On Deadly Tides (A Wendover House Mystery Book 3) (7 page)

No children, no dogs, no cats, no voices. The place was under an evil spell.

I sped away, but the final moments of sunset were still sour and I began hoping that I could find someone to run me to the island after dark. It would cost extra for a night run but I didn’t want to spend a night at the B&B, though I had made a reservation just in case I was delayed on the mainland. The outside world was ugly and unfriendly. I needed to be back in the islands. Yes, they were kind of like sausage—attractive as long as you didn’t look too closely at what was in them—but they were my sausage now. And they were worlds’ friendlier than the rest of the outside realms I had visited. It was time to go home.

It did not escape my notice that I was thinking of Wendover House as home in a way that I had not done since my parents’ death. Odd and perhaps unwise, I had made that mental transition almost immediately and my old life seemed impossibly far away. I belonged to the islands now and forever more.

The car’s heater worked efficiently. There had to be another reason for my lingering chill and I didn’t need to look very far to find it. This adventure, which I had thought would feel like a wife trysting with a lover while her husband was at work, had been something else entirely. If a lesson in patience and humility was needed, then I had had one. It was time to admit that being good at research did not mean that I was good at being a sleuth. The sweet taste of conceit at my other triumphs since coming to the island had misled me. Research involved ordering information. A detective had to unravel the motives of people and convince them to talk to her.

The distant clouds were heavy, barely clinging to the sky, but as I traveled north the weather slowly warmed and I stopped worrying about snow. I wanted to be home though.
Wanted Barney and Kelvin and a warm fire.
In fact, I half promised myself that I would go back to Little Goose and not think about the awful body on the beach ever again. Yes, I had committed myself to the task of finding out who the body was, but by that evening I was ready, even eager, to go home and forget everything. My brain understood the consequences of knowledge, even with a lot of its critical capacity worn away by exhaustion.
Easier to walk away.
Cowardly, but easier.
Let Bryson and Harris handle it.

Except that didn’t work.
Even in that moment of longing, my brain kept picking at things.

So naturally I thought about Tom’s—or Kelvin’s—dreary room. The whole town had seemed rundown as well as the people in it. Why? Why no pride of place, like the other villages I had been through? Though, come to think of it, there had been a sense of diminishing cheerfulness as I traveled farther from the islands. At the time I had blamed it on the worsening weather, but was it something else? The islands, for all that they were strange in some ways, seemed very prosperous.
Unusually prosperous for a country in an economic downturn.

Perhaps because they were.

I turned that idea and examined it from a few angles. I didn’t let myself think about causes and reasons for this prosperity. Just asked if this was actual truth or merely perceived truth brought on by fondness and perhaps pride in my new home. The conclusions made me uncomfortable.

The return trip went faster since I wasn’t stopping anywhere, but it was still full dark when I turned in my rental car. After the paperwork was done, I took a detour by the docks. No ferry and no boats I recognized.
Of course not.
It was dark and it was raining. Depressed, I pulled out my phone and began walking for the bed and breakfast where I had made my reservation. I knew Ben wouldn’t mind looking after Barney overnight but I hated making the call and admitting I wasn’t going home until morning.

Carlton House augmented its hired rooms by having a small bar on the ground floor that served simple drinks like beer, wine, and whisky. A glass of wine was sounding like a good idea.
A loaf of bread, a jug of wine, and bed.
It wouldn’t make me happy, but it might make me forget the day and that was cause for happiness.

An orange cat was napping on the desk, half covering the registration book with his fluffy tail, but fortunately I could sign on the left page without breaking in on his reverie. Between the heat and the slumbering feline, I began to feel better.

“Here’s your key. The Indigo suite is the first on the left at the top of the stairs,” Mrs. Hampton said. She smiled happily, such a contrast to the last woman who had had rooms for rent.

“Thank you. I’m sure it’s perfect. Your house is lovely.”

She beamed.

Given that I was back in home territory, I was not terribly surprised when I turned away from the registration desk and found an out-of-uniform Bryson standing in the doorway to the parlor bar. I figured that the first person I saw would either be Harris or Bryson. Bryson was a better choice given my mood. Harris always seemed to take my darker moments as personal criticism of his failure to make me happy. It made it hard to enjoy a well-justified wallow. Bryson, on the other hand, seemed to find everything about the human condition—including people’s moods—to be vaguely amusing.

I did wonder briefly if Harris and Bryson had talked it over and decided that he should be the one to bell the cat.
You should do it. You have a house on the mainland and it will look more natural
.…

And maybe I was just being paranoid because I was tired. It would be best if I stopped thinking like that or I’d sprain my few remaining brain cells. I also refused to think about the possibility of a biological connection.

“Miss MacKay,” Bryson said, raising a beer. “You’re here for the night?”

“Yes, sadly.”
And it was
sad,
though seeing a familiar face helped a little.

“Could I maybe interest you in some dinner?” he asked.
“Something of the Italian persuasion?”

He remembered that I am not wild about fish. That was nice.

Of course, if I went to dinner, he was going to quiz me about what I had been up to on the mainland.

I decided I didn’t care. If I didn’t want to answer a question I wouldn’t. Refusal to speak would hurt Harris because of its implied lack of trust. Bryson would just shrug and try something else.

“Thank you. Let me take my bag up and I’ll join you.”

Bryson nodded. He didn’t offer to help me up the stairs. I was carrying a small tote and obviously didn’t need assistance.

My room was nice, small but furnished with good reproductions and the prints on the wall were not unbearably nautical. There were maybe a few too many throw pillows and no warm, fuzzy bodies to warm the bed, but it would do for one night.

Bryson had on his black trench coat and hat when I came back down and he looked unusually dignified and somber, like he was going to a funeral and not out for dinner. I wondered what had happened. Thanks to cell phones, bad news travels quickly.

He didn’t say anything about being called away though, so I decided not to ask. Suffice it unto the day the trouble therein. I had enough bothers of my own.

“Is it far?” I asked, feeling tired and half regretting that I had agreed to share a meal with him.
Especially if we had to be out in the cold for any length of time.

“No. You won’t even get wet if we walk quickly enough.”

That was an overstatement. The drizzle was cold and the street was mostly deserted and had a lot of black patches between streetlamps which seemed ugly and out of place and made the shadows hard. The only bright spot was the neon OPEN sign in the window of a house about three doors up. Except for that, we might have been walking through an old black and white movie, one with Bogart and Bacall and Peter Lorre lurking in the gloom.

We quickstepped the short cobble path and stepped up on the wide porch. Bryson opened the narrow door and a blade of light cut into the dark, letting out color and scent. The air inside was thick with garlic and butter and my mouth began to water as my lungs filled with succulent smells.

My ears were caressed with the soft incantation of Italian love songs, and a lot of my weariness and frustration fell away.

“Just what the doctor ordered?” Bryson asked, helping me out of my coat.

“Exactly.”
My smile felt natural this time.

He hung his own coat and hat on the brass tree by the door.

Bryson was known and liked there and we were given a table by the window. Perhaps they had mistaken me for a date. Or maybe they recognized me. Certainly I was aware of the barely hidden scrutiny of the other patrons as we took our seats.

There was a stone fireplace on one wall but also forced-air heating. The currents made the candles in their wine-bottle candelabra flicker in a way that was rather more alarming than romantic. Unable to stop myself, I adjusted them away from the curtains. Then, since they obstructed my view of Bryson, I blew them out and stuck the waxy bottle on the windowsill.

Bryson chuckled and pulled off his gloves. His knuckles were scratched and I could see that he had acquired a few blisters on his palms that were almost healed, but still looked sore.

“I may want to gaze into your eyes at some point—like after the antipasto—and the candles were in the way,” I explained, opening my napkin and not commenting on the state of his hands.

“If we must wait until after the antipasto then I can see that we have a food emergency,” he said and nodded at a slim, teenage boy standing near the kitchen. He hurried toward us with menus.

There was no objection from me. I was feeling famished and would rather eat than talk.

“And let the games begin,” I muttered, taking a menu.
“Recommendations?”

“I like the chicken piccata.”

“Yes, but appetizers first.
There aren’t any laws on the books about letting pigs in restaurants, are there? Because I am
afraid
things could get ugly if someone tried to turn me out before the tiramisu.”

Bryson laughed again. Whatever his earlier mood had been, he seemed relaxed now.

“Not a one. Shall we begin with an antipasto platter, and a feta salad?”

“Yes. And bruschetta, please.”

“Good. And two glasses of Burgundy. Manny, make it so,” he said to the boy who nodded and hurried for the kitchen.

“Had a good day?” Bryson asked and I thought I knew why he had been looking grim earlier.

“Mostly.
I did notice an odd thing though.”

“What is that?”

“It didn’t strike me until I was on the way back, but….” I tried to think of a way to express my suspicion about our islands without sounding like a mystic. “I went south. I haven’t toured the mainland before. It seemed a bit different from the islands.
Maybe a little less flourishing.”

Bryson nodded.

“The last place I visited, it seemed blighted.
Depressed.
And colder.
Much colder.
It wasn’t just that things were shabby, but the people seemed … unhappy. Not neighborly.”

Bryson nodded.

“Ah. Well, our islands are blessed, warm. Fishing is terrible everywhere else it seems, but so far we haven’t been hurt by the shortages that are affecting fisherman up and down the seaboard.”

The way he said
blessed
made it seem like more than a casual phrase. And I think he was also talking about the fact that we lived in a pineapple belt.
One that couldn’t be explained by ocean currents but which kept pollution away and fish breeding nearby.

“We are fortunate then to be living here.”

“Fortunate. Yes, we are, and most of us are aware of it.”

Food began to appear and I traded in small talk for eating.

“Tess, do you want the chicken piccata?” Bryson asked when Manny reappeared and I
nodded,
my mouth too full to answer.

When the appetizers were cleared away and I couldn’t avoid talking by stuffing my face, Bryson resumed social convention and inaugurated another conversation. It felt a lot like the last conversation and I realized we weren’t done discussing my trip yet.

“How far south did you get?”

“
Derrymoor
,” I admitted. “Then my courage forsook me. It was so…. Well, I don’t imagine many tourists stay there. I’ve never been anyplace less welcoming.”

He nodded again.

“It’s an odd town with a sad history. Disaster seems to strike it every couple of decades. Fires, hurricanes, even plagues. For a while they had a factory that made sulfuric acid for fertilizers. They had to tear it down though because they had a spill and the building kept oozing out corrosives and burning people, even melting their shoes. It is supposed to be safe now but…. At one point, the town was even treated as a kind of leper colony—no actual leprosy there, but the nearby towns noticed that bad luck seemed to follow the people who lived there and would drive them away if they did more than pass through the other villages. Of course, that all ended centuries ago, but I think the shadow of the past lingers there and the people still feel … unwanted. Mostly they stick to themselves.”

I nodded, believing. I had seen how things were in the islands and it didn’t take a huge stretch of imagination to believe that there had once been some kind of a curse laid on unfortunate
Derrymoor
.

“A curse is a good way of putting it,” Bryson said and I realized I had spoken aloud. “Except we aren’t sure who laid it. There is no story about witches or anything. Just one day the cows stopped giving milk, the sea went barren, and a lot of folks moved away. The ones who stayed got sullen and secretive.”

Witches.
Didn’t want to talk about that.
I frowned at my empty glass of wine and made up my mind not to drink any more. Fortunately our entrees arrived and I was able to give up speaking.

Bryson seemed satisfied with what I had told him and didn’t try forcing conversation again until excusing himself to speak to the owner of the restaurant. Probably about a shipment of illegal whisky, I thought, and then mentally slapped myself for assuming the worst.