The Legend of Sleepy Harlow (6 page)

“Yeah.” Kate followed my example and gave each of them a look until they squirmed. “Before I call the police.”

“You can’t. You can’t do that. Not until we have a chance to film. Just a few hours’ worth of footage. What difference is a few hours going to make?” Noreen made the mistake of trying to plead her case by putting a hand on Kate’s arm.

I felt the change in Kate’s attitude rather than saw it—a shift in the anger that simmered in the air around her, a flare like when wind stokes the flames of a fire. Before I had a chance to respond to it and grab hold of her so she couldn’t do Noreen any real physical damage, a voice called out from the tasting area.

“Trouble here?”

We all looked that way just in time to see Hank Florentine, the local police chief, saunter in, one hand laid casually on the butt of the gun in his belt holster. “Kate, I saw all the lights on and pulled around back and saw the cars. Funny time of night for you to be working. Thought I’d better stop and see what was going on. Trouble here?”

“I don’t know, Hank. As a matter of fact, I was just going to ask.” She pinned her gaze on the leader of EGG. “Is there trouble here, Noreen?”

Noreen gurgled and burbled. Her cheeks shot through with vivid color, then went as pale as the moonlight outside. She bit her lower lip. “Somebody go find Fiona,” she grumbled. “She’s getting equipment out of the truck. Tell her to get everything put away again. And then let’s get out of here. Paranormal activity?” Her snort put an accent on her mood. “No self-respecting ghost would bother with this place.”

The smile Kate turned on her wasn’t as much about relief as it was about one-upmanship. “No trouble at all, Hank,” she told him while she kept her eyes on Noreen. “Noreen and her EGG-heads were just leaving.”

Noreen commanded Liam and David to grab the plasmometer and, under the careful gaze of Hank, they all marched out. A few minutes later, we heard the engines on the EGG SUVs start up and saw their headlights skim the wall when they pulled out of the parking lot.

“Want to explain?” Hank asked Kate.

I had to give Kate credit for handling the situation with so much poise, and I could only imagine how much strength it took for her to hold it together. Rather than make her relive it all for Hank, I stepped forward. “Just a mix-up,” I said, and paused to give Kate a chance to contradict me. When she didn’t, I went on, “The ghost getters were just leaving when you got here.”

“Well, all right then.” Hank, his gaze still fastened to Kate, stepped back toward the tasting room. “You want me to have a look around before I leave?”

Kate snapped to. “No. It’s fine, Hank. They’re gone. I’ll lock up. Bea’s here with me.”

“All right then, ladies.” Hank wasn’t wearing a hat, but he touched his hand to his buzz-cut hair. “I’ll see you both at the wake on Friday, right? Last days of summer!” His sigh vibrated through the vast room. “I for one am happy summer’s over. We can get rid of the tourists and have the island all to ourselves for a while.”

With that, Hank banged out of the front door.

“Come on.” Kate led the way. “I want to check things out and make sure those idiots didn’t break anything.” She screeched her frustration. “The nerve of that woman. She told her people they had permission? She said it was all right for them to be here? I swear, Bea, if you weren’t here with me, I would have dumped her in one of these tanks and let her ferment for a month or two. Then maybe she’d get the message.”

We crossed that room and headed into a back corridor. Ahead of us, a series of hallways led to the rooms where the wine was bottled, packed, and shipped, and we found and locked the back door that the ghost getters had jimmied open to get in. I wondered what Noreen had told them to explain the inconvenience, then instantly knew: Kate had forgotten to leave a key. I’d bet anything she told them Kate had forgotten to leave a key.

In the other direction was Kate’s office, and she went that way.

“They better not have been in here,” she said, flicking on the light.

Kate’s office was a lot like Kate’s house, and a lot like Kate herself. Plain enough to let the world know she was no-nonsense. Stylish enough to be attractive. She zipped right past the sleek Scandinavian-inspired desk that dominated the room in front of a wide window that looked out over the vineyards and went right over to a cabinet that she unlocked. She came back across the room holding an old-fashioned oil lamp, the kind with a fat, round bottom and a tall, conical chimney.

“It might be more efficient if we just turned on all the lights in the winery,” I suggested.

Kate set down the lamp on the windowsill. “Huh?”

“An oil lamp.” I pointed even though I didn’t have to. “We don’t need that to search the winery. We could just turn on the lights.”

“Oh, the lamp!” She laugh, and truthfully, I was grateful. Though Kate might be hardheaded when it comes to business, I had never known her to be cruel or hard-hearted (okay, with the exception of the times she took me to court because she said my remodeling at the B and B brought too much traffic through our neighborhood). Watching her seethe in anger had not only been uncomfortable; it left me feeling as if I should have/could have done more.

“The lamp has nothing to do with looking around the winery. It’s just . . .” Her grin was sheepish. “I guess it’s kind of a family tradition,” she said. “See, when my great-grandmother, Carrie Wilder, ran the winery, she always put the lamp out when she came to work in the morning. And she always put it away again when she left for the evening. Sometimes she lit it and sometimes she didn’t.” Kate shrugged as a way of saying she had no idea what her great-grandmother might have been thinking.

“And she always set the lamp on the window ledge. Lucky for us, my office wasn’t touched by the fire and this part of the building is original. I put the lamp out every time I walk in. I know it’s silly, but hey, force of habit! When my grandparents took over the winery, that was the first and last thing they did every day. And my parents, too. In fact, when Mom and Dad retired to Florida, they told me never to forget to put out the lamp. Nobody knows when Great-Grandma Carrie started the tradition and nobody knows why. But it can’t hurt anything.”

“It’s really kind of nice,” I told her. “It keeps you connected with the past and with the family.”

“And it reminds me that no matter what that idiot Noreen did, I’m still the boss around here.” Fists on hips, Kate did a turn around the office. “It doesn’t look like anything was touched,” she said. “Noreen can thank her lucky stars for that. If I saw anything messed with in here, I’d get Hank back over here in a heartbeat and have him arrest her camouflaged butt for breaking and entering.”

“And I wouldn’t blame you in the least. In fact, I was surprised when you didn’t.”

Kate tried to control a smile. It didn’t exactly work. “Don’t tell anybody, okay? Most people around the island are convinced I’m as hard as nails. I’d hate to burst their bubbles. Besides, what use is it for them to be thrown in jail? I’d rather have them over at your B and B, with you charging them the fortune you charge and them not being able to get close to the one place they’re just itching to investigate. That’s real revenge!”

While Kate was busy checking every corner of the office, I went to the window to look over the lamp. I like antiques. I own plenty of them. I knew this one wasn’t unusual, and at a flea market, it wouldn’t have sold for more than fifty dollars, in spite of its age. But the fact that it belonged to Kate’s great-grandmother and that it was involved in such a charming family ritual made the lamp special.

It was a foot and a half tall and made of clear glass, and the kerosene that had once gone into the bulbous bottom part of the lamp had evaporated long ago.

“Ready?” Kate came up from behind me, picked up the lamp, and put it back in the cabinet. “Everything’s okay in here. We can check out the rest of the place on our way out.”

We did a quick search of the winery, from the bottling room to the gift shop and from the gift shop to the office where a small staff of dedicated workers took care of Internet and wholesale orders. Our last stop was the warehouse, and as soon as we stepped into the cavernous room, I shivered.

“Somebody left a window open.”

We checked. They hadn’t.

“And not the door into the old back storage rooms, either,” Kate said, with a look toward the back of the warehouse. “That’s closed, too. It must just be getting colder outside.”

And I knew she was right.

Which didn’t explain why after she’d already turned out the lights and I took one second to glance over my shoulder into the warehouse, I thought I saw . . .

Something.

I closed my eyes and looked again—and again, I swear I saw a shimmer in the deepest shadows along the far wall. Not a light exactly. And certainly not a full-blown movement. It was more of a flicker. A flutter in the darkness that morphed from black to gray and back to black again so quickly, I couldn’t say for sure what it could have been.

Legs.

A torso.

Not a person, surely. Because people have heads.

And I know it sounds crazy, but I swear, the figure that flashed in front of my eyes one second and was gone the next was missing his.

  5  

I
t was a trick of the light.

A trick of the shadows.

A trick of my imagination.

And I refused to think about it.

In fact, the next morning I put breakfast out for my guests and immediately retreated into my private suite. For one thing, after what they had pulled the night before, I didn’t want to deal with pushy Noreen and her compadres. They could serve themselves, and considering I provided pumpkin muffins, a couple of carafes of coffee, fresh fruit, and a platter of perfectly cooked bacon, they should have been more than able to.

More importantly, I wanted to look over what I had done—and the epic amount of work I had yet to do—on Marianne’s manuscript.

This was the only Sleepy Harlow who mattered, I reminded myself, glancing over the pitifully few pages I’d managed to re-create.

The real man. The real criminal from back in the days of Prohibition. The person who, according to the little I’d been able to find out about him online and in those few words I’d been able to cobble together from Marianne’s manuscript, was responsible for running boatloads of liquor out of Canada and delivering it to any number of mobbed-up gangs in Ohio and Michigan. The man who was viciously murdered by rival bootleggers and whose body—and legacy—had been buried here on the island for more than eighty years.

Not the ghost I thought I saw at the winery the night before.

Which couldn’t have been a ghost.

Because there is no such thing.

Right?

My mind made up (even though my irrational self kept replaying that flash of weird, headless shadow I’d seen at the winery), I concentrated on the pages of Marianne’s book and realized I had to work fast. They were getting soggier and smellier by the hour.

By ten o’clock, I was talking to myself.

By eleven, the talk had degraded into mumbling, and by noon, that mumbling was punctuated with a whole lot of words I never use in public.

I needed a break and I needed one bad, and since the weather was still glorious and the sun shone golden against the multicolored trees, I opted for a walk.

While I was at it, I decided I could acquaint myself with the (pitifully few) places I’d been able to decipher in Marianne’s manuscript, locations that played a part in Sleepy Harlow’s daily life, his life of crime, and his death.

I pulled a black sweater over the red, long-sleeved T-shirt I was wearing with jeans and headed downtown. I’d just been able to make out the address of the place Sleepy had once lived, and though I knew Put-in-Bay had plenty more bars and restaurants per square inch than it had back in the 1920s and ’30s, I also knew that many of the old buildings downtown had been preserved and repurposed.

If I could locate and explore Sleepy’s old haunts—honest, I didn’t mean it, the word just popped into my head—I would hopefully be able to start to get a better sense of the man.

It was a great plan, and it would have worked.

If I hadn’t found the address of Sleepy’s apartment and seen the sign that hung above the first-floor establishment:
Levi’s Bar
.

It was Thursday afternoon and the Wake to Summer would be held the next evening. Already the streets were filled with partiers. Boats bobbed next to the dock at the marina and the park directly across the street was crammed with picnickers. As a last salute to summer, a nearby bar blared Jimmy Buffett and a couple out front improvised a snappy little line dance. They gave me strange looks when I interrupted the fun by barking out one of those words I said I never use in public.

Why?

It’s one of those simple questions that’s not so simple to answer.

See, Levi Kozlov, owner of the abovementioned establishment, is the bane of my island existence.

And the most delicious man to come into my life in as long as I can remember.

Which, for the record, is pretty darned long.

As for why I wasn’t acting on the baser instincts that reared their ugly (and very appealing) heads every time Levi was around . . .

Well, I had my reasons.

Not the least of which was that after he’d kissed me a few months earlier, Levi had told me the whole thing was a mistake.

Since I thought it was a mistake, too, this should have cheered me. It did cheer me. Except for the part about how it didn’t. That part of me was only appeased by me reminding myself that I had come to the island to get away from the glare of the public eye and all things associated with it. Like the stalker who’d made my life a living hell back in New York. I wanted peace in my life, and that would come only with anonymity. I couldn’t start a relationship—with anyone—without revealing things about myself I’d rather keep hidden.

Anonymity.

It was my motto.

Do not get involved.

That was my mantra.

It all made sense and it all sounded good and I knew it was the right thing to do.

Except that every time Levi was anywhere near, all that good sense went flying out the window.

Just like it did right then and there when just thinking about Levi sent heat racing into my cheeks.

Fortunately, a distraction came along in the form of Dimitri, who I saw up ahead walking away from the ferry dock. He looked more like an A-lister than ever in a stylish pair of aviator sunglasses and with his EGG jacket slung over one shoulder. At his side was a woman every bit as attractive as he was. She was long-legged, dark-haired, and gorgeous enough to turn heads. Curious, I watched them walk slowly over to the park and stop to check out the huge, showy, and very kitschy display of mums and pumpkins and smiling scarecrows that would surround the coffin of summer after it was paraded around the park with great ceremony.

When Dimitri caught sight of me, he stepped away from the woman and waved me over.

“I’m glad I ran into you. What Noreen did last night . . .” He coughed away his discomfort. “I need to apologize on behalf of EGG.”

“Not to me.”

“I’ll talk to Ms. Wilder, too. I was hoping to see her tomorrow at the wake.”

“You’re lucky she didn’t have you all thrown in jail.”

“That’s exactly what I’m planning to tell her. That, and how much I appreciate her understanding. Not to mention her compassion.”

His smile shimmered like the sun reflecting off the Aegean, and it was impossible for me not to smile back.

“That’s better,” Dimitri said. “I hate to think . . .” He was obviously not a man who was used to apologizing. Not about anything. He pulled in a steadying breath. “After what happened last night, I hated to think that we made you uncomfortable.”

“You didn’t make me uncomfortable. You made me angry.”

“Then that’s even worse. Which is why—”

Before he had a chance to finish, the woman stepped up to his side and slipped her hand into his.

“Oh, there’s someone here I’d like you to meet,” Dimitri said. “This is Jacklyn Bichot. She was one of us back in the day. You know, a member of EGG.”

I figured it wasn’t politically correct to congratulate her for not associating with the group anymore, so I kept my words to a friendly hello and a welcome to the island.

Jacklyn had hair that was even darker than mine. When she looked over the display and the volunteers who scampered around making sure everything would be just right for the ceremony the next day, her eyes danced. “If there’s a wake, can ghosts be very far behind? I can’t wait to find out.”

“So you’re still hunting ghosts?” I asked her.

I did not expect a look that could have shattered glass. “I used to hunt ghosts,” Jacklyn said. Her voice went along with the whole tall, lithe, and good-looking package. It was husky, and there was just the tiniest trace of North Carolina backwoods in her elongated vowels. “That is, until Noreen realized I look way better on camera than she ever will.”

“Now, Jacklyn!” The warning from Dimitri was friendly enough, but Jacklyn didn’t respond with a smile.

“She may as well know the truth,” she said, and turned a knowing look in my direction. “I bet you already do. Dimitri tells me that the crew is staying at your place. That means you’ve met Noreen. You look like a reasonably smart woman. How long did it take you to figure out that Noreen is a self-centered, self-righteous, annoying cow with OCD and an ego as big as all of the great outdoors?”

I was saved from saying
practically no time at all
when Dimitri looped one arm through Jacklyn’s and another through mine. “Come on. We’re going for coffee. And Bea, it’s my treat. It’s the least I can do to show you how bad I feel about what happened last night.”

Jacklyn’s smile was sleek. “Let me guess—that something you feel bad about has something to do with Noreen. Am I right?”

Instead of answering, Dimitri piloted us over to the coffee shop near the park and left us at a table on the patio while he went up to the window to place our orders. He came back and put one cup of coffee in front of me and one in front of Jacklyn before he went back up to the window to get his own.

“So . . .” Dimitri sat down, and without a word, Jacklyn popped the top off his coffee, added two bags of sugar and stirred. “Has Jacklyn chewed your ear off yet? About how much she hates Noreen?”

“We haven’t had time to talk about anything at all,” I told him, and it wasn’t like I wasn’t curious, but I did have to admit, I was getting uncomfortable, like I’d stepped into the middle of a family feud I didn’t understand and didn’t want to get involved in.

Dimitri took a sip of his coffee before he leaned closer to me. “Jacklyn hates Noreen almost as much as I do. With a fiery passion,” he said quietly, though not so quietly that Jacklyn couldn’t hear it. “Jacklyn would like to boil Noreen in oil.”

“I wouldn’t waste perfectly good oil.” Jacklyn sat up and put an arm across the back of Dimitri’s chair, a sort of half smile on her face that made it impossible for me to tell if she was kidding or not. “I’d just as soon whack her over the head with a big old boulder. Then I wouldn’t be squandering resources.”

“You keep talking like that and Bea’s going to think you’re some kind of nutcase. Tell her the truth, Jacki. Tell her what you told me a little while ago.”

The way Jacklyn’s smile wilted, I knew she was sorry the fun was over. “Truth,” she said. “The truth is, Noreen is the reason I came to the island. I heard EGG would be here filming, and I came over from the mainland to thank Noreen.” She sat up a little straighter. “Call me shallow. I knew it would be a heck of a lot more fun in person than it would ever be via text message.”

My coffee was hot. I popped the top and blew on it. “You came all the way over here to thank her for firing you?”

Jacklyn’s dark eyes gleamed. “Absolutely. You see, if it wasn’t for Noreen—”

“We’d all be a little less crazy and a whole lot less stressed,” Dimitri said, then laughed so hard, he ended up coughing, and he pounded his chest.

“True,” Jacklyn acknowledged when he’d finally settled down. “But that’s not what I was going to say. I was going to say that if it wasn’t for Noreen kicking me off the show, my schedule wouldn’t have been nice and open when my agent called a few months ago. I’m just back from California.” Her shoulders shot back. “I got a part on
Brains and Beauty.
”

“The soap?” I was impressed, and I told Jacklyn so. “That couldn’t have been easy.”

“It would have been impossible if I was still hanging with these losers.” I can’t say for sure if the smile she tossed at Dimitri was genuine or not; I only knew that like the sun that shone overhead, it warmed him through and through. I could practically see him turn to mush right before my eyes.

“It’s not officially a recurring role,” she added. “Not yet, anyway. But my agent says there’s a good possibility they’re going to write my character into a new story line. Cool, huh? I can’t wait to tell Noreen and watch her turn neon green with envy! Turns out when she got jealous and dumped me off the show, she was actually doing me a favor.” Jacklyn finished her coffee. “In fact, I’m going to find her and tell her right now. Bea, are you going back to the B and B? If you’re not, I’m sure Dimitri will take me over there.”

I told her I was heading home and the three of us started out, but either my timing was off or my luck was just plain bad. No sooner had we gotten over to the park again than Levi stepped out from behind the stage he was helping set up.