A Death in Duck: Lindsay Harding Cozy Mystery Series (Reverend Lindsay Harding Mystery Book 2) (13 page)

“Claire and I are staying at a house the Duck Police arranged for us. We can’t have a witness in a murder investigation staying there with us. For all everybody else knows, you’re somehow involved in this.”

Lindsay had managed to keep her emotions in check all day, allowing only tiny bubbles of anger, fear, and desperation to break the surface. Now, however, she was struggling to keep her shattered psyche from boiling over. “You let them think I’m a suspect?”

Warren dodged the question. He crossed the room and pulled the French door shut. “Whose ashes are in your aunt’s gun safe?”

“Ashes? Have you lost your mind?!”

“There was a metal box inside the safe. Inside the box are somebody’s ashes. I thought you might want to tell me whose they are.”

“I have no idea. Can’t you see? I didn’t know my aunt. She was an uncaring, lonely old misanthrope. We weren’t close, and she never told me things. She tolerated me when I lived with her, but I’ve hardly seen her over the past 20 years. Will you sit down please? You’re making me nervous.”

Warren stopped his angry pacing, but he didn’t sit down. “You know what’s funny? Wynn Butterworth spent over an hour cracking that safe, getting all the pins to click into place, meticulously graphing out the combinations until he had figured it all out. Do you know what the combination was? 04-27-04-27-04-27. Do you recognize those numbers?”

“April 27th? My birthday,” Lindsay whispered, her eyes wide with astonishment.

“Yes. Your birthday was the combination on your aunt’s safe. And you know what else was in that safe besides her gun collection and some mystery person’s ashes? The stuff in that box.” He jabbed his finger toward the cardboard container on the dresser.

“What is it?” Lindsay asked. She crossed the room and lifted the lid. Inside, she found a stack of papers and photos. Flicking through them, she saw her old report cards, school pictures, and a card she’d made for her aunt when she was seven.

“That’s right. All your old stuff from when you lived there. Birthday cards you and Jonah sent her over the years. A clipping from the
New Albany Gazette
when you got the chaplain job at the Medical Center.”

Lindsay stood perfectly still. She felt like if she moved, if she even took a deep breath, she would be swallowed up by the ground below her. These revelations upended everything she had believed about her aunt. To Lindsay, Aunt Harding had been the mechanical life-support system of her childhood—the person who had done the bare minimum to feed her, house her, and keep her clean. She wracked her brain, trying to conjure a single memory of tenderness, a single instance when her aunt showed that Lindsay meant something more to her than an unwanted obligation. Why would her aunt save those mementos? Surely, they were bound to each other by familial duty, not by love. “I don’t understand,” Lindsay said, her voice raw.

“You’ve been feeling sorry for yourself all this time, and you missed what was right in front of you. She cared about you. Lots of people care about you, but you make it so hard for them sometimes.”

There was a brief silence, as years of rage fizzed up inside Lindsay. “
I
make it hard? How dare you! You don’t know what it was like for me as a kid. Is it supposed to be good enough for me to find out now that she secretly cared? Children respond to hugs and nice words. They like cookie baking and parties and toys. Maybe Stalin spent his spare time helping little old ladies across the street and Attila the Hun liked to cuddle homeless kittens, but it’s not really what people remember about them, is it?

“I’m supposedly so lucky to have all these people that truly love me, way deep down in their hearts,” she continued, her voice rising in volume. “Simmy says that my mother cares about me, when she shows her love by abandoning me and then trying to blackmail me. You tell me that Aunt Harding loved me, but she showed it by treating me like a rock in her shoe. And what about you, who loves me so much but then comes over here and treats me like a criminal? Who says he wants to protect me, but then leaves me alone when I need him?”

She marched over to the hall door and, with shaking hands, opened it wide. “Tell you what. I’m going to resolve the little dilemma you’ve been having. You don’t have to worry about my criminal family or about people thinking that you’re giving me special treatment because I’m your girlfriend. Because I’m not your girlfriend anymore. I’m nothing to you but a witness. Or, if you want, a suspect.”

Warren turned his face like he’d been slapped. He stood there for a moment, waving his arms slightly as if conducting a silent symphony. His brown eyes searched Lindsay’s face, then Kipper’s, seeming to seek out a sign of softening, an indication that there was more to be said. He might as well have sought warmth from a pair of icebergs.

Lindsay tapped her foot impatiently and pointed down the hallway. “You can take that kind of love and get out of here—before I sic Kipper on you.”

Chapter 14

Lindsay spent the next day lying in bed, fending off invitations from Anna, Drew, and Anna’s mother to join them in various pre-wedding activities. As another episode in the all-day
Happy Days
marathon flickered onto the TV screen, Lindsay clicked the off button on the remote. The box of mementos from her aunt’s safe stood alongside the TV, and although she tried to ignore it, more and more, she felt drawn to open it.

She lifted the lid and dumped the contents onto the white duvet of her king-sized bed. On top were the things that she’d seen the previous day—the series of straight-A report cards with comments like, “
Lindsay is an exceptionally bright child, but she does not play well with others her own age. She often seems overly serious for such a young child, and at times even morbid. Please let me know if you would like me to refer her to the District Psychologist
.” Aunt Harding had apparently disregarded that well-meaning offer.

Almost everything in the box related to her. It seemed that Aunt Harding had kept every scrap of paper that had ever passed between them. A small pang of guilt tugged at Lindsay’s solar plexus as she realized just how little she’d kept in touch with her aunt. If these little contacts had meant so much to Patricia Harding, why had she never shown it?

Nearer to the bottom of the box, she found two objects that she’d never seen before. The first was a scrap of navy blue cloth aboutthe size of a bookmark. In a baroque script, the letter
s
MAR
I
were embroidered in fraying gold thread. The scrap seemed to have been scissored out of a larger piece of material. The fabric felt old and brittle, almost like paper. She turned it over in her hands, but it offered no further clues. The other strange object was a brief news story from the
Elizabeth City Daily Advance
. The date had been cut off of the article, but the paper was almost brown with age. It reported the death of a 37-year-old woman named Rita Lutz in a single car crash. Again, Lindsay examined the paper closely, but could find nothing to indicate its relationship to her aunt.

She dialed her father’s number. He picked up on the first ring. “So you’re answering your phone yourself now?” She kidded. “Where are your minions?”

Jonah Harding’s laugh washed over her like warm summer rain. “I sent them home. I’m temporarily minion-less. Might even brush my own teeth tonight.” He sighed. “I can’t wait until I’m back on my feet. I hate the thought of you out there all by yourself, dealing with all of this while I’m laying here getting my pillows fluffed by Mrs. Heyer.”

“Your pillows fluffed, eh?” Lindsay teased her father, picturing the way his cheeks burned bright pink with embarrassment whenever he said something unintentionally suggestive.

“Mrs. Heyer is a widow in her 80’s. She was a nurse for 40 years, and she’s an excellent pillow fluffer. But forget about me and my pillows. How are you?”

The two of them had grown closer since they were thrown together the previous summer by Leander and Sarabelle’s schemes. Once upon a time, Lindsay would’ve met his earnestness and never-ending enquiries into her well-being with sarcasm and evasion. Now, however, she answered honestly. “It’s been hard. Pretty terrible, actually. But I’m okay.”

“Are you sure? I have multiple minions who could drive me.” Jonah had been forbidden by his doctor from driving, and was supposed to be spending the week resting flat on his back.

“I know you’re worried, but there’s honestly nothing you can do, and it would only make things worse if you bump along the highway in the car for five hours and mess up your back even more.”

“Well, the offer stands if you need me. So what’s up with you?”

“I was going through some of Aunt Harding’s things. Did she ever know somebody named Ritz Lutz? Or somebody named Mari, spelled with an ‘i’?”

“Hmm…doesn’t ring any bells. Why?”

“It’s probably not important. We can talk about it when I see you.”

              They chatted a while longer before signing off. Lindsay knew that her “upbeat” roommate would be returning soon, no doubt to try to strong-arm her into joining the group for dinner and “drinkies.” She quickly gathered the contents back into the box and slipped it into a drawer next to her bed. Pulling on her jogging clothes, she turned to Kipper, who was dozing on the floor. “How about we blow this joint? Are you up for a run?”

The dog’s ears perked to attention and his tail began to swing wildly to and fro. Lindsay clipped Kipper on to his leash and headed out. As she passed the front desk she left word about her plans, in case Anna was in mother hen mode.

She and Kipper moved north and west across the island towards the Sound, until they reached the rocky beach. She stopped there, breathing hard from the exertion. Evening was beginning to fall, and Lindsay stared across the small, scattered islands and inlets of the Currituck Sound toward the North Carolina mainland. North of Duck, the mammoth vacation homes all clustered along the Atlantic side, leaving the sound-side virtually empty. There was no real beach here, just an anemic line of trees, a border of sea grass, and a thin ribbon of rocks and sand. The wind had died down completely and the water had settled into a mirror-like surface the old ‘Bankers called “slick cam”—water that was waveless and flat as a pane of glass. The pink sunset was reflected back on itself in the smooth surface of the water. Ahead, out a hundred yards or so, swam a pod of dolphins. Dozens of them spread out in lines and groups, some coming so close to shore that Lindsay could see their eyes glistening in the fading light like black pearls.

Kipper spied the dolphins, too. For several minutes, he stood perfectly still, his ears perked up and his muscles taut. Lindsay sat down alongside him and hugged her legs into her chest. She was wearing only her Lycra jogging bottoms and a long-sleeved t-shirt, and now that she’d stopped moving, the December air began to chill her. Although she was soon shivering with cold, she wasn’t ready to head back to the hotel. What she really wanted was to disappear, to melt into the landscape. She put her legs inside her shirt and lay on her side in a tightly-curled ball, watching as the dolphin pod slowly edged closer. As the sun dipped further below the horizon, the shadows lengthened and merged together, like a rising tide.

For the first time since she arrived on the Outer Banks, Lindsay filled her lungs fully with air. For a moment, she felt that she had recaptured some of the beauty that had sustained her lonely years on the island. The place had become so overdeveloped she had forgotten that parts of it could still be wild. She stopped thinking about her aunt, her mother, the raw wound inflicted by Warren’s words, and let herself relax into the wonder of the place.

Without warning, Kipper issued a low growl. His eyes remained fixed on the dolphins and he began to charge toward the water. “Kipper, heel,” Lindsay commanded. She had dropped the leash when she lay down, and now she scrambled to her feet, struggling to get hold of it as Kipper lurched ahead. The dog obeyed her command, but continued barking and lunging at the dolphins. “What’s gotten into you? If you’ve been out here all these months, I’m sure you’ve seen dolphins before.”

Lindsay followed Kipper’s eyes to two of the dolphins who had broken off from the far end of the pod and began to head inland. Lindsay shielded her eyes against the setting sun and tried to make out the details of their bodies. They moved strangely; Lindsay wondered if they were injured. Kipper tugged relentlessly on the leash, nearly ripping it from her hands. As they neared the shore, the two wayward dolphins broke the surface. Bewildered by what she was seeing, Lindsay blinked to clear the sun’s dazzling brilliance from her vision. The dolphins weren’t dolphins at all, but two men in scuba gear.

They wore matching black full-body Gore Tex drysuits and gloves, face masks and flippers. As they flopped awkwardly towards the shore, one of them removed his mask and called, “Hey there! Is everything okay?” He paused, and edged closer more cautiously. “Is that dog going to take our heads off if we come ashore here?”

“Only if I tell him to,” Lindsay yelled. The pair seemed harmless enough, so she kept her tone friendly, but given the events of the previous days, she wasn’t entirely kidding. She patted Kipper on the head and shushed him…for the moment.

The two men paused a few yards from the shoreline and removed their flippers and hoods. Lindsay gasped as the smaller of the pair pulled back his hood to reveal the tightly coiled dreadlocks that covered his head.

“Owen?” she said, her eyes wide with astonishment.

The boy did a double take before a look of recognition settled over his face. “You’re the hospital chaplain I met in the garden that night.” Owen turned, smiling broadly, to the man next to him. “Dad, this is that lady I told you about.”

“I can honestly say that I never expected to run into you out here,” Lindsay laughed. By now, the boy and his father were only a few feet in front of Lindsay. Owen’s father came forward to introduce himself. He extended his hand slowly to greet Lindsay, all the while keeping his eye on Kipper to be sure that his movements didn’t set off another volley of aggression. Kipper, however, was perfectly calm. The moment that Lindsay’s body language relaxed, Kipper had become docile at her side. He sat there now, observing the pair with keen interest. The man knelt slowly and stretched out his hand for the dog to sniff. Kipper indicated his approval by a volley of furious licking.

Lindsay’s first surprise was that Owen’s father was white. He had pale olive skin and thinning black hair. He was handsome, but even in a full-body wet suit he managed to look slightly unkempt. His chin bristled with gray stubble—not the fashionable kind sported by movie stars, either—it was the real deal, the kind that let you know that he was either a lazy bachelor or a married man with an unusually laid-back wife. Though deep smile lines were etched around his jewel-green eyes, there was something in his face that held a hint of sadness. Despite their different complexions, Lindsay could immediately make out a resemblance between Owen and his father. She was surprised, though, that she saw another, even more uncanny, resemblance.

“I’m Lindsay Harding,” Lindsay said, extending her hand.

“Mike Checkoway,” the man replied.

“You must be Drew’s brother. And I suppose you’re his nephew,” she said, turning to Owen. Although Mike was a few years older than Drew, with considerably more wear and tear, there could be no doubt that the two men were brothers. They shared the same handsome, regular features, the same perfect rows of white teeth.

“You know Drew?” Mike said.

“Yeah, we, uh, work together. I’m friends with Anna.” Lindsay decided that, if Drew hadn’t mentioned their brief romance to his brother, it wasn’t her place to fill in the details. “I guess we’re all here for the wedding,” she added. There was a pause as Mike picked at some seaweed that clung to his dry suit.

“Dad, maybe we should explain what we’re doing?” Owen prompted.

Lindsay laughed. “You mean why you’re scuba diving at sunset in shallow water in late December? And why you emerged from the Sound like swamp creatures?”

“I suppose we probably do look a little odd.” With wide eyes, Mike looked down at himself and then looked around the deserted shoreline. He seemed astonished to find himself there, as if he hadn’t noticed anything strange about the circumstances until that moment. Lindsay imagined it was a sensation he probably experienced fairly regularly.

“Dad wants us to go diving this week, so we came out to test our scuba equipment. We had it all shipped over from Thailand a few weeks ago,” Owen said, taking the oxygen tank off his back and setting it with a muffled thump in the sand next to him. “Scuba diving is one of our many new hobbies.”

“How’d you get here, though? Where’s your boat?” Lindsay had never been diving herself, but she knew that divers didn’t typically set off from the beach or walk around on land with their cumbersome gear on.

“Oh, yeah. Our rental car is parked about a quarter of a mile south of here,” Mike said. “Once I saw how calm it was, I wanted to get out ASAP and test the visibility. Then I saw the dolphins and we just started following them. They let us swim right with them, which was so cool! And anyway, when I surfaced, I noticed you lying on the beach all curled into a ball. I thought you were a little kid who was sick or something.” He blushed, realizing that he might have insulted her. “Now that I’m closer, though, I can see that you’re not a kid. I mean, you’re a big woman. I mean a grown woman. Not a child is what I mean.”

“Nice one, Dad,” Owen said. “It was bad enough when I thought she was homeless. But you just managed to call her a helpless child and a ‘big woman’ all in the same breath. Smooth.” Owen patted his father on the back.

“I’ve been called worse.” Lindsay felt happy for the first time that day. “Did everything work okay with your equipment? Are you all set for your dive?”

“It was still pretty murky out there from the storm. And there’s a lot more kelp on this side. I’m sure it’ll be better tomorrow once we get out on the ocean side. I think we’re going to need at least 50 feet of visibility in order to get down to the U-352.”

“You’re going down to see the German sub?” Lindsay asked. Even if she hadn’t majored in history in college and even if she didn’t have an almost encyclopedic knowledge of North Carolina’s past, Lindsay would still have known about the U-352. Any Outer Banks native knew about the hulking wreck of the World War II German U-boat that lay at the bottom of the ocean a few miles south of Morehead City.