A Fatal Visit (A Harbor Cove Cozy Mystery Book 1) (3 page)

Chapter Five

“Yes, yes. We’ll both be there. See you later.” Nichole hung up the phone as Skyler entered the room, pulling a teal sweater on. “Tea with your mother later,” she spoke, flicking over the page of a magazine.

Skyler nodded and picked up Clue’s leash off a hook on the back door. “Off we go, girl.” She attached the lead and left, Clue trotting along behind her. It was a warm day, and Skyler was suddenly regretting the amount of layers she had on. The morning was quiet, and she didn’t pass many other people. The wind rustled in the leaves of the trees gently. A few more people appeared as they reached the main street.

Unfortunately, so did Clue’s interest in a passing cat. Seeing the dog, the skittish feline had bolted off down the street, with Clue bounding after. Attached to the leash as she was, Skyler also ended up being dragged along for the ride. She tried her hardest to plant her feet on the pavement but found no purchase. After being dragged past several storefronts, Clue and Skyler crashed into a young man selling coffee from a cart.

Skyler found herself quickly standing up. “I am so, so,
so
sorry.” Her face had turned scarlet. “Come on, Clue. I think it’s time to get home.”

~~~

Lily’s Cosy Tea
: a renowned spot for the elderly and the hipster socialite. And the source of the best scones in Harbor Cove. They were having tea on the patio, which sported tables and chairs of cast-iron latticework. Trailing vines hung from the porch above them, the scent of lavender and lilies wafting on the breeze. Skyler was staring at the phone she’d discovered in the restaurant. Momma Avery, bedecked in a fringe orange blouse and matching ankle-length skirt, poured tea into their cups, and Nichole nibbled on a gooey cinnamon roll. The sun was warm, and it beamed down on their heads where the white trellis above wasn’t crisscrossing them with shade.

“Anything useful? Anything that puts Bryson in the clear?” Nichole asked between bites.

“I’m not sure, to be honest.” She flicked through more of the photos. “There are a lot of pictures of him with this woman, and this little girl. They share a resemblance. Myers and the girl. Oh.” She paused. “There’s a video.”

“Go on, then,” Nichole encouraged.

“You can’t bruise the ego of a dead man, dear,” Momma Avery added.

The video started with a pair of feet walking through grass and then panned up to a dog, which was being walked by Chase. A little girl walked beside him, holding his hand. Chase released the dog from its leash, and the little girl went bounding after it. In the video, it was a bright sunny day. Flowers sprung from the grass, and birdsong could be heard in the background. Chase ran after the little girl, laughing and grinning all the while. After grabbing the girl, Chase tickled her and she giggled happily, shouting out, “I love Daddy!” Chase turned to the camera and smiled, a twinkle in his bright blue eyes. “Come on, Aubrey!”

Skyler’s head snapped up. “Aubrey. That’s it!” She stopped the video. “The woman from the restaurant…the assistant manager. She ran out of the bathroom crying after she saw Chase’s body.” She lowered her voice, her eyes casted down to the table. “The poor woman was devastated.”

“So, she’s the murderer!” Momma Avery announced.

Nichole and Skyler looked at her in confusion. “No…” Skyler said. “Not necessarily. But she has links to Chase.”

Momma Avery pouted. “It would be much simpler for it to be her.”

Nichole stepped in, seeing a retort form on Skyler’s lips. “May I see the phone, please? If need be, these pictures and videos may be crucial to presenting Bryson’s defense.” She looked at the phone while the other women sat silently. “There’s another video.” She was giving them her best I’m-a-Sarah-Lawrence-educated-lawyer look.

Skyler sometimes forgot just how well Nichole had done in school, and how she was actually probably far more qualified than either she or her mother to investigate this kind of mystery.

They crowded round the phone as Nichole pressed play. This one showed Aubrey being filmed while playing with the little girl, swinging her round while the girl laughed. Ringing interrupted the playing, and Aubrey answered her phone. Her face dropped as whoever was on the other end spoke. Her voice cracked, and she hung up. The view on the screen swung downward to Chase’s trousers. They heard him ask what was wrong, and Aubrey explained to him that they had been having problems with one of their best chefs, Dustin Cole (
the head chef at Harbor Point Restaurant,
Skyler thought,
tall guy, brown hair… I think
). She almost spat, saying that he was “more interested in throwing his life down the drain.” The video ended on Chase telling her, with a hint of humor in his voice, that he would take care of it, if he wanted her to.

“So he was trying to kill the chef!” Momma Avery announced. “So the chef got
him
first.”

“I…I don’t think he was serious.” Skyler paused and frowned. “At least I
really
hope he wasn’t.” She bit her lip. “We’ll have to talk to both of them. Dustin and Aubrey.”

The breeze had stilled. Birds sang in the trees, and people talked about their day, families and friends. The smell of the pastries and cakes being baked inside drifted on the air. Skyler sighed and tapped on the table.

“They were trying to be a family.” She shook her head. “It seems so unfair. After seeing the way Aubrey reacted…well, it’s just that it seems like she really believed in him. Like he wanted to try.”

Momma Avery looked somber. “Fatherhood changes a man, for better or worse.”

They were silent for a few more moments. Nichole was still looking at the phone.

“Good news: this is definitely Chase’s phone. He was texting Aubrey.” She grimaced. “He was also texting someone else.”

She held up the phone to the other women. A text on the screen read, “You’re just going to have to hold the money. Leave it in your van, I’ll pick it back up tomorrow.” It was from Bryson. The contact picture confirmed that it was Bryson
Everett.

“Oh Bryson.” Momma Avery’s face fell. “What have you gotten yourself into?”

As the evening drew in, Skyler found herself walking along the shore. Clouds had rolled over the earlier sun, and the water lapped against the yellow sand. She clutched a leather-bound book in one hand. Her hair was down about her shoulders. Shells and seaweed crunched under her boots. Gulls cawed in the sky above. There was a pen tucked behind her ear, and she removed it and replaced it several times as she walked.

Fifteen minutes into her walk, or so she supposed it might have been, she came across a tree trunk that had been pushed ashore. She pushed on the bark with her hand, and it still felt firm so she sat down. Uncapping the pen after having removed it from behind her ear, she flipped open the book in her hand. Her journal. With a twitch of a frown, she glanced at the chunk of pages that were still blank and then back at the last entry.

“Date night. A blind date, set up by someone who works at the newspaper. Apparently he’s called Bill. I’m optimistic. Just this once, you know? I think I need to let myself have that. Nichole is right. I don’t
need
a romantic partner; I don’t think anyone
needs
that. But it’s nice to be wanted.

Work kind of consumes me at times. A romantic life would give me something else, I think. Maybe I’ve been conditioned to think that. I suppose we are constantly blasted with messages of love and romance and coupledom and the like. Still. Even dating again will give me something to focus on, right?

These entries always seems to end up written as if they’re letters. Maybe that’s a good thing. Well, imaginary contact, I shall sign off here. Here’s hoping date night goes well.”

“Anything interesting?”

Skyler almost jumped at the question. She looked up, and he was standing there. Bill. Only he looked far more casual now, dressed in a faded blue T-shirt and stonewashed denim jeans.

“May I?” he asked, gesturing to the space next to her. She nodded. Sitting down, he pulled a cigarette from a pack and lit it between his teeth.

Skyler arched an eyebrow. “You smoke?”

He sighed. As he spoke, he didn’t look at Skyler. His eyes were directed at the sea, but his gaze suggested he was looking somewhere far beyond that. “I had quit.  But after the other day.” He closed his eyes and shuddered. Opening them again, he took in a breath of smoke and then exhaled it away from Skyler. “It was…people are awful to each other sometimes. Aren’t they?”

She nodded. They sat together in silence for a few moments. The beach was expanding as the tide retreated. A previously idle hermit crab scuttled after a receding wave, and Skyler watched it as it disappeared under the water.

“You’ve never seen anything like that before, have you?” Skyler spoke softly.

Ash dropped from his cigarette as he turned to her. He had an odd, unreadable expression on his face. “What makes you say that?”

She could only offer him a shrug. “You seem so…so strongly affected by it.”

“Whereas you seem oddly numb.” The retort was an unexpected bite. Skyler shrank away from him a little. He stubbed the cigarette butt out under his shoe, on the sand. “Sorry. It’s a sore area.” His expression fell to sadness, his voice lowered. “I really am. I found my brother dead after…well, I suppose it isn’t that important now.”

She bit her lip and allowed silence to fall between them. Their eyes met briefly, and then the shared look broke.

“Who do you think murdered him?” Bill ventured.

Skyler shrugged. “I don’t have any strong leads so far.”

“Seems obvious to me.” He looked at her again. “This guy they let go from the scene of the crime. He was homeless, right? Probably desperate. Murdered him to take the money.”

“That’s guesswork and assumptions. They released him because they have nothing to go on.”

“I dunno.” He paused, wiped something off his shoe. “But he was at the scene. There’s no one else that fits.”

She didn’t respond to his statement. “It was nice to see you again, Bill—”

Standing, he gave her a firm hug. She blinked in shock. “Take care of yourself, Skyler.”

She nodded, and then she turned as if she were made of clockwork and walked away down the beach.

Chapter Six

The picturesque day had faded into a glowing evening. Sunset bathed the world outside the window in orange and red, and the ocean mirrored the scene in watercolor. Skyler rolled up the sleeves of her soft, woolen pajamas and pulled a blanket over her legs. Her red laptop whirred on the bed beside her, open on a word processing program that had a few lines of text written on an otherwise blank document. The pictures of the murder scene were arranged on her bed, as if in some kind of gruesome collage. She glanced over them again but nothing jumped out. Her hands clenched into fists and she frowned.

None of this is making an awful lot of sense yet.

Clue grumbled in her sleep and turned over. Skyler allowed herself a fractional smile at the huge animal that seemed to think it was a lap dog. She picked a mug up from the window and sipped hot chocolate. She yawned and stretched before pulling the laptop onto her knee. She began to type.

‘The victim, Chase Myers, was texting one of the suspects, Bryson Everett, a day before the murder. Their conversation breaks down a sort of plan between them. Myers ‘borrowed’ a safe key for the restaurant from Aubrey. When at the restaurant visiting her, Myers intended to steal money from the safe—to pay for their daughter’s spiraling medical bills. Everett was to hold the money for Myers until he was ready to pick it up and deposit it into Aubrey’s bank account. Everett couldn’t understand why Myers couldn’t pay the bills with his own money, and the following texts explain that because of his current status as missing, his bank accounts had all been frozen. And the problem had to be sorted immediately. Everett seemed hesitant to agree at first, but it seems as if he didn’t say no, judging by the texts that followed from Myers.

And, of course, Everett was seen leaving the murder scene.”

Skyler leaned back, reading over her work. Her mother was still clinging to her belief in Bryson; she was insisting that he had not killed anyone. Skyler hadn’t organized the clues in any way that pointed to who else could have. Suspects she certainly had, but nothing definitive.

Picking up her phone, she scrolled through her contacts. Finding Malcolm’s number, she typed out a text to him: “Any more word on Myers? I could use some help. Feeling kinda stuck right now.”

As she waited for a reply, she flicked through her social networks. Her cousin was posting pictures of her engagement ring. Nichole had shared a dog video with her, saying, “This reminds me of Clue!”

Her phone pinged. The reply read, “Main suspects: Aubrey Perkins, Dustin Cole…and Bryson Everett. Sorry. Don’t know much more. They’re looking more in depth at Aubrey’s background right now. Maybe that’s your angle.”

“I’ll put some thought into it. Thanks, Malcolm.”

“Any time, Skyler.”

Clue awoke, blinking her eyes and yawning. She stood on her hind legs while stretching out her front legs. She padded over, swishing her tale and scattering the pictures before promptly sitting herself in front of Skyler.

“Clue, you just messed up all of my…clues.” She shook her head. “Off the bed.” The dog cocked her head. “Now.”

Clue jumped down and started to sniff at the pictures on the ground.

“Away from those, Clue,” she said as she turned to her laptop.

The dog fixated on a particular picture, tail pointed straight, nose glued to it. Skyler sighed and picked it up.

“I’ve looked at this about a million times. There’s—” She stopped mid-sentence. “Bryson insisted that he hadn’t even seen Chase. But Chase had the money…meaning they have to have met up!” She ruffled the dog on her head. “Good girl, Clue. Good girl!”

“Are you talking to the dog, again,” Nichole called from the hallway, “or yourself?”

“You’re better company than Nichole, aren’t you, girl? Smarter, too. Your help has us a step closer.” Clue wagged her tail.

“Funny.” She opened the door. “Has the dog
actually
found something then?”

“Chase had the money when he was found, right?” Nichole nodded. “To have that money, who did he have to have met?”

Nichole blinked. “Bryson!”

“He was in a bad way when we met him in the station. Maybe that’s because he was terrified. If Bryson gave him that bag, then he might have
witnessed
the murder. Think about it: he was in a state of shock to begin with, he was potentially threatened, and then he finds out that he’s the number one suspect!”

“That makes sense…” Nichole frowned. “But the phone implicates him. We can’t turn it in. Not until we have some idea of who the real killer is.”

Skyler nodded her agreement, and Clue padded out of the door past Nichole.

“She probably wants fed,” Nichole commented.

Skyler nodded and stood up. “I’ll do it. I wanted to catch the news anyway, see if anything else has turned up about Chase or any suspects.”

Nichole nodded. “I’m going to sort through some notes for one of my other cases.” She paused and then added, “Because I do have those, you know?”

Skyler rolled her eyes as her roommate walked away. Clue was sitting in their kitchen area, staring at the cupboard that held her food. Skyler smiled and picked up the remote from the couch, flicking the news on. As she returned to the kitchen she set about opening a can of the mysterious mulch-like, meaty substance certain dog foods are made of (but that Clue seemed to love). She could hear the television buzzing in the background. The news reporter was rehashing the facts of the case of Chase’s murder so far. Skyler mentally added to those facts that she hadn’t known the additional information she had discovered. As she stirred the brownish mush in Clue’s bowl, her ears tuned into the words “new information.”  Still carrying the bowl (and with Clue at her heels), she wandered back to the living room to watch the report.

“Myers’s lawyer is now insisting that he received a phone call from his client urging him to change his will to include his daughter.” A photograph of the girl they had seen in the videos flashed up on the screen. “On the same day as the crime, a notarized document containing the changes to the will was signed, dated and mailed. Said documents were signed by a witness.” A picture appeared on the screen that caused Skyler’s mouth to drop open in shock. She recognized the man; he was wearing a suit and his long hair was tied back into a bun, but she was certain of who he was. “The witness in question was Myers’s brother, Bryson Everett Myers.”

Clue whined at her master’s feet as she stood transfixed and staring at the television, clutching a metallic bowl of dog food.