Southern Sass and a Battered Bride Page 12

  Moving too fast! “Paul.” I glanced away and tried to pull my hands from his grasp.

  He held on. “Don’t panic. I’m not proposing or anything.”

  I swallowed hard and got up the courage to meet his gaze. “I’m sorry. This has to be the worst reaction ever.”

  His smile didn’t waver. “No. I expected it. You need security and safety. And that comes with preparing for the future. I’ve blindsided you and, for the distress it causes you, I’m sorry. It isn’t my intent. I have strong feelings for you, Marygene.”

  My mouth fell open, and I broke out in a cold sweat. Not an attractive response or romantic reaction. Surely he’d back off now.

  Paul acted as if he didn’t notice and kept plowing forward. “I know we’ve only known each other for a short time, but the feelings are real.” He glanced at my hands. “I saw there was something between you and the deputy.”

  Which one?

  “But the two of you have never dated.”

  Ah, Javy.

  “That leads me to believe you don’t believe he’s right for you. I’m good with giving you your space now. The casual nature of our relationship gives you a sense of control. After all you’ve been through, I can afford you that willingly.” He glanced back up and he searched my face. “Not now, but when all this is over, will you consider advancing our relationship to the next phase?”

  “The next phase?” I mumbled dumbly.

  “Yes, moving from casual to seriously considering marriage.”

  I hesitated before responding. I steadied my tone. “I can promise you I will think about it.”

  His smile broadened and he leaned in and kissed me on the cheek. “That’s good enough for me.” He released my hands and his shoulders relaxed. “No more heavy stuff tonight, I promise. How about we order pizza and, just for tonight, forget what’s going on out there and watch some TV?”

  Forgetting was an impossibility. I had so much on my mind and friends in trouble. Still, this sweet guy in front of me had saved my and Betsy’s lives. He wanted to consider a life with me, and the next few weeks were probably going to be rough on him. And still, he was offering an evening of normalcy, or attempting to. I nodded.

  “Great! I’ll order the pizza while you find us something to binge watch on Netflix.”

  CHAPTER 14

  A loud thud caused me to wake with a start, sitting upright in the bed, disturbing Mr. Wrigley. The cat yawned and gave a meow. “Did you hear something?” I ran my fingers through his fur.

  He peered around the room, though hadn’t reacted with alarm. Mr. Wrigley wasn’t as effective as a watch dog, but he’d alerted me to danger on other occasions. Now he seemed nonplussed and my heart raced.

  In the darkness of my room, I reached for my cell phone, where I kept it on the charger on the bedside table. It was three thirty in the morning. I threw the covers back and listened, placing my feet on the cool tile floor. The alarm wasn’t blaring. Had I forgotten to engage the security system? Had the person who rigged my van come back to finish the job? Was this more of the trouble Mama saw coming? My heart pounded so loudly in my ears I feared I wouldn’t be able to discern sounds of an intruder if there was one. I moved through the bedroom on tiptoes, quiet as a mouse, and paused by the open bedroom door, trying to listen. Nothing. Not a peep.

  My breath came in pants. I searched around the bedroom for something I could use as a weapon. I grabbed a giant conch shell off my dresser. I wasn’t sure what good it would do, but it was something. Vacillating momentarily, I scrounged up the courage and moved into the living room, flipping the switch and bathing the room in light. I meticulously and shakily scanned everywhere. Everything was in its place and exactly the way I left it when I’d gone to bed. I checked the security system, and it was engaged. Every room was clear, and all was well in my little cottage. I let out a sigh of relief. It must’ve been a nightmare that woke me. I couldn’t recall a dream, but it wasn’t uncommon for me to wake startled, thinking I heard a crash or someone yelling, with the feeling of impending doom. PTSD could strip you of all logical thinking at times.

  Placing the shell on the island, I poured myself a cold glass of water. Mr. Wrigley moseyed into the kitchen and had a drink. Seemed like the thing to do, I guess.

  “We’re all right. We should get back to bed.” I wiped the sweat from my forehead. Sliding between the cool sheets, I pondered my life. I would be extra cautious moving forward. I’d make better decisions and consider my words before I spoke. I’d be watchful for anything strange or unusual and do my best to stay safe. With all these thoughts, I had no idea how I would be able to get back to sleep. I’d needed the rest too. I had an early morning ahead of me.

  The next thing I knew, the alarm on my phone was going off at six thirty. I groaned and stretched before climbing out of the bed and turning it off. I went straight for the shower and stayed in there five minutes longer than I should have. I dried my hair and put on my standard diner uniform of shorts and a peach polo, applied my makeup in record time, slung my purse across my body, and was about to rush out the front door when Mr. Wrigley’s howling halted me. He was pacing in front of the glass doors. Like me, he loved to sunbathe during the day and, to his obvious dismay, the blackout curtains remained drawn.

  I glanced back at Mr. Wrigley pawing at the hem. I left the front door cracked open. “Sorry, I nearly forgot.”

  He kept meowing.

  “I said I was sorry.” I gave the cord a yank and light began to spill onto the tile. I froze mid-pull. Flutters took up residence in my midsection. Oh . . . no no no no!

  Sequins on a once-white garment escaped a large black bag that lay in front of my back door. My head spun when I slid down the glass onto the floor as I stared at the half-open body bag. A glimpse inside caused me to shriek, and I scrambled backward. The horribly decomposed body was one I wouldn’t forget.

  Mr. Wrigley leaped on my lap.

  “It’s okay, fella. We’re going to b-be okay.” I stroked the cat’s fur before my brain caught up and I put the cat on the floor and dug into my purse for my cell phone. I stared at the sleek device in my hand and panted. This was going to look so bad. Still, I had to get help. I called the first person I thought of, which happened to be the closest person. When he answered, I choked out without preamble, “Lucy’s body is on my deck. It’s bad, so terribly bad . . . Javy, I . . . I don’t know what to do.”

  “I’m coming.” His gravelly voice, thick with sleep, became alert, “Don’t touch anything.”

  Minutes later, Javier came racing through the front door shirtless and in low-slung pajama pants, barefoot with his gun in his hand. Through my watering vision, I saw him carefully taking everything in. He walked past me on the floor and moved to the glass pocket doors.

  “I . . . I was on my way out the door and Mr. Wrigley likes to sunbathe,” I rambled. “If I hadn’t come back to open the curtain, I wouldn’t have seen it.” I wiped my nose with the back of my hand.

  “Did you see anyone around?” Javier opened the doors and a gust of wind brought the scent of decay and death. I gagged and scooted farther away as he squatted near the body.

  “No. Oh, wait . . .” I thought back to last night. “At three this morning. I thought I heard something. I went through the house and everything seemed fine. But I didn’t think to check outside.”

  He got up and looked around. He took a pen off the side table and used it to open the bag more. “Okay. What about your security lights? Were they on last night?”

  “I . . . I don’t know. I didn’t check. I should have. I just didn’t think to. Nightmares wake me up like that a lot. And with the blackout curtains, I wouldn’t have noticed.” I wrapped my arms around my knees and hugged them to my chest. “It’s her, isn’t it?”

  “Hard to tell. I mean, she’s in a wedding dress. The decomposition seems to be farther along than I’d expect, but I’m not an expert in forensics.” He closed the doors and sat on the floor next to me. “The
only reason someone would dump a body at your doorstep is to make an impact. Either to frighten you or—”

  “Frame me.”

  We made direct eye contact. He’d tried to warn me. Like Mama mentioned earlier, this felt off. The whole ordeal. If the deceased had wanted my help as they had in the past, our paths would have intersected.

  “They’re doing a poor job of it, if they’re trying to frame me.”

  Mama had said trouble would be coming for me, and boy, had that been an understatement.

  “True, there are many other places to stash a body and plant evidence pointing to you that would be more believable. Perhaps they laid clues out, or what they believed to be clues, and we missed them.” He rubbed the back of his neck. “They obviously wanted the body found and now. He’s desperate and making mistakes.”

  My head whipped toward him. “Mistakes or not, this is damning evidence.”

  “They probably called the tip line to give a heads-up on where the body would be. That’s how this type works. If the detective and the sheriff found it before you, a lot of theories could be presented on how you were about to get rid of the evidence and were caught before you succeeded.” His gaze was intense, and I could see he was rapidly thinking through different scenarios.

  Being the daughter of a sheriff and an ex-girlfriend of a deputy, I’d seen that look many times. Somehow, though, Javy’s seemed different.

  He’d seen more; his life experiences were quite vast. His theories would go many directions that Alex and Eddie probably wouldn’t consider. “I don’t know what’s going on here, but something is rotten. I’ve been a cop a long time, and I can smell the deceit. That might not even be Lucy Carmichael out there.”

  “You think she . . . she’s alive?” I wiped the remaining wetness from my cheeks, surprised by my strength and ability to have rational thoughts. “She’d have to be beyond ignorant of police procedure to try something like that and, honestly, Lucy struck me as an intelligent person when she wasn’t playing the bimbo. Besides, what would her motive be?”

  “I don’t know. And she’d need an accomplice. Maybe Alex . . . But we’re speculating. DNA will tell the story.” He scratched his head.

  “Oh God! You can’t be serious? You think he hates me that much?”

  He stood and held out his hand for my cell phone. “I don’t want to believe it of him either. It has to be this way. Anyone and everyone is a suspect. I have to call this in.”

  I handed him my phone. “Even me, huh?”

  He held my stare. “Except you. By my calculations, I’ll be able to explain the time lapse of your call to me and when I called this in. Any more time passing and it’ll seem suspicious that I waited, especially with the Atlanta detective overseeing everything.” He hit a few buttons on my cell. “The sheriff won’t be able to keep him out of this crime scene. You need to prepare yourself.”

  His words struck fear deep within. I fought to keep my knees from knocking together. I took a deep breath and got to my feet while I listened to Javy explain what he’d discovered at my house. He went dead silent and his face hardened and he disconnected the call.

  “We have an even bigger problem.” He stormed past me and went into my bedroom and then into my en suite. He searched underneath the sink and I felt a tad embarrassed at the disarray he found. He froze.

  “What?”

  He snatched my hand towel off the rack and picked up a tiny bottle and showed it to me.

  “What is that?” I put my hand on his back and tried to get a look at the label on what he was holding.

  “Fentanyl.” He rose to his feet.

  “What is fentanyl?”

  “It’s an opioid about a hundred times stronger than morphine. It’s usually for hospice patients in patch form. I’ve had experience with it being adapted into a street drug. We must turn this over. The tip about the body and this drug were reported on the tip line. It’s recorded and time stamped. Followed by anonymous calls to the sheriff and Detective Thornton.”

  My entire body tingled as I stared at the tiny half-used bottle. “What am I going to do?”

  CHAPTER 15

  My cottage swarmed with a forensic team, Teddy the coroner, the entire Peach Cove Sheriff’s Department minus Alex, and the horrible detective. I sat at the bar and waited to be spoken to again. I’d already given my statement to the detective and now he was speaking with Javier, who’d run home and changed into his uniform. Teddy rolled the body out on a gurney through the front door of the cottage, a must since the sand would make it a struggle to wheel it up the side of the dunes. Strangely, and for some odd reason, I kept focusing on how in the world I was going to get the odor out of my house.

  I must’ve said it aloud because Mama said from the stool beside me, “You’ll open the windows and doors and steam your floors.”

  Slowly, I spun the chair around, facing the kitchen, and put my face in my hands, my elbows on the bar, and kept my tone barely above a whisper. “I know you warned me, and I appreciated it. It would have been nice, though, if you could have given me some clue about the freaking dead body. My life is destroyed. I honestly don’t know how I’m supposed to come back from this one. They have a body and evidence. Motive won’t be hard to establish. She was marrying my ex. Any decent lawyer could run with that. Alex will hate me forever.”

  She rubbed my back. “Your life isn’t ruined. I am going to help. I am helping.”

  Eddie put his hand on my shoulder. And just like that, my mama and daddy were both consoling me. I tried not to focus on how weird it was that Mama was dead and no one could see her but me.

  “Pumpkin,” Eddie began softly, “we’re going to need to take this to the office and get your statement down officially. I’ve called Mr. O’Malley, the attorney in Savannah that I know, and he’s agreed to represent you. Now, it’s up to you if you want to give a statement today without his presence. I’ll be there and will interject if I feel it’s taking a bad turn.”

  My heart fluttered within my chest. “Am I going to be charged?” I couldn’t stop the wobble in my voice as I glanced at my father.

  He stroked my cheek with the back of his fingers and leaned in closer. His gaze held mine and his tone edged on fierce when he said, “Over my dead body.” His declaration was swift and, from what I could tell, undetected by the others in the room. Eddie meant it, and understanding how hard he’d fight gave me the courage to calm myself and slide off the stool.

  My tone sounded stronger when I spoke next, but his face remained pale. “What about my house? You’re not going to seal it off as a crime scene, are you? I can’t be homeless again.” The body was found outside my cottage. Surely that meant I’d be okay to stay here.

  “No, I don’t have any plans to do that.” His phone rang and he pulled it from his pocket and checked it. “I’ve got to take this. Trust me.” He squeezed my hand and I nodded before he stepped aside to answer the call. “Sheriff Carter here.”

  The energy in the space changed and Mama faded. Her face revealed she hadn’t wanted to leave. A lot of times she disappeared before she felt ready to. She didn’t always have a choice in the matter. I lifted my hand in goodbye and then scratched my face to hide the motion. My sister’s face appeared on the screen as my cell vibrated on the kitchen island, where Javy had placed it after his call to Eddie earlier.

  I hit the answer icon. “Hello.”

  “Hey, your text was beyond terse. What’s going on?”

  “Did you get Hannah to come in and cover my shift?” I slid off the stool and walked around the counter and stood by the refrigerator, keeping my back to everyone.

  “Yes,” she said tentatively.

  “Good. I’m going to be a little longer than I initially expected. Someone dumped Lucy’s remains, or what we believe to be Lucy, on my deck.”

  “Oh my God!”

  “Say that again,” Eddie said into his phone, breaking into my and Jena Lynn’s inconspicuous conversation. His tone, more than hi
s words, caught my attention. “I’ll be right there.” Eddie shoved his phone into his pocket. “Deputy Reyes.”

  “Listen, I’ve gotta go, but I’ll speak to you as soon as I can. And tell Betsy what’s going on when you see her.” I knew she’d be at work today. She called me before I went to bed, with a play-by-play of her interrogation and how they had nothing on her and were forced to let her go.

  “She’s here now. I’ll tell her. And, Marygene, be careful.” Jena Lynn sounded worried.

  The detective stayed on the other side of the room while Javier and Eddie conversed. Eddie clapped his deputy on the shoulder before he started for the front door. He paused by the island, and I went to meet him. He pierced me with his blue-gray gaze and placed both hands on my shoulders. “Deputy Reyes will drive you. I have to go. I want you to make your statement. Stick to the facts. Don’t elaborate, and then leave. Go to work or come back home, if you wish. Don’t talk about this case with anyone. You understand?”

  “Yes, sir.” He would get no arguments from me.

  He kissed me lightly on the forehead and left.

  “Is there something I should know, Deputy?” Detective Thornton asked with his brow raised.

  “The sheriff received a call from the president of Peach Cove Credit Union. There’s been a robbery attempt. I’ll drive Marygene in and take her formal statement.”

  “I can drive myself.” I needed to exercise a little free will when I could. It gave me a sense of control.

  “You’re sure?”

  I nodded.

  “I’ll be right behind you. And, Deputy, I’ll be conducting the interview.” Detective Thornton spoke to a member of the forensic team as I was gathering my things to leave. “Miss Brown.” He paused beside me.

  “Yes, Detective.” I repositioned my bag across my body.

  “I’ll have the team lock up when they leave. Would you like to give them a key or just lock the bottom lock?”