Death Walked In Read online

  She reached for the carafe, full to the brim with newly brewed Tanzanian Peaberry. It was a shame to drink coffee alone. She’d give Max a ring and no doubt they’d close their businesses early and slip home for love and laughter on this foggy Wednesday morning. She was reaching for the phone when she remembered. He was going to be at the Franklin house, conferring with the carpenter about new cypress paneling in the library, then swinging by the ferry. They would meet at noon at Parotti’s, the island’s best and oldest and most down-home eatery. It was a perfect day for a fried oyster sandwich. And an afternoon frolic…

  The telephone rang.

  Annie grinned when she saw caller ID and the familiar number of Confidential Commissions. Sure, she believed in ESP. She lifted the receiver.

  Barb’s breathless voice started without preamble. “Annie, you know how it is. Max keeps his cell in the car pocket and I don’t think he turns it on much. I called him twice.”

  Annie considered her cell phone a necessity. She wouldn’t dream of turning it off. Who knew what she might miss? Abruptly she realized Barb was still talking. “…he didn’t want to fool with anyone this morning because he was going out to the house. I didn’t tell her that, of course. I just said Max wasn’t here and she kept on talking. I should have told her he’d refused to take the call, because she asked me to have him call as soon as possible. She said she had to get—Then she stopped and stumbled a bit and went on kind of desperately, saying she couldn’t explain it over the phone but the Franklin house was the only place she could hide something and know it would be safe and she’d used her key to get in Tuesday morning but when she went back this morning, her key didn’t work. She had to get it—whatever it is—as soon as possible. She said everything would be all right and nobody would be in trouble, but she had to get the package. Max would be doing her a big favor and she promised it was the best way to handle everything. She asked me to please tell Max she was sorry she’d gone inside the Franklin house. Then she gasped, said she had to go, and hung up. I called Max twice and left messages, then I called her back. She picked up the phone but didn’t say a word. I hung up and called again and the line was busy. I wouldn’t bother you, but I can’t catch Max. If this woman hid something in the Franklin house, maybe you should go talk to her.”

  Annie hunched over the wheel of her Volvo. The farther she drove on Bay Street, the more impenetrable the fog became. Nearly opaque patches were occasionally interspersed with swirling eddies that gave hope only to be snatched away as she plunged into thicker belts. She felt alone in a gray universe, familiar landmarks obliterated. She rolled down the driver’s window. It seemed a long time ago that she’d glimpsed the white sign with the arrow pointing to the Sea Side Inn. Had she already passed the road that wound to the Franklin house? Who knew?

  She slowed to a stop, studied her island map. Once she passed Sea Side Inn, it was another half mile to the drive to the Franklin house. A quarter mile past their entrance, Bay Street ended. If she turned right on Calliope Lane, she would be nearing her goal. Calliope Lane cut back to the northeast. It was a tiny squiggle on the map, running from Bay Street to Palmetto Drive. Barb had used the caller ID number to find the address. Barb said it was the only house on the lane and it belonged to Gwen Jamison and she supposed the woman on the phone was Gwen Jamison.

  The fog thinned momentarily. Annie recognized a lightning-split oak near the drive to the Franklin house. Encouraged, she continued to the dead end and turned right. She encountered another thick patch and drove with white-knuckled determination, praying no one else was on the road.

  The fog abruptly shifted, allowing a clear view. She followed a jog in the road. Once around the curve, she saw a neat white picket fence and a mailbox to her right. If the only house on Calliope Lane belonged to Gwen Jamison, Annie had arrived.

  She turned into a crushed-oyster-shell drive. A small white house loomed ahead. Lights shone in a front window, a cheerful beacon. Annie parked and walked the short distance to steps and climbed to the porch. The white porch swing looked recently painted. A green pottery frog with a rollicking smile sat by the doormat. She lifted the heavy brass knocker on the front door. She knocked once, twice, a third time. No response. Annie was abruptly aware of heavy silence, made more oppressive by the muffling fog.

  She glanced at the lighted window. Had Mrs. Jamison gone out but left the lights on? The curtains were open. Annie walked a few steps and looked inside at a modest living room, a tan and black sofa, a rocking chair with a gay red cushion, an oval braided rug, a portion of an upright piano…

  Annie felt breath bunch in her throat. A trail of blood began on the floor near the piano bench. She followed it to a slender, work-worn hand that lay palm up near the base of a floor lamp. The fingers jerked. Annie stood frozen for an instant, then plunged toward the front door. She yanked open the screen, turned the knob and the door swung in.

  A slender black woman lay on her back near the piano. Blood stained the front of her white blouse, spread in a slow pool to one side. Her eyes were open. The fingers of one hand moved feebly.

  A portable phone lay nearby. A mechanical voice announced a phone off the hook. Annie felt frantic. Should she go out to the car, get her cell phone from her purse? The injured woman needed help as quickly as Annie could get it. As visions of fingerprints whirled in her mind, she ran to the phone, dropped to one knee, picked it up. She pushed end, talk, 911.

  “Broward’s Rock emergency center.” In a corner of her mind, Annie wondered who was answering. She didn’t recognize the voice. Mavis Cameron, wife of Police Chief Billy Cameron, served in turn as dispatcher for the police department and first responder to emergency calls, but Mavis and Billy and their children were on vacation this week at Disney World. “Please send help.” Annie didn’t recognize her own voice, high, thin, and wavering. “A woman’s been shot.”

  The responder sounded shocked. “Where are you?”

  Annie tried desperately to remember the house number. Barb had given her the number, she’d written it on her map, but the map lay on the front seat of the car. “Calliope Lane. It’s the only house. I can’t remember the number. One something.”

  “Who has been shot?” The question was urgent.

  “I don’t know for sure. It’s probably Mrs. Jamison. Please. You’ve got to hurry. Send help. She’s still alive but she’s bleeding and—”

  A guttural sound came from the woman on the floor.

  Annie jumped up and hurried to the wounded woman. She knelt beside her. In her ear, the voice continued, “Please stay calm. An ambulance is on its way. I need to know more—”

  “Not now. She needs help. Please hurry.”

  A whisper of sound came from that still form. Dark eyes blinked. The fingers of one hand moved again. Annie put the phone down, took that seeking hand in her own. “Mrs. Jamison, who did this?”

  The gravely injured woman gave no indication she’d heard. Her desperate gaze beckoned Annie.

  Annie leaned so near she could feel the faint thread of breath, smell a sweet scent of violet, and, hideously, the rank muskiness of blood, blood that continued to well, turning the starched white cotton blouse sodden and limp.

  The voice was louder now from the discarded telephone. “Who is speaking, please?”

  The wounded woman’s eyes closed, reopened. With enormous effort, her lips parted. She spoke, but the faint sound was lost in noise from the telephone.

  Annie reached out, closed the connection. “Mrs. Jamison?”

  The dying woman—Annie knew she was dying, there was the smell and feel of death—seemed to steel herself. From deep inside, she drew on a last vestige of strength. Her dark eyes locked with Annie’s. “…griff…” She gave a convulsive jerk. Her body sagged against the floor. Her gaze was fixed and staring. The hand Annie held was at one moment living flesh, the next it was limp, the husk left behind.

  The telephone shrilled.

  Annie grabbed it up.

  A worrie
d voice demanded, “Did you initiate a nine-one-one call? I’m trying to help you but I must know who you are.”

  Annie managed a choked answer. “She was dying. Now she’s dead.” Annie tried to stop shaking. “Someone shot her. Please come.”

  “Ma’am, it is imperative that you remain on the line. An officer is en route and emergency vehicles. Stay calm. I need your name.”

  “Annie Darling.”

  “Annie?” There was a change in tone. “Oh, my heavens.

  Annie, this is Lana Edwards. I’m trying to take care of the desk for Mavis, but I’ve never done it before and seeing that red flash for nine-one-one has me all upset. How did you find the lady?”

  Annie felt a surge of thankfulness. Speaking to someone she knew made her feel better and safer. Lana Edwards was a retired teacher. Annie had met her in Friends of the Library. “I’ll tell them when they get here. It’s very complicated. I’ll explain to Billy”—she stopped. Billy was in Orlando—“to the officer when she gets here. I’ll wait on the front porch.” She broke the connection. Quickly, she dialed Confidential Commissions.

  With sudden capriciousness, the fog lifted. Max picked up speed. A quarter mile later, he turned the Corvette into the drive to the Franklin house. At the end of the drive, he looked in vain for a bright red pickup with a gun rack in the cab. The drive was empty. Troy Hudman had his pick of jobs on the island and was known to walk out in the middle of a job if he didn’t like the owner’s attitude. Surely he would understand Max being delayed by fog. Perhaps Troy too was late.

  Max parked and strolled up the front steps. The new door-knob had a bright shine. A white sheet poked from the screen door.

  Max pulled out the note: “Had to take the early ferry to the mainland. Chance to pick up a ’47 Packard. Catch you tomorrow. Troy.”

  Max crumpled the scrap of paper into a ball, jammed it in his pocket. Hudman collected vintage cars. He could indulge his passion because he earned a great deal of money as the best finish carpenter on Broward’s Rock. He was one of many artisans Max had wooed and cajoled to work on the Franklin house.

  Max’s irritation was momentary. He’d learned in a hard school what mattered and what didn’t. What difference did a day make? Max was relaxed as he walked down the broad front steps. He turned and looked back at the two-story tabby house with piazzas both downstairs and up. The majestic white columns had Ionic capitals on the first level and Corinthian on the second. The house sat high on tabby foundations. Tabby was the Low Country’s original building material, oyster shells mixed with lime and sand. The support was as firm today as when built in 1805. The front faced southeast to catch prevailing summer breezes.

  He took great pleasure in the transformation he and Annie had wrought. The Franklin house had been a sagging ruin, windows broken and boarded over, the stately live oak avenue leading to the house rutted and choked by encroaching ferns and untended shrubbery. The road had been bulldozed level and covered with crushed oyster shells, the trees trimmed, the woods cleared of excess undergrowth.

  Max almost climbed into his new black Corvette, but he was in no hurry to see Barb. She wouldn’t say a word, but she would be brooding over the client he had turned away. After lunch with Annie, he’d drop by the island bakery and pick up a happy face cookie. Barb would try to hold on to her frown, but she was too good-humored to be grumpy for long. He’d be extra appreciative of today’s cooking effort, sweet potato pudding.

  He walked to the back of the house, looked down on the garden. The azaleas they’d planted in the fall would create a fairy tale of delicate color next month along with japonica, anemone, daffodils, wisteria, and dogwoods. Patches of fog still shrouded the plants and shrubs. He could barely make out the fish pond. It had been dredged, the surrounding retaining wall rebuilt. In summer, he and Annie would sit in rocking chairs on the back piazza, listen to the grunts, snores, whangs, and wheezes of male frogs serenading their lady loves. Man, did he understand. Guys and frogs did whatever worked, Godiva chocolates, wheezes, whatever. He grinned as he climbed the back steps.

  He enjoyed entering the house. The unfurnished rooms were like stages waiting for players, the ceilings immensely high, the doorways wide and tall, the windows huge. Empty, there was nothing to distract the eye from the recently painted or papered walls, spectacular crystal chandeliers, intricate pilasters framing doorways, elaborate cornices throughout, and, Max’s favorite, the coved ceiling of the drawing room.

  He pulled one of the new keys from his pocket. He was reaching to insert it in the lock when he realized the back door was ajar. Somebody had been careless. He shrugged. No harm done. Many houses on the island were never locked.

  A shaft of sunlight pierced the fog, the light emphasizing the rich glow of the refinished floor of the porch. If the floor had been less shiny, he might not have seen a sprinkle of glass near the first window to his right, a window that opened into the back of the main hall.

  In two quick steps, he reached the window. The pane in the top frame nearest the interior lock was broken out. How easy to reach inside, undo the lock, push up the bottom sash, and step over the sill. His eyes swung back to the unlocked kitchen door. An intruder would be smart to open an avenue for escape.

  Max strode back to the door. He eased the panel wide and stepped into the kitchen, dim and shadowy despite the array of gleaming new appliances.

  A muffled creak sounded above him, followed by dull thumps.

  Someone was in the small study upstairs. Max moved to the butcher’s block and grabbed a mallet for pounding meat. He stepped out of his loafers and ran soft-footed toward the narrow back stairs.

  The interior back stairs were narrow, uncarpeted, and blacker than Arthur Conan Doyle’s ghost-hound. Max took a tighter grip on the mallet, which suddenly seemed small. He thought, not for the first time, that the arcane mystery knowledge he’d gleaned from Annie was not always reassuring. Creeping up un-lighted back stairs in search of an intruder in a house remote from neighbors could land him in a fight. He wished he’d taken time to grab a log from the woodpile as a possible weapon. Better still, he should have returned to his car and used his cell to call the police. He pictured the cell, resting in the glove compartment. He didn’t like to be tethered. Cell phones and Black-Berries were great but he avoided them. He would be the one to order his life, not electronic pings. At this moment, he would have welcomed a tether to the outside world.

  The back stairs seemed cocooned in silence. He tried to hurry, stumbled, crashed on all fours in the darkness. No hope now to arrive unannounced. He came to his feet, raced up the steps, flung open the door.

  Pounding steps sounded on the main staircase.

  By the time Max reached the upper landing, the door to the kitchen banged. Max went down the steps three at a time. He burst into the kitchen. The kitchen door was ajar. He hurried out onto the back piazza. Fog still clung to the trees, drifted across the garden, bunched thick as cotton candy in the lower garden near the pond. Crushed oyster shells popped under running feet.

  Max thudded toward the steps.

  A shot rang out and then another.

  Chapter 3

  Annie’s voice was high and shaky. “Barb, somebody shot the woman who called. She was still alive when I got here. She died.” Annie remembered dark desperate eyes, the warmth of a slender hand.

  A siren shrilled, drowning out Barb’s reply. Dust rose in a cloud as a police cruiser swung into the drive. The car jolted to a stop, red light whirling.

  “The police are here. Find Max and tell him where I am.” Annie ended the call. She looked up and came face-to-face with Hyla Harrison, the newest member of the island’s police force. Behind her was a man in a crumpled gray suit. He was slightly over six feet tall and probably weighed two hundred and fifty pounds. Cold brown eyes in a seamed face scanned Annie, the porch, and the yard.

  Annie remembered Officer Harrison as a tall, somber woman with lank red hair who wore no makeup. Today there was a differen
ce in the officer’s appearance: freshly waved hair that shone, blush, and lipstick. She was the officer who had arrested Max last summer, training a gun on him and treating him like a dangerous felon. Annie fought a rush of dislike even though she knew she wasn’t being fair. Still, Annie avoided her at any social gathering, the ice cream and cake social at the club for kids where Officer Harrison and Max both volunteered, Friends of the Library meetings, wherever their paths crossed.

  Officer Harrison kept one hand on her holstered gun. She glanced at Annie, swiftly looked around before demanding, “Did you report a gunshot victim?” There was a tiny flicker of recognition in her eyes, but she gave no other indication she’d ever had contact with Annie.

  “The woman’s dead now. I was holding her hand and she died. I kept asking for help.” Annie knew her tone was accusatory even though likely no one could have arrived in time to make a difference. “She’s inside.”

  An ambulance swung into the yard, light flashing, siren wailing. The sound ended abruptly. Two EMTs jumped out, a middle-aged woman with a bush of gray hair and a muscular dark-haired young man with a coral snake tattoo crawling up one arm.

  When they reached the porch, Officer Harrison used a pen from her uniform blouse pocket to open the screen door. “Victim inside. Check for life. Don’t touch anything. Watch where you step.”

  Annie almost objected. She’d told her that Mrs. Jamison—if it was Mrs. Jamison—was dead. But procedure had to be followed. Before an investigating officer could touch the body, death had to be officially established.

  Officer Harrison gestured toward her companion. “Interview the witness.” She disappeared into the living room.