Murder on Edisto (The Edisto Island Mysteries) (27 page)

Unexpectedly, her eyes moistened, and she fought to push down the lump. She missed her daddy so damn much. This was such a pomp and circumstance, but admission didn’t entitle these people to see her cry.

CALLIE ENTERED the family room of her parents’ Middleton mini-mansion of forty-five hundred square feet as the hall clock gonged once for half past eleven at night. Beverly stood at the mahogany wet bar, heels off and barefoot. She faced the five-by-seven mirror with exaggerated concentration, as if afraid to glance up and see herself. From the reflection, Callie recognized the makings for a pitcher of martinis.

“Mix that with that fancy French gin, and I’ll share it with you,” she said as she kicked off her own shoes.

Beverly held up a sixty dollar bottle of Citadelle without glancing back.

“Yes, that one,” Callie said, sitting on the leather sofa, avoiding the brown recliner that had been her father’s.

Jeb had fallen into bed as soon as they’d arrived back at the Cantrell home. Callie couldn’t have slept if she wanted to. The past often overwhelmed her in sleep, driving her frantic with so many memories. Hers and John’s wedding day, their academy graduations, late night Saturdays and late morning Sundays that followed. His dislike for eggs and her love of omelettes. The scenes would flash faster and faster until her pulse raced, and she sweated out from under the covers.

She now feared her father’s death would escalate the visions and add new chapters to those already in place. Maybe bring on the anxiety attacks again. If she had to stay up and await sunrise peeking past the crape myrtles, she would. Whatever it took to make her drop from exhaustion into a comatose sleep.

Beverly brought over the pitcher, two glasses, and a bottle of green olives. Without asking, she threw three olives and extra juice in a glass, filled it with drink, and gave it to her daughter nesting on the other end of the sofa.

Callie took a sip. “You always make a good drink.”

“That’s what your father used to say.” Then she drank half the glass’s contents, studied the remnant, and downed the rest.

Callie now appreciated Jeb’s shoes. Was this how he felt watching her? Beverly refilled her glass. “How’re you holding up, Mother?”

“Fine.” Her mother took in another deep swallow, leaving just enough to cover the olives.

She was taking those drinks fast. “I hope you don’t have any obligations tomorrow,” Callie said.

Beverly sharply jerked her head toward the bar. “Worried I’ll drink it all? You know how to fix another batch. I taught you that much.”

Callie winced. The lady’s Southern charms were nonexistent tonight. “You indeed educated me on how to find my way around a bar.”

“Hmph,” Beverly said, pouring her third in a matter of minutes.

Callie’s gaze rested on Lawton’s recliner. She’d give Beverly the benefit of the doubt tonight. A new widow deserved that much. But she’d rarely seen her mother so blunt, willing to sling ornery so hard. “I asked Chief Warren to review Daddy’s accident.” Licking off the alcohol, she sucked out the pimento first before consuming the olive. “Daddy was a good driver.”

Beverly’s slender form deflated into the cushions, showing how much weight she’d lost off a previously size six frame. “Let it be, Callie. It won’t bring him back.”

Callie sank into her own cushion and her second drink, draining the pitcher. “Don’t you want the truth?”

Beverly dragged her gaze from her glass to her daughter as if her eyes weighed thirty pounds each. A white tress of hair strayed from its spray and loosely draped across her vision, but the woman didn’t notice. “If he made some dumbass mistake driving, why do I want to know that as his last deed with all he accomplished in life? Let me remember him as perfectly as possible, please.” She fished an olive out and ate it, licking fingers afterwards. “You of all people ought to sympathize.”

Callie tugged at her necklace. She didn’t want to compound her anguish for Lawton with the old grief of John. “Guess we share widowhood now,” was all she could say.

“Hmmm.” Her mother slid an unfocused stare toward her daughter. “So we have something in common after all. How wonderful is that?”

Callie’s eyes burned, a choke rising. She considered one statement and ruled it too malicious, then another. Shit and damn! She lifted up from the sofa.

She knew how intensely Beverly would suffer. Without a doubt, her mother loved her father completely, unconditionally. Agony would dominate most of her days and all of her nights for months to come. “Mother, I’m going to sit in the courtyard. Tonight you’re entitled to be as nasty as you like. But I lost my daddy, too.”

Callie silently moved around the woman toward the archway, stroking her mother’s shoulder along the way. Beverly shivered.

“The days will get worse before they get better,” Callie whispered. “Give yourself time to heal. I get it, trust me, I do.” Then she left, the weight of the day mashing each step deeper into the plush cream carpet.

Into the sunroom and outside the French doors, Callie took a seat in a floral-cushioned wrought-iron chair. The view faced a thick copse of pines, blackened silhouettes this time of night, but she knew a foreclosed house half the size of her parents’ sat empty just on the other side. In the courtyard, with its decadent horticulture, flagstone, and landscape lighting, she could pretend no bad luck or evil deeds existed. This was where Beverly would hide for a while. Callie didn’t blame her.

Callie set her glass on a short table and scrubbed her face with fingertips. This wasn’t her home any longer. But Edisto wasn’t either. Boston was out of the question, with no chance of affording that cost of living without a job. Boston PD might take her back, but she didn’t want to be a cop again. Besides, she’d never leave Jeb a thousand miles away. Maybe he’d come with her? What kind of tuition would that be?

No place felt right.

Daddy, did you give us the house to keep us close or make me put my life back together again
?

Moths fluttered around a coach lamp. A mosquito sang in her ear before she brushed it away for it to quickly return. A sweat bead trickled down her temple. It was too hot and irritating out here, even for June.

She reached to collect her glass, but between the dark and the gin, she knocked it off the edge. Thin crystal shattered into slivers and shards and skittered in all directions.

She fell back, lifting bare feet off the flagstone. “Well, shit.”

Beverly stuck her head out the door, her shoulder leaning on the frame for balance. “Why don’t you go back to Edisto, dear? I don’t need a sitter.” She started to shut the door.

“Mother!” Callie called just loud enough not to wake neighbors or Jeb.

The door reopened. Beverly repositioned herself against the other half of the French door with her blouse dangling wrinkled and unkempt over her skirt, waiting as if she’d made her move, and it was Callie’s turn to draw a card.

“You might need some help,” Callie said, struck awkward at her mother’s remark. “You stayed with me when John died.”

“I seem to recall someone telling us to give her space,” Beverly slurred. “Your father and I left two days after the funeral.”

The air between them had been thick as pudding then, as Callie recalled. Lawton had known how to temper the tense moments when his daughter’s nerves unraveled and Jeb couldn’t get out of bed. Her mother, not so much, which stung Callie sharply at the time, because Beverly Cantrell had a full grasp of social etiquette and the proper phrases to say. Just not words meant for a daughter in need.

“Well, I had Jeb. You have no one,” Callie said.

Beverly lifted one shoulder, brushing off her daughter’s remark. “My friends will harbor me and tend my needs. Tomorrow I’ll receive even more food, more cards, calls, and visits.” She waved slowly toward the stars, as if beginning a soliloquy. “The Cantrells thrive here. From your great-great-grandfather to your father, four generations of public servants. Mayors, councilmen, state representatives. The legacy means the town holds an obligation to pay its respects for the long term.” She lowered her arm. “I’ll be anything but alone. You”—she pointed at Callie—“on the other hand, will stand in a corner observing, picking up used hors d’oeuvres napkins and washing
unbroken
drink glasses in an attempt to stay busy and avoid societal well-wishers.”

Callie rose up and turned to her mother with an exhausted anger. “You love the attention. I don’t.”

“Yes, you do,” Beverly said, her stocking-covered feet still inside, protected by the marble floor. “Just on your own terms, and most people don’t tolerate your terms. Makes for a short list of friends, I’d say. Those who
get
you, as you used to be so fond of saying.”

Callie stepped forward. Glass pricked her left foot, under her toes, then another under her right heel, but she walked over to Beverly anyway, not stopping to analyze the damage. “You’re a mean drunk, Mother.”

“Are there sweet drunks, dear?” She took another sip as if to anchor the question mark.

Callie hated her mother’s word play. “Maybe I
should
leave.” She edged around the woman and went inside, walked a few feet, and then noticed the trail of dark marks on the beige marble floor of the sunroom.

“Stop. Don’t go any further and track blood on my hall carpet. Here,” Beverly said. “Take my napkin.”

“A real mother would sit me down so she could tend her daughter’s cuts.” Callie leaned on the stair banister and lifted one foot, then the other, noticing the heel bleeding, but the ball of her foot not showing the tiny piece she still felt embedded.

Beverly pushed off the door and moved with a shaky dignity toward Callie. “Sit down, then, if that’s what you need.”

“Can you even tell how many feet I have right now? No, thanks.”

Her mother halted, swaying slightly. Leaning on the cherry hall table, she softened her expression. “What will we do without your father, Callie?”

Callie studied this lady who’d birthed her, not sure she felt the genetic connection as deeply as she should. Lawton had bridged them. What
would
they do?

“I don’t know, Mother.”

Beverly shoved off the table and weaved her way back toward the family room. “Well, I meant what I said. Go back to Edisto. Leave Jeb if you wish, but if you stay we’ll cause a nuclear holocaust this town doesn’t need to read in the
Journal Scene
. I think you follow, dear.”

Even in mourning, her mother worried about appearances, but for once, Callie agreed. If she stuck around, she and her mother would only rub each other raw and make for gossip which would only be remembered as the atrocious, uncouth manner in which the Cantrells commemorated their monarch’s passing.

Guess she’d go back to Edisto . . . for now.

Chapter 21

AROUND TWO P.M. the next day, Callie drove the long way to Edisto along Highway 61. The old road ran ten miles farther than Highway 165, but she couldn’t bring herself to pass the accident’s location. She begged Jeb to take the alternate route as well when he returned to the beach in a few days. For now, he could stand guard over Beverly if Callie couldn’t and return in John’s old car. Lawton never did tune it up.

Driving with a grip at ten and two, she felt more alone and vulnerable than ever. This road ran more traffic than the other, and a driver couldn’t be too careful. Four-and five-foot wide oaks climbed seventy-five feet toward the clouds, dripping ten-foot clumps of Spanish moss under a canopy of branches. The highway guided cars from Middleton, past historic Middleton Plantation and Magnolia Gardens, to the West Ashley area of Charleston. Sunlight flickered like a disco ball through the leaves. Emotional exhaustion dragged her into the seat, but this wasn’t a highway to drive tired on. Not with the oaks almost atop the asphalt.

Punching the radio search button, Callie dialed for hard rock, any sort of musical racket. Screeching Rolling Stones, Aerosmith, Metallica. Distraction. The radio blared a few decibels short of max, but she could not clear her head or shut down the continual unsettled concern over . . . she wasn’t sure what. Everything?

But fact was she had nobody to call for aid anymore.

After Seabrook delivered the news five days ago, she’d thrown clothes in the car and held it together until they reached Middleton around ten p.m. Seabrook’s headlights had followed them most of the way.

Jeb had locked himself in his room. Her mother had medicated herself, and Callie had tucked her into bed. Callie had then taken a bottle to her parents’ courtyard and slung it across the yard in grief, wanting so damn much to drink it down like an iced Coke on an August evening.

Now, her wheels hummed easy on the pavement.

Callie wasn’t sure what Beverly was to her now. Lawton had kept the family civil. And Beverly’s first overt action as a widow had been to ship her daughter away. Jeb already served in Lawton’s stead. Okay to a point, but Beverly was not dragging Jeb too deeply into her world.

The stark reality of her family’s hobbled state had first engulfed her when the funeral director told the three remaining Cantrells where to stand for the receiving line. Beverly and Jeb were all she had left. A family that had shrunk from six to three in two years.

She had no reason to return to Chelsea Morning, yet had nowhere else to go.

Callie smacked the steering wheel.
Stop it!
Her mind wandered in ridiculous directions, with common thoughts twisted into misshapen anxieties. Where was her head?

She caught herself thinking of Seabrook again. She’d thrown up a wall from the moment they’d met. Of all the characters on Edisto, Seabrook could probably relate to her the most. He wanted to sympathize, yet she hadn’t let him near enough to express it.

He’d been patient with her running on the beach, gun in her waistband. Hiding from the evening sun. And he’d probably given up on her. Completely alone, she could see herself leaving the television on, going out, and coming home terrified someone had broken in. Or worse, someone hiding in a closet or under the bed.

There had to be a reason for her reluctance to let him close, but she didn’t want to think about that now.

Who would be her foundation now? Tears spilled down her face. Her father was gone.

Highway 17 appeared in the distance. Her gaze dropped to the dashboard.
What? Shit!
Her speedometer read ninety. She yanked her foot off the accelerator and slammed weight on the brake. The car fishtailed. Her fingers vise-gripped the steering wheel. Her forearms and biceps knotted rock hard.

The car squealed to a halt ten feet into the crossroad, missing the rear end of a passing Honda by a yard. Her whole body shook as she flipped the transmission into reverse and eased back behind the stop sign.

She searched the rearview mirror for blue lights . . . then gasped at her reflection.

Tears coated flushed cheeks, shiny with red blotches. Eyes wide and red-rimmed, she appeared completely emotional. A cop would have given her the once over and snatched her keys, maybe her license, and hauled her in until somebody could determine her state of mind.