Carolina Isle

  “Too bad,” Gideon said. “I have some briefs that need editing.”

  Both R.J. and Sara looked at him in consternation.

  “Just kidding,” he said. “No briefs. Nothing that needs editing. Just fish that need to be cleaned, then cooked.” He walked around the front of the porch and they saw that he was at least six feet two. He was wearing clean jeans and a T-shirt, but both were faded and nearly worn-out. His feet were encased in worn moccasins.

  For all that he was no more than sixteen, seventeen at the most, there was something about the boy that made a person relax around him.

  “It didn’t take you long to find me,” he said over his shoulder as he went to a big rock protruding out of the ground in front of the cabin. R.J. practically ran down the steps to stand beside him.

  Sara watched in amusement as R.J. eagerly took the fish from the boy and started to clean them. She’d had no idea he knew anything about the outdoors. “Do you have a restroom?” she asked.

  “Not inside,” Gideon said, smiling. “The girls refuse to let you use theirs?”

  “Yeah,” R.J. said as his knife expertly split a fish in half. “Real sweethearts.”

  “They’re as mean as their father,” Gideon said matter-of-factly, but with no animosity. He looked back at Sara. “Sorry, but all I have is an outhouse and the creek.”

  “I’ll wait,” she said as she sat down on a bench and watched the two men clean the fish. She was quiet for a few moments, but she couldn’t stand it any longer. “So who are you and why do you live here in this cabin and who are the twins?”

  Gideon laughed softly as he put the cleaned fish on a slab of wood and started toward the house. “Come inside,” he said. “I need to get the twins fed.”

  Gideon held open the door and R.J. let Sara go in first. Inside, it was one room, with a big bed in the corner, a fireplace in one wall, an oldfashioned cookstove beside it, and a few pieces of old furniture with heavy rugs draped over them. It was cozy and homey, smelled of wood smoke, and Sara felt comfortable for the first time since Ariel had arrived at her apartment in New York. She sat down on the couch and propped her feet on the pine coffee table.

  “Put you through it, have they?” Gideon said as he took a chair across from her. R.J. was at the cookstove and he seemed to know exactly what to do as he lifted the iron disk and put in small branches taken from a box on the floor.

  “Bad enough that we’ll do most anything to get off this island,” R.J. said.

  Sara knew he was telling the young man that he’d pay a lot for transportation, but Gideon just looked straight ahead. He wants something, she thought. Whatever he tells us isn’t going to be for free. And until he gets what he wants, he’s not going to help us get out of here. She looked at Gideon. “Are you as nice as you seem or are you an illusion? Are you going to turn us over to the sheriff for trespassing?”

  “You know, don’t you, that you’re not in any real trouble?” Gideon said.

  “No,” R.J. said, “we don’t know that at all.” He gave Sara a look of warning that she wasn’t to get too comfortable and she wasn’t to trust too much. This young man may seem nice, but he was the son of the dead man.

  “The island was alerted that something big might be happening,” Gideon said. “The office of billionaire Charles Dunkirk called a realtor in Arundel, and soon after that we heard that the illustrious R. J. Brompton was checking out every website about the island.”

  When Sara looked at R.J., he raised an eyebrow. She knew what he was thinking: good detective work.

  “Someone from the island called your office in New York,” Gideon continued, “and asked when the meeting on King’s Isle was. He gave the wrong date. ‘The eighteenth, right?’ Something like that. Your secretary said that Mr. Brompton wouldn’t be on King’s Isle until the twenty-second, so we knew when you were arriving.”

  “And your plan was to put us in jail?” Sara asked, eyes wide.

  “Not my plan,” Gideon said. “I had nothing to do with it. I have nothing to do with any of them, but that doesn’t keep me from knowing what’s going on.”

  R.J. was heating a skillet full of oil, about to put the fish in. “Why would they want to make me hate this place? If they went to all that trouble to find out I was coming, they must have known I was thinking of buying land here. Or is it that they like this place just as it is and don’t want to sell?”

  “They very much want to sell. We’re a dying society. The fishing is bad and all we have is a hope of tourism. But people never return to King’s Isle,” Gideon said. “There’s nothing here. There’re no beaches, no hot springs. The idea was to force you to stay here for a few days so you could look around and really get to know the place. They thought that if you spent time here, you’d come to like it.”

  “They scared us half to death,” Sara said. “That man Lassiter—”

  “He’s a real sleaze, isn’t he?” Gideon said. “Fenny’s best friend. The island wasn’t expecting four of you and that threw them off a bit. They were told it was just going to be the fabulously wealthy R. J. Brompton and his secretary. The truth is that the majority of the population had no idea what was going on. We were told to go spend two hours on the west side of the island and anybody who didn’t would be fined a thousand dollars.”

  “That’s a lot of money,” Sara said.

  “The day before you arrived, the underground telephone cable was cut.”

  “Did you go to the west side of the island?” R.J. asked.

  “I never do anything anybody tells me to do,” Gideon said and for the first time the humor was gone from his voice. “Tell me, Mr. Brompton, what were you going to do about King’s Isle?”

  “Tell Charley Dunkirk not to buy anything here.”

  Sara looked at him in astonishment. “You’d already made up your mind before …?”

  “Before we were arrested on a made-up charge? Yeah. I didn’t like the place the second we got off the ferry.”

  “Right,” Gideon said. “There are too many people here, too many houses involved. It’s easier to start from scratch.”

  “Smart kid,” R.J. said. “You want to work for me?”

  His remark was meant as a joke, but Gideon didn’t take it as such. “Yes,” he said seriously. “Anywhere, anytime. As you said, I’ll do anything to get off this island.”

  R.J. slid six perfectly fried fish onto a platter. “Why don’t you just leave? You look big enough.”

  “I’m underage and Nezbit would come after me.”

  “Nezbit? Your father?”

  “I have no proof of it, but I’m sure he’s not my biological father, and the law says he is so I have to stay. Besides …”

  “The twins,” Sara said softly. “Whose are they?”

  “I don’t know. The old man brought them home one day like he’d found puppies.”

  “Didn’t Social Services—?”

  “Here? Nobody on King’s Isle will go up against the Unholy Trio.”

  “Nezbit, Lassiter, and the judge,” R.J. said.

  “Right on.”

  R.J. smiled. “So what happens now?”

  “They’ll fine you over that dog Nezbit used to torture. Poor thing was probably glad to die.”

  “How is Phyllis Vancurren involved in all this?” R.J. asked.

  Gideon shrugged. “She was told to be very nice to R. J. Brompton. They wanted to put him— you—in the jail upstairs in her house so you couldn’t escape. She was told that Brompton was known to be ‘a great cocksman,’ so she was allowed to seduce him.”

  Sara gave R.J. an I-told-you-so look, but he ignored her as he put the platter of fish on the table.

  It was when young Gideon got up from the chair that Sara saw the scars on the back of his legs. His trouser leg had caught on the bottom of the chair and ridden up to expose a few inches of skin. When he saw Sara looking, he brushed his trousers down.

  “I have to get the twins,” Gideon said, then quickly went out th
e door.

  “Did you see?” Sara whispered to R.J.

  “Yeah, I saw. Don’t mistake his niceness. There’s enough hatred in that young man to start a war.”

  “Or to kill someone?”

  “Easily.”

  “But he stays here to take care of the little kids.”

  “Yeah, maybe. But if Nezbit was out of the way, he’d be free to leave the island and take the twins with him—if that’s what he wants to do. I’m not so sure.” He looked at the door when he heard voices.

  “I like him and I vote that we tell him about Nezbit being dead,” Sara said. “Gideon is the first person on this island that I’ve thought couldn’t possibly be a murderer. The rest of them …” She rubbed her arms as she thought of the people they’d met so far. “We need help and we need it quickly. We don’t have much time. I expect sirens to go off any second because they’ve found the body and they’re searching for us.”

  “I’m sure everyone on this island knows exactly where we are.”

  “That’s reassuring.” When the door opened and Gideon came in with the twins, Sara stopped talking. Both she and R.J. watched the young man with the children. The love he had for them was evident. He sat them at the table, with big pillows on the chairs so they were high enough, then carefully pulled every bite off the fish to make sure there were no bones.

  Sara watched the four of them at the table for about five minutes, then that’s all she could stand. All of them were nibbling on the remains of a few fish, but nothing else. To the right of the cookstove was a tall cabinet with a cotton curtain hanging across it. She could see a bag of flour peeping out of a corner and next to it was a can of baking powder. Getting up, she went to the cabinet and, without asking permission, she flung back the curtain. Everything she needed was there.

  “Peel a dozen of these,” she said to R.J. as she handed him a bag of store-bought apples. She was glad she wasn’t going to have to deal with the hindquarters of some recently slaughtered wild animal.

  “And, Gideon, take those children and a bar of soap outside. They don’t sit down to my table until they’re clean.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” he said, then grabbed a child under each arm and hurried to the door.

  “Heterosexual,” Sara said, staring at the closed door.

  “What?” R.J. whispered.

  “Gideon is heterosexual. The way you tell for sure is to say, ‘If you’ll go outside and set yourself on fire, I’ll cook.’ Straight men will say, ‘Where are the matches?’ Gay men— Hey! Are you listening to me?” R.J. had a glazed expression on his face that she’d never seen before.

  “You can cook?”

  “I had to if I wanted anything to eat. Are you just going to sit there or are you going to help me?”

  “Do with me what you will,” he said, and in the next second he was peeling apples. “Wow, you can cook,” he kept saying.

  She pointed a long knife at him. “When we get back to New York, if you ever expect me to cook anything for you, I’ll—”

  He grabbed her hand and quickly kissed the back of it. “Never. I promise. Never.” For a full minute, he was silent as he peeled apples, then he said, “What kind of things can you cook?”

  “If you fall in love with me I’ll have to get a new boss,” she said, mimicking his earlier phrase, then they looked at each other and laughed.

  Chapter Fourteen

  “SO HOW DID NEZBIT MAKE HIS MONEY?” R.J. asked, leaning back in his chair on two legs, a toothpick in his mouth. Sara thought all that was needed was for Charlie Daniels to be playing in the background.

  “That’s the great mystery of the island,” Gideon said, pushing away his plate. He had eaten some of everything Sara had made: fried apples, biscuits, scrambled eggs, bacon, and little pancakes with smiley faces on them. The twins had run outside ten minutes before, probably to get the clean off them. “How old are you?” Gideon asked Sara.

  “Too old for you,” R.J. said quickly. “So how do you think your dad—Sorry, Nezbit—makes his money?”

  “And who’s the TV shopper?” Sara nodded toward the house below them.

  “His wife,” Gideon said, shrugging.

  Sara looked at R.J. Gideon didn’t call either of them mother or father.

  “I don’t trust any of this,” R.J. said to Gideon and Sara could hear the caution in his voice. “I don’t think any of this is as innocent as you think it is. I think someone means to harm us.”

  Gideon looked from one to the other of them. “What’s happened?”

  Sara sat down at the table with them. “You need to tell him,” she said to R.J. “We have today and tomorrow and that’s it. If someone opens that— You know what I mean. We have to trust someone.”

  Gideon looked at R.J. “I can understand that you don’t trust me since I live here on this god-forsaken island. When I said I’d do anything to get off it, I was telling the truth. Fenny Nezbit has used me as a pack horse since I was six years old. I don’t know where I came from, but I suspect my ancestry has something to do with that house he lives in and with this cabin.”

  Getting up, he went to an old cabinet against a wall, pulled out a tattered sketch book, and tossed it on the table. “I drew those.”

  R.J. took the book and began flipping pages as Sara looked over his shoulder. There were beautiful drawings of buildings that seemed to rise out of the sea, others that were set back into cliffs so they looked to be part of the landscape. There were pages of drawings of seashells and clams, then the shapes were transformed into houses.

  “You have talent,” R.J. said.

  “Which proves I’m not Fenny Nezbit’s son.” Gideon sat back down at the table. “He made me quit high school when I turned sixteen. He said too much education ‘waren’t good for a man.’ I was going to run away then. I was going to stow away on that damned ferry boat and leave this island forever.”

  There was so much anger in his voice that Sara reached out and put her hand over his. “That’s when he brought the twins home, isn’t it?”

  “Yes. He knew me. He said he’d throw the kids out to sea if I left.”

  “What about their parents?” R.J. asked.

  Gideon shrugged. “I have no idea. Boat wreck, probably. I tried to find out, but couldn’t.”

  Sara felt her heart breaking at what the beautiful boy had gone through, but R.J. was sitting back in his seat and watching him. She got the feeling that he didn’t trust Gideon, but she wasn’t sure why. Did he think the boy was lying?

  “He’s dead,” R.J. said after a while.

  “What?”

  “John Fenwick Nezbit is dead. We found him shot through the head and lying in the bathtub in Phyllis Vancurren’s house.”

  Gideon’s handsome face turned pale.

  “Are you all right?” Sara asked.

  “It’s over,” he whispered. “The twins and I are free. We can leave and no one will come after us. Thank you.”

  “Wait a minute!” R.J. said. “We didn’t kill him.”

  “Then who did?” Gideon asked, then smiled a bit. “Right, you think I should know that.” He got up from the table and went to the front window to look out. “It could have been a hundred people, including Phyllis. Fenny used to pester her until she threatened him with death. Everyone knew she’d been the mistress of some rich man, so Fenny thought she was a whore and should put out for him.”

  “Who else?” R.J. asked.

  “The other two.”

  “Lassiter and the judge?”

  “My money’s on Lassiter,” Sara said. “He’s the slimiest man I’ve ever met. He made my skin crawl.”

  “Who came up with the idea of arresting us?” R.J. asked. “And who cut the cable?”

  “I don’t know,” Gideon said. “They don’t tell me anything. The twins like to listen at doors and they tell me what they hear. I take that and what I know of Fenny and put it all together.”

  “What do you think will happen if someone finds Nezbit
’s body?” Sara asked.

  “Where is it?”

  R.J. and Sara looked at each other, weighing whether or not they could trust this young man this much. R.J. made a decision. “It’s in the freezer in Phyllis’s basement.”

  “Good,” Gideon said. “She’ll never find it there. She never uses that freezer.”

  “You sound like you know her well.”

  Gideon gave Sara a sheepish grin. “All the young men on the island know lots about Phyllis Vancurren and her house. Did you see the blue roses?”

  “Yes,” Sara said, smiling, “but I’d already counted steps so we didn’t need them.”

  “Counted steps?”

  “Sara remembers things,” R.J. said before she could reply. “What will happen if they find the body before the hearing on Monday?”

  “It won’t be good,” Gideon said. “Judge Proctor and Nezbit are—”

  “Related,” R.J. said. “Yeah, we’ve been told.”

  “Who really, really wanted Nezbit dead?” Sara asked. “Besides us, that is?”

  “And me,” Gideon said. “My guess is it was whoever wanted the money but couldn’t find it.”

  “Ah,” R.J. said. “Now we get back to that. What money?”

  “Thirty-two years old,” Sara said softly. “Phyllis said Fenny Nezbit hasn’t worked since he was thirty-two years old.”

  “That implies that he worked before he was thirty-two,” Gideon said, then waved his hand. “I would imagine he found a shipwreck. Not a big ship, but something from Florida, rich, retired people, maybe. Boats wreck around here often.”

  “Very often?” R.J. asked.

  “More often than is probably normal,” Gideon said, but looked away as he said it.

  Sara knew what R.J. was thinking. Could it be possible that the islanders were supplementing their income with what they made by making ships wreck? How were they doing it?

  “What we need to do is find out where Nezbit was getting his money, who wanted it enough to kill him, and to do it in less than two days.”

  “ ’Bout sums it up,” Gideon said, his eyes laughing at the absurdity of that idea. “Two days to solve something that others on this island have been trying to find out for over ten years. Every three months Fenny leaves—or left, I guess—the island and returned with cash. He and his wife spent the money to the bone, then Nezbit went off to the mainland again and returned with more cash.”