Carolina Isle

  “Not a very good one,” Sara said.

  “Are you kidding? She was on Broadway in a play and she was really good.”

  “How do you know this about her?” Sara asked softly. She wouldn’t have thought that R.J. could shock her, but this did.

  He shrugged. “I typed her name on the Internet one day and it came up that she had a bit part in a Broadway play. I went to see it three nights in a row. She only had a walk-on part and three lines of dialogue, but I thought she was great. She was the heroine’s daughter’s best friend, and she wore one of those thin, white dresses that always makes you wonder what’s underneath.”

  Sara was so stunned she could hardly speak. When had he taken time out of his a-woman-every-night schedule to see her in a play? She started to say something, but he moved away to the far end of the ferry to look back at the mainland. He left Sara frowning in puzzlement over what he’d said.

  Finally, they reached the island. It was a perfect vision of yesteryear, and Sara knew that R.J. wouldn’t be disappointed. King’s Isle was rundown in a way that some people would think was romantic, but a businessman would know was anything but. Every house in view, every waterfront building, needed repair, and if they didn’t get it soon, they were going to fall down. R.J. was right, Sara thought. There’s no money here. And, worse, there was an air about the place that spoke of a failure to preserve what the place had once been. She didn’t think he was going to have much trouble buying the entire island.

  When she turned around, she saw that R.J. was staring at her, and she wondered what he was thinking. David and Ariel were standing by the rail, shoulder to shoulder, and they looked as though they were half-afraid of the island, half-hypnotized by it.

  When the ferry stopped, they got into the car and drove onto the island. Everyone was silent. Sara saw R.J. look in the rearview mirror several times. When she glanced back, Ariel and David were staring out the car windows with wide eyes. Sara was sitting straight up, looking ahead.

  There were no people around. No one at all. R.J. drove slowly down the street, looking at the run-down buildings. There was absolutely no one in sight.

  “Where are all the people?” Sara whispered.

  “Maybe it’s an island holiday,” David said. “St. Somebody’s birthday or something and they’re having a picnic.”

  No one said anything to that. Sara glanced at R.J. and thought that even he looked a bit unsettled. What could bother him?

  “I thought I’d drive around the island, have a good look at it, then we could go back,” R.J. said. “When’s the next ferry run?” He looked in the rearview mirror at Ariel, but Sara knew that she hadn’t looked at the schedule. But then, neither had Sara. Talking to R.J. as a person and not being ordered about by him had so unsettled her that she hadn’t thought of things that usually would be second nature to her.

  R.J. drove past two residential streets before coming to what was obviously the heart of the town, then he took a right and drove down the main street. It was deserted, completely empty of people. There were no traffic lights and no stop signs. Leaning forward, R.J. looked at the buildings.

  “What do you think?” Sara asked quietly.

  “This town is dead,” he said. “I think they’d welcome some money.”

  “Where are the people?” Ariel asked from the back.

  No one had a reply.

  R.J. glanced at the car clock. It was 1:30. “How soon do you think we can leave this place and get back to the mainland? Didn’t anyone see when the next ferry ran?”

  “I don’t like this place,” Sara whispered.

  R.J. took a left at the end of the street and entered a tree-lined residential area. There was one huge, old Victorian house after another. Each one needed painting and a lot of repairs. Some had windows with paper taped over them. Fallen trees had been left where they hit the ground.

  On the corner was an especially big house. It was brick, with dark green shutters that had been recently painted. There was a faded sign in the window: ROOMS TO LET.

  “Shall we spend the night?” R.J. asked, trying to dispel the gloom in the car.

  Silence was his answer. So much for humor, Sara thought. The hairs on her forearms were standing upright.

  All of them were looking at the houses so hard that no one was watching the road carefully. Sara yelled, “Look out!” and R.J. swerved to miss the dog that was lying in the middle of the road. He ran the car up onto the sidewalk and winced when he heard it scrape the bottom on the flaking concrete curb.

  Sara jumped out of the car before he’d turned the engine off and ran toward the dog. R.J. followed her, with Ariel and David on his heels. Sara was crouched down by the dog when they got there.

  “It’s been dead a while,” she said, looking up at R.J.

  “And wasn’t well cared for while it was alive,” David said in disgust. “The poor thing looks as though it was starved to death.”

  Ariel said nothing. Too frightened to move, she stood close to David, her eyes downcast.

  “Yeah,” R.J. said, looking about the place. The silence in the town was eerie. All they heard were birds chirping. No cars, trucks, no planes, not even any boats.

  “Do you think anyone lives in these houses?” Sara whispered into the silence.

  “Not people I’d want to know if they’d treat a dog like this,” David said.

  “Maybe it was old and—” R.J. began.

  David cut him off. “Look at it! That dog isn’t more than a year old, if that. I don’t think it’s even fully grown, but it’s been so mistreated that—”

  Ariel took David’s hand in hers and he calmed down.

  “I think we should go,” Sara said. “This place gives me the creeps.”

  “How about if we take some photos, then leave?” R.J. said.

  “Yes,” Ariel whispered, still holding David’s hand. She looked as though she was standing in the middle of a haunted house.

  Sara, seeming to forget her disguise, silently held out her hand to R.J. for the keys, then went to the car and got his camera out of the trunk. She was soon clicking away as fast as a digital camera could go, making a circle of the street. “Done,” she said. “So let’s go find out when the next ferry runs to take us out of here.”

  Everyone nodded in agreement.

  But David held back. “We can’t leave the dog where it is. We have to at least move it out of the road.” He started to pick it up by himself, but R.J. took one end of it and they set it on the far sidewalk, out of the way.

  “I think I should tell someone about the dog,” David said as he started toward the nearest house.

  “I think we should get the girls out of here,” R.J. said loudly.

  For a moment David seemed torn between his sense of chivalry and his love of animals. But then he looked at Ariel’s white face, and she won.

  No one said anything as they got back into the car.

  R.J. drove slowly back through the town, pausing now and then so Sara could snap photos out of the window. “I’ll have a lot to show Charley,” he said, forcing cheerfulness into his voice, but no one answered him.

  He went down two more residential streets, but they still saw no people. The houses were big and showed that King’s Isle had once been rich, but was now faded and poor. “I’ll report to Charley that I think he can buy the entire place for about ten dollars,” R.J. said to Sara.

  “Do you think he should buy this place?” she whispered back.

  R.J. drove down the main street again and they looked at the shops. Most of them were empty.

  “There’s fresh produce in that store,” Sara said, almost with excitement in her voice. “There are people here.”

  There was what looked to be a café and a hardware store. But since there were no people, they couldn’t tell what was open and what wasn’t. R.J. started to turn back to the ferry, but at the end of the street was a big building. “I think I saw somebody,” he said and kept going straight.

&nb
sp; When he didn’t make the turn, David said, “You missed the road!”

  But Sara saw the big building at the end of the street and knew what was in R.J.’s mind. They’d come there for a purpose and R.J. meant to do his job. Maybe the big building could be turned into the clubhouse for a golf course, she thought. When he glanced at Sara and nodded toward the building, she knew they were in agreement.

  It was a courthouse and, unlike the other buildings in town, it was in excellent repair. In fact, it was beautiful. It was two stories and looked much earlier than the Victorian houses in town. “Charley will like this,” R.J. said.

  “I like it,” Sara said, then they both got out. Ariel and David stayed in the car.

  Sara took photos of the courthouse and the street leading up to it, while R.J. walked around and looked at the building. “Yeah,” he said, “Charley could make something out of this town. He could repair the houses, bring in some businesses, and make it into the resort his wife wants.”

  R.J. was smiling at the thought of telling Charley the good news when all hell broke loose. Out of nowhere came two police cars, one from the right and one from the left. The cars slammed on the brakes, just missing the sides of the rented Jag, and out jumped four armed policemen. Both Sara and R.J. stood where they were, too stunned to move. All four of the men surrounded R.J., as though they thought he was going to try to run for it.

  “Are you the driver of this vehicle?” asked a tall, broad-shouldered man, his face serious.

  “Yes, I am,” R.J. said, smiling, trying to ingratiate himself to them.

  What do they want? Sara thought. A donation?

  To her horror, the policeman said, “Read him his rights,” and in the next second R.J. was being handcuffed while someone Mirandized him.

  Sara came out of her stupor. “What do you think you’re doing?” she said loudly as she tried to move into the middle of the men.

  “Get back!” R.J. said, but Sara didn’t obey. When one of the cops pushed her aside, R.J. started to struggle and one of the policemen knocked him to the ground. He groaned when his knee hit the pavement. His lip was bleeding and he couldn’t wipe the blood away because his hands were cuffed behind him. When a second cop pulled him upright, R.J.’s shoulder was wrenched half out of its socket.

  “What’s he charged with?” Sara asked, again trying to put herself between the cops and R.J.

  “He killed John Nezbit’s dog. Malicious homicide.”

  “What?!” Sara and R.J. shouted in unison.

  A cop grabbed R.J.’s arm and started pulling him toward the courthouse door.

  “You can’t do this!” Sara shouted. “That dog was dead when we saw it.”

  “That’s not what Mr. Nezbit says. He says he saw you swerve onto the sidewalk just so you could hit his dog.”

  “Sir!” David said to the policeman, and Sara was glad to see him. Even though R.J. ran a big corporation, he had a look about him of a street fighter. David was clean-cut personified. If anyone would be listened to, he would be. “Mr. Brompton saw the dog lying in the street and swerved onto the sidewalk to miss it. The dog was already dead—and had been for a long time. We moved it to the side of the street.”

  “That’s not what Mr. Nezbit said,” the policeman shot back, his fingers digging into R.J.’s arm. “He said you hit the dog so hard that your car went one way and the dog went the other. He said the four of you got out and laughed about it.”

  This was so absurd that all three of them— Ariel was still in the car—were stunned into momentary silence.

  “That’s not true,” Sara gasped.

  “Tell it to the judge,” the policeman said, then pulled R.J. toward the courthouse.

  “Sara, call my lawyer,” R.J. shouted over his shoulder as they pulled him toward the door.

  Relieved that the short-lived masquerade was over, Sara pulled off the wig and ran to the car to get her cellphone.

  “At least this got you to stop lying to me,” R.J. called as he disappeared into the courthouse. He was trying to inject some humor into the horrible situation.

  Chapter Six

  NO SIGNAL.

  Sara tossed the useless cellphone into the car and looked at David. Ariel was cringing in the backseat, saying nothing.

  David turned to Sara and said, “Get in the car with Ariel and go back to the ferry. If the ferry isn’t there, hire a boat. If you have to swim back to the mainland, do so, but I want the two of you off this island immediately.”

  Sara took a breath. “I’m sure that what you’re saying would have sounded good in a 1950s Western, but this is the twenty-first century. You and Ariel go back. I’m going to get R.J. out of there.” She started toward the courthouse, but David grabbed her arm.

  “Where do you think you’re going?”

  “To find a telephone,” she said, shaking off his grasp. “This seems to be the only building that has people in it, so I’m going in there to use their telephone.”

  “I’m sure this is all a mistake,” David said. “Someone else must have seen us with that dog. In all those huge houses, there must have been someone who saw us.”

  Sara started to say something as she put her hand on the big brass door handle, but Ariel stopped her.

  “Don’t leave me alone,” Ariel whispered. Her face was white with terror.

  David put his arm around her shoulders. “Let me do the talking,” he said to Sara as he opened the courthouse door. When she started to protest, he said, “This isn’t about women’s rights, this is just logic. Sara, you sound like a Yankee, and, Ariel, you’re scared out of your mind, so who knows what you’d say? By default, that leaves me.”

  “I hope they don’t throw me in jail because of my accent,” Sara muttered. She thought she was being sarcastic, saying something that couldn’t possibly happen.

  But, in the end, that’s just what did happen. The chief of the King’s Isle police department put all four of them in jail. There were two cells that shared a wall of iron bars. Ariel and Sara were in one, David and R.J. in the other.

  As soon as he saw them, R.J. looked at Sara and said, “What the hell have you done?!” It was a whisper that was a shout.

  David, his hands manacled behind him, gave Sara a look over his shoulder that was intended to singe her hair.

  Ariel and she weren’t handcuffed and Sara knew that was because of Ariel’s gracious manners. Even when she was being arrested, Ariel said “please” and “thank you” and never raised her voice.

  When the policeman had removed David’s handcuffs, then shut the doors on them, Ariel sat on the end of the bed, her back rigid, and looked straight ahead. She was in such a state of trauma that Sara didn’t think she was capable of speech.

  R.J. walked to the shared wall of bars and glared at Sara. “What did you do?”

  She sat down on the opposite end of the bed from Ariel and tried to smile. “Did we ever fool you with our disguise?”

  “Not for a second,” R.J. said in dismissal. “I want to know why all of you are in here. Did you call my lawyer?”

  “No signal,” Sara said, looking down at her hands. She was trying to think how long it would be before R.J. was missed. No one would miss her until her rent was due, but R.J. was a different matter. How many of his adoring secretaries knew where he was going this weekend? The answer was that only she knew R.J.’s schedule.

  “Sara,” R.J. said quietly. “I’m waiting.”

  Before she could come up with a reply, David said, “She told the chief of police that you were a very important man and that you’d bring so many lawyers into this two-bit town that World War Two would look like a picnic.”

  “I see,” R.J. said and when she glanced up at him she saw a twinkle in his eye. She knew he was thinking that she’d said exactly what he would have said if they’d given him time to talk. He put on a fake frown to cover his smile, then turned to David. “Not what she should have said, right?”

  “No.” David’s face was stern, a
nd he kept looking at Ariel, who seemed to be in a state of near catatonia.

  Before R.J. could say anything else, the door that led into the cell opened and in came a man who had the air of a lawyer. Lawyers came and went in R.J.’s office so often that Sara knew she could have picked them out naked (them naked, that is, not her). They had a certain walk and an arrogance that not even doctors could match.

  The man was wearing a cheap, dark green summer suit. He was tall and thin, no lips at all, small eyes and a pointed nose, and he was chewing gum. In spite of the fact that he looked like a rat, he had a big smile and an attitude that said all of life was a laugh.

  “Hi!” he said, as though the four people in the two cells were his long-long friends. “I heard you were in a predicament so I came right over to see if I could help. Now, which one of you is Sara?” As he said this he looked from her to Ariel, then back again. He stopped at Sara, as though he guessed she was the one with the big mouth.

  “You have to apologize,” he said, and when she nodded, he looked at R.J. “You the dog killer?”

  R.J.’s face turned red and Sara could see that it was all he could do to keep from telling the man off.

  David stepped between the two men—behind the bars, that is. “I am David Allenton Tredwell,” he said. “Of Arundel.”

  “Arundel, huh?” the man said. “Tea party people.”

  Sara looked at R.J. in question and he shrugged. What tea party? they wanted to know. Sara got up and moved closer to the bars.

  David smiled. “Yes, sir, I am,” he said proudly. “One of my ancestors—”

  Rudely, the man turned away. “We’re still loyal to the king around here and we drink tea, not coffee.”

  Sara started to laugh, but then she saw the look on the man’s face. He was serious.

  “I’m Lawrence Lassiter,” he said, “and I’m an attorney. Unfortunately, there’s only one attorney in town and I happen to be defending Mr. Nezbit. He’s the man whose dog you killed.”