“Jonathan, I’m not some weak little spineless creature. I can be strong too.”
“I know you can, honey,” he said, “but Blair can be a barracuda.”
“She’s real upset, you know,” Morgan said. “She tore up the library out of pure rage. I promised to help her put it back together tonight.”
“As long as you’re together,” he said. “And don’t stay at Hanover House. I don’t trust anybody there anymore.”
“I know,” she said. “I won’t.”
They heard footsteps on the building floor, then Cade came to the door and peered in like a teacher checking on one of his students. “J.J., what’re you doing?”
J.J. jumped and pulled off his headphones. “Just listening to the news, Chief,” he said. “I thought maybe it would give us a clue.”
Cade looked disgusted. “You need a clue all right, but you’re not going to get it from the news. Now pull off those headphones and get back to work.”
He shot Morgan an apologetic look. “Sorry, Morgan, but I’m going to have to ask you to leave now. Your visitation time is over.”
“It’s not like anybody’s keeping track,” Jonathan said. “You’re the boss around here last time I looked.”
“We have rules,” Cade said, “and I abide by them, just like I expect you to.”
“I never expected to abide from this side of the bars,” Jonathan muttered. He got up and bent over and gave Morgan a kiss.
Cade waited respectfully until she let him go, then he led Jonathan back to the jail cell.
Morgan didn’t wait to say good-bye to Cade or anyone else in the station. She just headed out to her car, determined to find Blair so they could clean up the library, then head over to Hanover House to search their parents’ things.
C H A P T E R
26
Morgan was full of plans and purpose by the time she found Blair at the library. They hadn’t been there since the other night when Blair had torn the place up.
Blair stood in the middle of the room, surveying the damage. She had a blank look on her face as she stood in profile, the pale, pretty side of her face closest to Morgan.
“You okay?” Morgan asked.
“Yeah,” Blair said absently. “Just wondering whatever possessed me to do this.”
“I told you I’d help you clean it up. But I want you to do something else first.”
Blair turned around. “What?”
“I want you to go with me to the house. I want to look through Mama and Pop’s things for clues.”
Blair frowned. “But you know the police have already done that. Wouldn’t they have found something if there was something to find?”
“Maybe,” Morgan said, picking up a book and smoothing out the pages with her hand. “Maybe not. There may be something that would ring a bell for us but not for them. Besides, Cade’s shorthanded for the investigation. They might not have done a thorough job.” She looked around at the floor, wondering where to start. Blair didn’t seem to know, either. “I was thinking that maybe we could go over there now, then clean this up when we get back.”
“I guess we could,” Blair said. “Hanover House is ours now. I guess we have to decide what to do. Maybe we should just give everybody notice and close the place down.”
“No,” Morgan said. “Mama and Pop fought too hard to keep it open.”
“Well, we can’t just keep it going to spite the city council. It’s more than you can handle by yourself.”
“But where will they go? No one on the island would take Gus, what with all these rumors. Rick isn’t ready to leave yet. He’s still not over the death of his wife and daughter. And Mrs. Hern is just in the beginning stages of Alzheimer’s. She relied so on Mama.”
“Still,” Blair said, “I have a full-time job. I can’t help with it.”
“Yeah,” Morgan said. “You’ve got your hands full with this mess.”
Blair looked helplessly around her again. “Do you have any idea how heavy these bookshelves are?”
“I think I’m going to find out.”
Blair stepped over some books. “Let’s just go. It’ll still be here when we get back.”
The home in which Blair had spent most of her childhood years looked different as she pulled into the driveway. A wreath hung on the mailbox, offering grim notice of their bereavement. She looked up at the front door and saw another, larger wreath hung on the door in the place reserved for her mother’s handmade Christmas wreath.
“We’re going to need to write some thank-you notes,” Morgan said softly. “The funeral director said they were bringing all the flowers here.”
“Why didn’t you tell him we don’t want them? He should have thrown them away.”
“That would have been rude,” Morgan said. “Besides, some people sent pots of flowers that I want to plant in the yard. Kind of a memorial garden for them.”
Blair’s gaze drifted to the yellow Victorian house. White rocking chairs and a swing adorned the front porch. Full-bodied ferns spilled over hanging baskets at intervals along the eaves, and green azalea bushes lined the front lawn, a breathtaking addition to the groomed yard when they were in bloom each spring. Petunias of pink, white, and yellow filled the beds in front of the azaleas.
That was their memorial garden, she thought. Her mother’s love shone in every blossom, in every carefully chosen color, in every placement, and her father’s care gave them a healthy, hydrated look. He had watered them every morning after returning from Crickets. Sometimes he pulled up a lawn chair and sat down and prayed right out loud, as if God was in a chair next to him as he fed the garden.
“There shouldn’t be flowers in bloom,” Blair whispered under her breath. “When people you love die, it seems like every flower in the world ought to just die with them.”
“It’s nice that they don’t,” Morgan said.
Blair sat there a moment, staring up at the house. Fresh new anger surged through her.
Someone inside could be responsible for their deaths, or someone who had once passed through. Maybe the city council members’ concerns had been prophetic. And there she’d been, spouting off at that microphone, defending the house and its tenants while her parents bled to death.
Morgan got out of the car. Blair followed her up to the front porch steps, climbed them one at a time. Morgan opened the front door. The parlor was empty. It was dark except for the Tiffany lamp in each corner, and the piano light that illuminated the sheet music for “It Is Well with My Soul.”
So many times, her father had told the story of the man who had written that song. His four children had drowned in a storm at sea, all of them, and his wife sent a telegram home to him. “Saved alone,” it said. Later, the man had sailed to that very spot where his children had lost their lives and, standing on the deck of the ship, had penned the song.
Blair didn’t know where he got his peace or how he had managed to speak, let alone sing, those words. Her chest tightened in resentment at his misguided faith.
It was not well with her soul, and it never would be.
Someone had brought the mail in and left it in a stack on the coffee table. Condolence cards and notes had already begun coming, and she wondered if people really expected them to read all of them and answer.
Almost reverent in her silence, Morgan went into the kitchen. Blair went with her. Through the back window to the screened porch, Blair saw Mrs. Hern, the old woman who had moved there after serving three years in prison for embezzlement. She sat slumped in front of an easel propped at the corner of the porch, her back to them.
Blair didn’t want to see anyone, for the thought of making small talk seemed worse to her than the empty silence of the house. But Morgan opened the door and stepped out. Mrs. Hern turned around, her unbound gray hair swinging around her shoulders and sticking to her wet face. She had been crying for hours, it was clear. Her nose was so red and her eyes so swollen that Blair had to look away.
“Oh, Mrs. Hern.?
?? Morgan took the old woman into her arms.
The woman’s frail body shook as she clung to Morgan. “I know she was your mama and all,” she wept, “but I sure loved her.”
“I know,” Morgan whispered. “I know.”
Blair looked away from the two clutched together, trying not to get pulled into that maelstrom of despair again. Her grief had a different manifestation that she didn’t quite understand. It came up in rage, like a cracking, furious storm, rather than a soft drizzle. She had to fight it.
She stepped over to the painting, trying to get her mind off of Mrs. Hern’s grief.
There were clouds everywhere, and in the center of the canvas was an unfinished white horse and someone riding it.
When Morgan finally let Mrs. Hern go, the woman turned her tormented face to Blair. “You’re not going to close the house down, are you?” she asked, taking Blair’s hand.
Blair didn’t pull away. “We don’t know, Mrs. Hern.”
“Please, you can’t,” she said. “I don’t know what I’ll do. There’s no place else I can stay. They’ll put me in a nursing home, only I’m not that far gone yet. My memory goes sometimes, but I think the medication’s helping. I don’t know how much longer they’ll let me work at Goodfellow’s because I’ve been making too many mistakes lately. Thelma told me she wouldn’t throw me out if I couldn’t pay, that I could help around here to earn my keep.”
“I know,” Morgan said. “She told me all that. You don’t have to worry. We’re not going to run you off. When we make a decision, we’ll make sure you’re taken care of.”
Blair wished Morgan wouldn’t make such promises. Hoping to change the subject, she looked back into the house. “Where is everybody?”
“Gus is up in his room playing his guitar,” Mrs. Hern said, “and I think Rick is across the street at the beach. He likes to go over there by himself and think. Lana and Harry both left. They checked out after the funeral when the police told them they could leave.”
“The police questioned them?” Blair asked.
“Oh, yes,” Mrs. Hern said. “They questioned all of us here.”
“Then they’ve been through Mama and Pop’s things?”
“Seems like they did,” she said. “They went upstairs while we were being questioned in the front room.” She let Blair go and took Morgan’s hand. “I know you don’t feel like doing what you usually do around here,” she said, “but I wanted you to know that I learned a lot from Thelma. She taught me how to cook some of her best recipes, and I’d been helping her clean up. I can take care of the place if you want until you feel like coming back. I know with Jonathan in jail and all, you’ve got a lot on your plate.”
The woman hadn’t even remembered to brush her hair this morning, Blair thought. How could she take care of the house?
“Feels like I ought to do something, the way Thelma and Wayne took care of me.” Mrs. Hern burst into tears again and turned back to her painting.
Morgan stroked the old woman’s hair. Blair almost envied her sister. This was the strongest she had seen her since they had learned of the murders. Leave it to Morgan to find strength in reaching out to others.
“I was just painting that verse in Thessalonians,” Mrs. Hern said. “The one about the Lord coming back from heaven for us.”
“First Thessalonians 4:16,” Morgan said softly. “Pop’s favorite verse: ‘For the Lord himself will come down from heaven, with a loud command, with the voice of the archangel and with the trumpet call of God, and the dead in Christ will rise first. After that, we who are still alive and are left will be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air. And so we will be with the Lord forever.’ “
Blair let those words float like a balloon in her mind, bouncing gently off the sides, never quite settling in. She had heard her parents quote it many times. She could probably have quoted it herself.
It made sense that Mrs. Hern would want to be reminded of it now. It did offer comfort. If it was true, then there would be a reunion someday. She wished she could believe it.
She didn’t want to think about the crude, amateur painting anymore or the words it represented, so she went back into the house and started up the staircase.
She heard the sound of a guitar playing in one of the rooms, and saw that Gus’s door was open. She stood frozen on the stairs, listening, thinking, trying to sort through the things she knew about the man—the 20/20 report, the mayor’s accusations, Jonathan’s concerns . . .
She heard Morgan’s footsteps behind her. When she reached the second floor, she looked inside and saw the big black man sitting on his bed with his red bandana tied around his head. He stopped playing the moment he saw her.
“Blair,” he said in his throaty Jamaican accent. “Ah, Morgan.” He set down the guitar and came to hug them. Blair was stiff, and she could see that Morgan was cooler with him than she was with Mrs. Hern.
“I’m so sorry,” he said in that deep bass. “Who would kill those kind people?”
“We don’t know,” Blair whispered.
“I know what you be thinking,” he said. “I know you are suspicious right now, with all this talk about me. But I tell you, I would never hurt Thelma and Wayne.”
Neither of them said a word, and Blair tried to process his statement in her mind. Would a guilty person broach the subject head on or avoid it completely?
He went back to his guitar. “I was just playing ‘How Great Thou Art.’ Wayne taught me. I played it in the church two weeks ago. You remember that, Morgan?”
She nodded and looked at her feet.
“ ‘Praise the Lord,’ Wayne always be saying. So I’m tryin’. Wish I’d known about it in the prison. Instead o’ cursin’, I coulda been prayin’. You know how I came to be here, don’t you, Miss Blair?”
Blair shook her head. “No, Gus. Tell me.”
He strummed a few chords. “I just got my release from the prison, and I had no place to go, mon, absolutely no place. Rescue mission took me in and let me sleep there at night. And Wayne and Thelma would come there and do Bible studies with us. After the rescue mission told me I’d been there too long, I had to move on and make room for somebody else, Wayne let me come to stay here and got me a job. Best mon who ever lived.”
Blair let her eyes wander around the room while he spoke. It was neat, and he had only a few personal items on the dresser. Some pocket change, the keys to the house and his truck, his billfold.
“The police interviewed me, and let me go. I was at work all that day. I know Jonathan didn’t do it, either, Miss Morgan. He wouldn’t do that to them.”
“No, he wouldn’t.”
Blair only stared at him, running every expression on his face through her mental lie detector. Did his body language suggest he was telling the truth? Was he hiding something?
She couldn’t say for sure.
They left him alone in his room, and Morgan crossed the hall to her parents’ doorway. The room was just as they had left it. Everything was neat and in its place, freshly dusted and fluffed. The bedroom was the most lived-in room of the house, and the least elaborate. Her mother’s things graced the tables and stand, and family pictures hung in collections on the walls.
Blair went in, but Morgan froze in the doorway. “I can’t do this,” she said. “I can’t go in there and rifle through their things. I’m not ready for this yet.”
“Neither am I,” Blair said. “But I haven’t been ready for much of what’s happened in the last few days.”
“Maybe Jonathan’s right. Maybe we shouldn’t have come.”
“We’re here,” Blair said. “Let’s just get what we need and take it back to my house.”
Morgan took a tentative step into the room. “I feel like I’m invading their privacy.”
“We are. But they’re not in a position to care.” The words came out on a cruel note. She didn’t know where that flip tone came from.
She bent down and looked under the bed.
She pulled out the boxes in which her parents archived their most important papers. “Let’s take these,” she said.
“Okay,” Morgan said. “And we can take the file cabinet downstairs, if the police haven’t already taken it for evidence.”
“Do you know where the key to the file cabinet is?”
“She kept it in her jewelry box,” Morgan said. She crossed the room slowly, anguish on her face, and went into the closet where her mother’s modest jewelry box lay. She opened it, found the key.
“Okay,” Blair said, “help me carry the boxes down.”
“We could get Gus to help,” Morgan said.
“Leave the tenants out of this. It’s just us.”
Blair grabbed one box, and Morgan took the other.
When they had loaded the car, Blair saw Rick—the other tenant—sitting in the sand across the street, watching the ocean. “There’s Rick,” she said as a warm breeze picked up and whispered through the trees, blowing her hair against her mouth. She pushed it back. Morgan came up beside her. Her long curls bounced in the breeze.
“He does that a lot,” she said. “Just sits out there staring out at the waves. Mama said it’s how he grieves.”
Blair had heard the story from her mother about how he had lost his wife and daughter in a drunk-driving accident and how he had come here seeking refuge while he tried to endure the pain.
“I’m going to run back in and get a few things together to bring back to your house,” Morgan said. “I’ll be right back.”
Blair waited at the car, watching Rick as the waves lapped up close to his feet. He was a suspect too, as far as she was concerned. She needed to talk to him, read his face. She needed to see if he grieved over her parents.
She crossed the street, and her feet rocked across the sand as she walked toward where he sat. The waves hit hard against the shore. A storm was probably blowing in, she thought. It was appropriate—more so than the bright sunshine that mocked her pain. She wanted thunder and lightning, howling wind, dark skies.