Not Quite Clear (A Lowcountry Mystery) Read online

  As though on cue, the smell hits me. I retch, smashing my forearm against my nose to try to block it, but it’s impossible. Amelia looks unfazed, except for the way she’s staring at me like I’ve gone mental. I can’t concentrate on anything but not throwing up from the stench of rotting flesh, oozing wounds, and maybe a few more things so gross I can’t even imagine them.

  Then, I see the men—the pirates. Instead of swinging on the business end of the nooses down below they’re scaling the seawall, climbing over onto the pristine Charleston sidewalks and striding with purpose toward Anne’s ghost. Toward us.

  Their presence backs me up a few steps. They’re all dead, must be dead, but I’ve never been in the presence of this many ghosts at one time. It’s unnerving, being outnumbered. Not knowing why they’re here or what they want.

  One look at Anne, who has moved as close to Amelia as she can get and adopted a protective stance, makes me feel better. We can trust her. She saved our lives once, and if she’s back, it must mean she’s going to help us again. We certainly need it.

  The pirates stop in unison, as though controlled by a single source. Anne walks toward them, leaving my cousin and me to watch. Except Amelia still can’t see anything but Anne Bonny.

  “What’s she doing?” Millie whispers, gaze fixed on our fiery ancestor.

  “She’s talking to a bunch of pirates that just un-hung themselves and crawled over the seawall,” I reply.

  “They’re here right now?” She peers through the rain, but no amount of squinting can help her see through the veil between worlds the way I can. Amelia makes a frustrated noise at my affirmative nod. “What are they doing?”

  “It looks like she’s talking to them, but I can’t hear anything.” I close my eyes, crawl along the link toward the mental door to Anne’s world, nudge it open. I slam it shut just as fast, scared to open myself up without following all Daria’s rules first. Scared I’ll mess it up.

  Especially with the way Mama Lottie always feels so close by.

  The conversation between the pirates and Anne ends before my lack of courage becomes an issue, and she returns to us with three of the pirates in tow. The smell is overpowering with them so close, and my stomach jerks like it’s trying to run away once I get a good look at her cohorts. My new allies, perhaps, haven’t exactly survived the afterlife in one piece. Pieces of skin peel away in strips, revealing bleached white bone in spots on their legs and arms, on one of their cheeks. Most of them are missing eyeballs and chunks of hair, bloody and torn scalps bared to the rain. It has to be the way they died, left to the elements and wildlife, but why on earth they would want to appear that way now baffles me.

  They can’t smell themselves, obviously, and maybe mirrors aren’t a thing where they’re hanging out these days. Or they could just enjoy looking creepy as hell.

  “What? What are they doing here?”

  Anne raises a finger to point, and I have to stop myself from reaching out to snap it in half. Calm down, Gracie. It’s not her fault you’re a substandard ghost communicator at best.

  She points to the pirates, then to me and Amelia. Again. Again.

  I put up a hand, losing patience faster than I’m about to lose my lunch. It’s raining. We haven’t had dinner. I’m standing in the rain staring at rotting corpses, completely missing the point on how they’re going to make better any of the myriad problems in my life.

  “She’s saying we’re going to do something together,” Amelia guesses. “I assume she’s pointing between the dead pirates and us?’

  I nod. “Yes. But I don’t know what she wants us to do together.”

  Anne hears me even if her words would fall on deaf ears, and she nudges one of the rotting pirates forward. She points to me, to him, to me, then gives him a jerk of the chin toward town. He walks off; she gives me the same look.

  “You want me to follow him?” Resistance rises, hot and fast. “I’m not leaving Amelia out here alone.”

  This time, the exasperation in her expression is easy enough to interpret. She motions to the two remaining men, then pushes them toward Amelia, then points to herself.

  “You’re going to take care of her? For how long?” The ghost shrugs, then pinches two fingers together. “Not long. It had better not be.”

  “Go, Grace. I’ll stay with Anne, or go wherever she goes, and we’ll meet back here when we’re done. We both have phones and wallets. Nothing is going to happen.”

  “If anything happens to her…” I trail off, and Anne gives me an uncharacteristic grin. She and I both know there’s not a damn thing I can do to her, but our ghost has no interest in hurting my cousin.

  “Fine,” I grumble. “I don’t suppose any of you are hiding an umbrella?”

  I get no response and heave a sigh, wondering if Anne gets her kicks watching me get drenched. The last time she led me on a wild goose chase—which, to her credit, didn’t turn out to be that wild—it took me exactly where she needed me to go. All well and good, and I’m happy to have her back if it means direction in this hopeless plight, but damn. Why does she have to send me slogging around in another storm?

  The pirate I’m supposed to follow has paused by one of the restored black cannons. He watches me as I approach, and I take a moment to study him. With his sloughed skin, the sores pockmarking the pieces that are left, his missing eyes and lips, it’s hard to say what he might have looked like in life. His hair is fair, his body toned and lithe, but beyond that, I couldn’t pick him out of a lineup if he had been my twin brother.

  “Where we goin’, Handsome?”

  He waggles his eyebrows, which are startlingly mostly intact. It’s suggestive in a gross and hilarious manner, a combination that earns a laugh. It seems to disappoint him.

  “Nothing against you, I promise. It’s just that I have a boyfriend.”

  That seems to satisfy him, and he makes a come-along motion, setting off across the soggy grass. Unlike my feet, which sink half an inch with every step, the mystery pirate floats just above the ground. He stops every twenty yards or so to check on my progress, then waits patiently for me to catch up. We’re both thrilled to trade the park for the sidewalk a few minutes later. As far as I can tell, at least.

  The streets are empty, streetlights and the glows from the living rooms of people who are nice and dry and sane tumbling out into our paths. The ghost skirts the yellow pools, choosing the shadows of trees, when they’re there, or to skulk out of sight. It’s interesting that he seems concerned that people might see him.

  There is still so much about this gig that I don’t understand. He and the others might have been wandering the sea, or the point, or maybe they just showed up because Anne put out a call to her fellow pirates that begged for help and haven’t been this close to the living for a long, long time. Centuries, even.

  He does seem a little stunned by the little things we pass along the way—cars, electricity, dogs barking from behind wooden fences—but if it’s new to him he does an excellent job blocking it out in favor of our mission. Which is still a mystery to me.

  The paths are familiar. Worn, even. We slink past churches and graveyards, historical monument after historical monument, big stately houses, turning corners and skirting overgrown shrubbery for seven or eight blocks. The rain doesn’t slack off, not for an instant, and my hair drips into my eyes so that when he finally stops outside a wrought iron gate, I almost run into him. Or through him, rather.

  My hands go out instinctively and sink into his shoulder. The bones freeze all the way to my wrists no matter how fast I jerk away, and I stick them in my armpits in an attempt to thaw them out. My teeth chatter. “What are we doing here? Who lives here?”

  He points to the house. Looks at me with an expectation of…something.

  “Do you want me to go in?” I look down, surveying the damage. “I doubt anyone is going to take me seriously, unless I’m auditioning for the part of Drowned Rat in a play no one’s ever going to see.”

 
; He doesn’t seem to get the joke, just cocks his head and returns his gaze to the house. I get out my phone, trying to shield it from the rain while I open up my notepad and type in the address. Then I hold the device up so he can see it. Not that he’ll have any idea what it is; hell, there’s no way to know for sure whether he knows how to read. Anne was an exception; the majority of pirates didn’t fall from grace and well-to-do families.

  “I wrote down the address so I can figure out who lives here and come back,” I explain, just in case. “Okay?”

  The ghost looks frustrated, his hands balling into fists. The next thing I know he’s disappeared through the white picket fence and stomped up to the front porch, where he settles like a sentinel next to the front door.

  “Hey,” I hiss, trying not to draw the attention of whoever lives here. Or the local cops, who are bound to get sick of my antics sooner or later. “Let’s go.”

  The dead pirate is stubborn, which shouldn’t surprise me since he’s a friend of Anne Bonny’s, but there’s no way I’m knocking on anyone’s door looking like this. If they’re trying to show me people who might be able to help, either with the custody case or the curse—it could be either, I figure, since Anne has a vested interest in Amelia’s baby boy—then dripping all over expensive hardwood floors isn’t going to get me into anyone’s good graces.

  “What are you doing, Gracie? Get the hell out of here. He’s a ghost. He can’t stop you.” I turn and leave him, reconsidering the truth of my muttered self-pep-talk when I reach up to wipe my face and wince. My nose still hurts from where Mama Lottie smacked it the other day.

  I cast a wary glance behind me, but the ghost has stayed put. Apparently he’s going to stand guard or something, and anyway, Daria has said more than once that Mama Lottie is special. Powerful.

  A shiver zips down my spine that could be a result of the chilly rain. Or not.

  When I get back to the car, Amelia is waiting, shivering on a bench-length concrete slab. She’s alone. No pirates. No Anne Bonny. No ghosts at all. No people, either. Just my cousin and her unborn baby.

  I unlock the car, and we both throw ourselves inside. I turn the ignition and crank the heat, rubbing my hands together. Millie digs around in the backseat and comes up with a chamois and an old T-shirt from a rock concert. She takes the shirt and tosses the other to me, and we spend a few minutes wringing out our hair as best as we can.

  “Well?” I ask once that’s done and my teeth stop chattering. “Did you go on an adventure?”

  “Anne…and I’m guessing your other pirates?” She looks to me for confirmation.

  I nod. “Two of them.”

  “We went on a little walkabout. Stopped at a couple different houses in town—I wrote down the addresses—and then came back.”

  “Did they want you to go inside?”

  “Anne didn’t point or anything, and I have no idea why we were there.”

  I tell her about my trek and how the ghost stayed behind as though on some kind of assignment. I figure maybe the two with her were dropped off at a couple of locations, though why, it’s hard to say.

  “When did Anne leave?”

  “On my way back to the car. I was talking to her and she just disappeared.” Amelia snorts. “All these months telling you not to talk to yourself and there I was, in the middle of Broad Street babbling like a loon.”

  “Hmm.” I’m not listening to her, instead turning this over in my mind. “We need to get home and look up these addresses.”

  “Duh. Why are we still sitting here, then?”

  Chapter Fourteen

  There’s leftover pizza, which makes grabbing our laptops easier after we get home and shower off the rainy chill. No one knows we were basically abducted after work, which means there are no explanations to be made. For the first time in days, Millie ignores her cell phone as it buzzes on the coffee table by her feet, choosing to focus, instead.

  Finding names to go along with the addresses is easy enough with the white pages online, but none of the names ring a bell. The pizza burns the roof of my mouth so I set it to the side, brushing crumbs off my fingers and putting to use all of the tricks I’ve learned through years of digging up long-buried secrets.

  Even so, Amelia is the first one to look up. “I think I’ve got something.”

  “Hmm?”

  “Eyes on me, Grace. Just for a minute.” She nods, excitement making her sparkle. “One of the addresses we stopped at belongs to a woman named Maria Sanchez.”

  “Who’s Maria Sanchez?”

  “She has a resume on LinkedIn. It says she worked as a housekeeper and nanny for the Middletons for a few years. While Jake was growing up.”

  “So if there’s something to know, she probably knows it.”

  “Sure. I’m guessing they also had her sign some kind of nondisclosure, but that doesn’t mean she might not talk to us if we explain the situation.” Amelia shrugs. “Based on how I’ve seen that woman treat her help, there’s a good chance Maria despises them.”

  We keep looking, inspired now. Anne seems to be intent on helping Amelia keep her baby, and it’s not hard to guess why it’s important to her. First, we’re family. Second, when we first learned about the curse, it was clear that it could take any form, use any person, to get the job done. Jake tried to kill my pregnant cousin…because he was a douche? Because of the curse? Both? There’s no way to know for sure, just like there’s no way to be sure the curse won’t use the Middletons to accomplish its goal—ending our male line before it can ever mature into adulthood.

  A search result displays on my screen, making my heart stop beating for a second. “Got something. The address where I left my guy was a kindergarten teacher at Jake’s school while he went there. She quit teaching soon afterward.”

  “Didn’t Clete say there were rumors about teachers making complaints that were later retracted?” I nod, and her lips press into a grim line. “If she’s one of them, she knows something.”

  The third address belongs to an ex-employee of Randall Middleton’s. He worked in the pharmaceutical division at one of his larger conglomerates back in the eighties—which means he’s not going to have any goods on Jake or how they raised him, but maybe he’ll have…something better?

  It’s late, and with the addresses exhausted and the pizza demolished, Amelia goes back to her phone. A small smile plays on her lips as she reads through the messages she’s missed. Instead of dying in silent curiosity, I pick up my own phone. There’s a text from Beau, and one from Mel asking whether Clete came up with anything because LeighAnn called and said she saw him at the library earlier today.

  I’ll call her tomorrow. The thought of typing out that long of an answer is too much. Beau’s text makes me smile, though, makes me feel light the way only he could at the end of a day like this.

  Hey. I hear there’s this beautiful new librarian/archivist in Heron Creek but I swear, I never see her around. Any idea where a lonely mayor could catch a glimpse?

  You’re a goof. I miss you, too. Lunch tomorrow?

  He’s either still awake or my text woke him because I get a message back right away. I will agree to lunch but not to any sort of inappropriate glimpses while we’re at the Wreck.

  You’d definitely get reelected if you started giving glimpses all over town.

  I only want to give glimpses to you. He adds a cheesy emoticon of a smiley face with hearts for eyeballs, which would be sweeter if it didn’t sort of remind me of the eyeless pirate that somehow led me around Charleston earlier tonight.

  I’ll take it. Any night.

  Goodnight, gorgeous. I know you’re worried about your cousin, and I’m not trying to pressure you or pout like I’m not getting enough attention…I just miss you, too.

  I know. You’re a perfect blend of attentive and chill. I love you.

  I love you.

  “I think we should ask Will and Mel to help us visit these people. Maybe Leo, too,” Amelia says. Her phone is dark and
she twirls it between her fingers. “Will’s always been good at getting people to talk, and Mel’s way better than I am at making up stories. Besides, they might have heard about me in the papers and stuff, and it will freak them out.”

  “You don’t have to convince me. I think it’s a good idea. The more heads the better, and we all have jobs. It’s not like we can spend a whole day interrogating people.”

  “I’ll text Mel and see if she can stop by the library during lunch tomorrow.”

  “Oh, I’m meeting Beau for lunch.”

  Amelia makes an impatient noise. “Well, then I’ll tell her to take lunch at a different time than you’re taking lunch.”

  “Fine, sheesh. You don’t have to get all testy about it.”

  “Grace, tonight I’ve been surprised by a ghost who insisted I wander around in a thunderstorm after other ghosts I couldn’t see. Even if Anne’s trying to help us, it’s been one hell of an evening.” She struggles out of the chair, and I hide a smile. “I’m going to bed.”

  “Me, too.”

  I take the trash to the kitchen while Millie switches off the lights and double-checks the lock on the front door, then sets the alarm. We head up the stairs together at eleven p.m. like two old spinsters who have been running through the same routine for years. It could be that we’re practicing for when that day arrives, but I don’t think that will be us. Amelia’s damaged, but she’s got too much love underneath the scars to trap it forever. I came back to Heron Creek washing my hands of men and relationships and all those old dreams of marriage and children, but Beau has flipped everything about my life on its head.

  I don’t know where we’re headed or how long it will take us to get there, but two things are for sure: nothing will ever tear my cousin and me apart again, and we’re not ever giving up on the idea of being happy.

  Mel blows into the library the next day around eleven with an expectant expression and a waterlogged umbrella. Of course she’s adult enough to keep one with her. She has been since we were twelve. Mel was born old. Like George Bailey.