Shadows on the Sand (14 page)

“Hi.” Courtesy of a brain freeze, I couldn’t think of anything else to say. I grabbed an empty cup.

He slid onto his stool, his smile gone as quickly as it had bloomed. He was barely settled before I handed him his coffee. He nodded his thanks.

“The usual?” I managed. Good. Two words. My brain must be thawing.

He nodded again.

“Got it,” Lindsay called. “Ricky, the usual for Greg.”

“Did you hear what the president just did?” Indignation poured off Mr. Perkins. He gave me a quick little sympathetic smile that made me cringe, then went back to being indignant. In all the years he’d been coming in, I don’t think there’d been a president he liked. Today, though, I couldn’t be certain whether he wanted to dump his take on the latest political goings-on on a new audience or whether he was trying to make things easier for me by claiming Greg’s attention. The latter thought made me teary with affection for the frustrating old man. I looked away and blinked until I knew I wasn’t going to humiliate myself.

Greg held up a finger, a signal to Mr. Perkins to be quiet. He took a deep breath, then exhaled. He looked at me. “They found Jase Peoples.”

My hand went to my heart as if to protect it from more pain. “It’s bad, isn’t it?”

He nodded.

“Where?” I asked, my stomach twisting.

“Floating in the bay.”

“No!” Tears came now, and I made no effort to staunch them. I pictured Jase in the kitchen, steam rising around him as he worked, a smile on his lips as he responded to something Ricky had said.

“Jase is dead?” Andi stood wide-eyed by Mr. Perkins. “That can’t be! How do you know? Maybe you have it wrong.”

I slipped my arm around her as Greg said, “I wish I did.”

“Greg’s got connections.” I stroked her hair. “If he says, then it’s so.”

I felt her shaking, and her breathing was ragged. I felt pretty fragile myself.

“He was my friend,” she whispered. “He was my
friend
.”

We were all quiet, even Mr. Perkins.

Andi pulled back. “I’ve got to call Clooney.” She bolted for the kitchen.

Lindsay appeared at the pass-through. “Is Andi right? Is Jase dead?”

Greg and I nodded.

She squeezed her eyes shut and gave a great sigh. “I liked him a lot. He was a nice guy in a world where they are in short supply.” She turned and went back into the kitchen.

“Such a waste.” My voice caught, and I had to clear my throat before I could continue. “Do they know what happened?”

Greg’s expression hardened. “Whatever it was, it wasn’t an accident.”

“Murder?” The word felt foreign on my lips. Murder was for mystery novels and television shows, not for people you knew.

Greg’s silence told me all I needed to know. I glanced toward the kitchen and Andi. “How long ago?”

“I’d guess Saturday night, but that’s just a guess. The coroner will determine time of death.”

I mopped my tears and sighed. “No wonder the tweeters couldn’t find him.”

Lindsay reappeared in the pass-through. “Where in the bay?”

“About midway between the causeway and the Thirty-Fourth Street Bridge,” Greg said. “He was caught in the marshy grasses at Turtle Island.”

“Don’t you wonder why, Greg?” Lindsay walked into the café proper,
carrying his scrambled eggs and toast. “Doesn’t something like this get your cop juices going? Don’t you want to find out who did this terrible thing?”

“Oh, yeah. I wonder who and why and how.” He studied his plate, made a face, and poked at his eggs with his fork.

“Not hungry?” I could understand that. Tragic news dampened the appetite.

“It’s not that.” He poked at the eggs some more.

I studied the eggs. They looked fine to me, light and fluffy. I might not know much about Ricky as a person except that he was allergic to cats and yearned after Lindsay, but one thing I did know: he was a good cook.

“They’re fine. Fine,” Greg said with a definite lack of enthusiasm. As if to prove his comment true, he took one bite and then another. “Good.”

I glanced at Lindsay just as she looked at me. Somehow neither of us was convinced, especially when he took a great swig of coffee after every bite.

The café door opened, and Jem Barnes entered. Greg looked at his father in surprise.

“I wasn’t expecting you today, was I, Dad?”

“I don’t know.” Jem slipped onto a stool. “Were you?”

I liked Greg’s father. He was a tall, slim man with a snow white mustache even though his hair was still mostly brown. He had an engaging smile, the kind that made you smile back no matter how blue you were feeling. If Greg looked like him thirty years from now, he’d be a handsome man.

“I’ll have one of Lindsay’s sticky buns,” Jem said. “There is still one left, isn’t there?”

I slid open the back of the display case and selected one for him.

“Did we have plans?” Greg asked his father.

Jem shook his head. “Not that I know of.”

Greg frowned. “Then why are you here?”

Interesting question since Jem lived a good twenty miles inland, too far to just drop in. Was he here to check up on Greg? He’d done that many times after Ginny and the kids died, back when Greg was drinking too much.

But Greg was doing very well now. I studied him as I filled Jem’s cup. His eyes were clear and his color good, bruises notwithstanding, visible proof that he’d been sober for a long time. I knew because I kept a running calendar in my head.

Not that he’d been alcohol dependent, not in the sense of being an alcoholic. He’d used drink to dull his pain, to make life bearable when the emotional agony was overwhelming.

Back then I would work the counter when Jem and Greg sat together, and I’d hear Jem trying to reach his son.

“You can’t use alcohol as a soporific to put yourself to sleep.” The pain in Jem’s voice as he watched his son hurt was clear, and the look on Jem’s face brought tears to my eyes.

Greg always nodded, but if his reddened eyes when he came in the next time were any indication, he ignored the advice.

“Son, drinking won’t solve your problems. It’ll just create new ones.”

“Don’t you think I know that?” That day Greg lost his temper. “I’ve seen what it does more times than I can count. I’m a cop, remember?”

There was a sharp silence as Jem stared into his cup and Greg looked bereft.

“At least I
was
a cop.” He slid off his stool and all but ran out the door.

Jem had sighed, overtipped me, and left, shoulders rounded with sorrow.

Then one Saturday about a year after Ginny and the kids died, Greg’s brothers stepped in, all five of them, including the one who was a missionary in Mexico. I know because they cornered him here at the café.

“Just what I need.” Greg eyed them in disgust. “What? You didn’t bring Mom and Dad too?”

“Like we want them to hear us reaming you out,” one brother said. “What we have to say isn’t for their ears.”

“Go away, all of you.” Greg glowered at them. “I mean it.”

“We’re going,” said another, “but you’re coming with us whether you like it or not.”

“Five against one? I can take you all.”

“At the moment you’re such a sorry excuse for a man, you couldn’t take any of us.” It was the missionary from Mexico.

They all had that don’t-mess-with-us look, and it was clear they’d take him by force if they needed to. The odds were in their favor in spite of Greg’s background a Marine and a cop.

They bore him off for what must have been a humdinger of a conversation. Greg hadn’t touched a drop since. Life had slowly, slowly seeped back into him, and I thought he was doing well.

Now Jem studied him. “Which one of your tenants popped you?”

Greg lifted a gentle hand to his shiner. “You didn’t read about it on Twitter?”

“I don’t tweet. My life isn’t worth the minute examination it requires.”

“There was this guy named Chaz,” Mr. Perkins began and gave his version of the incident. Since he wasn’t there, it was a bit skewed but by and large accurate.

Jem looked impressed. “Anything else going on around here I should know about, Mr. Perkins?”

Mr. Perkins launched into the tale of Jase.

“I heard about the murder on the news as I was driving here,” Jem said. “I didn’t realize there was a Carrie’s connection.”

“It makes me so sad!” My throat went tight, and I had to swallow.

Everyone nodded agreement. Then Mr. Perkins waved his spoon, dripping coffee on the counter. “The big question is what happened to him between when Bill decked him and he floated to the top. And a second biggie—did Bill do it?”

“Mr. Perkins! What an awful thing to say!” Andi glared at him as she came to the counter. “Bill would never do something so terrible.”

“He already did something terrible,” Mr. Perkins, ever the diplomat, was quick to point out. “He knocked Jase unconscious.”

Andi made a brushing-away gesture. “That wasn’t anything. He thought he was protecting me. He’s just too nice to do something really mean.”

Just moderately mean. I sighed. She was ignoring the still-purple skin about her wrist.

“Besides he was with me,” she said. “How could he hurt Jase if he was with me?”

Greg studied her. “He was with you all night?”

She squirmed. “Well, no. Clooney makes me come home by midnight on weekends. I keep telling him how lame that is, but he’s like a rock that can’t be moved.” She made a disgusted noise.

“You’re lucky to have someone who cares.” I couldn’t resist saying it. When I was her age, I was already on my own with a ten-year-old to care for, scared to death but determined. I’d have loved a caring family, even one as removed as a great-uncle.

“Remember how Jase had come home very recently after being gone for several years?” Greg said. “My sources tell me he’d been in The Pathway.”

If he was trying to divert the attention from Andi, he failed. She sucked in a breath and blurted, “They know Jase was in The Pathway?”

“The Pathway?” Lindsay looked appalled as she brought a platter of freshly baked, saucer-sized sugar cookies for the display case. “Michael the Archangel?”

“They’re all nuts,” Mr. Perkins said.

“Maybe.” Greg pushed away the plate with the largely uneaten eggs he tried to hide beneath his napkin. “For sure they’re different. I’ll have one of those cookies.”

Lindsay slid one onto a plate for him.

“How old was he?” Mr. Perkins asked. “He looked about ten.”

I assumed he meant Jase, not Michael.

“Twenty-five, according to the paper,” Greg said. “He took off at eighteen, was gone for seven years, and was with The Pathway for most of those years.”

“That group’s a cult, if you want my opinion,” Mr. Perkins said.

This time I tended to agree with him. Everything I’d read about The Pathway sounded bogus, from the claims of their leader, Michael the Archangel, to their reclusive, secretive, “God-ordained” way of life in their isolated desert compound.

“Any man who advertises himself as the modern incarnation of the archangel Michael, the field commander of the Lord’s army, has to be either quite strange or knowingly committing a fraud.” Greg took a bite of his cookie and sighed with pleasure. “Either way he’s dangerous.”

“Are they polygamous like that FLDS group in West Texas?” Jem asked. “I can’t remember.”

“They are,” Greg said.

Mr. Perkins made a disgusted sound. “Perverts. I hope they all land in jail.”

I patted his hand. “Easy there.”

“I’m going to take a few minutes, okay, Carrie?” Andi looked pale and
sounded breathless. She wouldn’t meet my eyes. She reached under the counter and retrieved the Sudoku book she kept stashed there. “I’ll be in the booth in the back.”

There was only one party in the place besides Greg, Jem, and Mr. Perkins. “Are they okay?” I cocked my head in the direction of the man and woman deep in conversation at booth one.

“They’re just talking over coffee. They have their bill and said they didn’t want anything more.”

I nodded. “Tell Ricky what you want to eat.”

“I-I don’t want anything.”

Another lost appetite. “Will Bill be in for breakfast?”

“I-I’m not sure.”

I studied the girl, thinking she looked off balance somehow. Greg was looking at her too. Was it Jase’s death? He’d been a friend, and his loss was bound to upset her. It certainly upset me. Or were things not going well in paradise in spite of her defense of Bill a few minutes ago? Perhaps Jase’s murder was making her wary of him, or perhaps the bruised wrist was having a warning-off effect after all.

“Go sit,” I said, feeling sad for her. “I’ll have Ricky make you some of your favorite chocolate-chip pancakes and bring them when they’re ready.”

With a weak smile, she turned and walked to the last booth, where she settled with her back to the door.

Poor kid. I might not know her problem, but I knew the empty-stomach feel of your world spinning out of control.

T
he Pathway! Andi felt a chill deep in her bones. She kept her head down so no one would see what she feared was a panicked expression. When she’d assumed that Jase was a victim of random violence, she’d been okay. Real sad for him, of course, because she liked him and felt sorry for him, but not scared. After all, in life bad stuff happened, as she knew all too well.