A Death in Duck: Lindsay Harding Cozy Mystery Series (Reverend Lindsay Harding Mystery Book 2) (16 page)

“Sarabelle,” Lindsay turned to face her mother. “I had a message on my phone earlier. From the police. They don’t seem to be any closer to finding Leander, but he’s been seen in Kitty Hawk. If you can tell them anything at all that would help, you need to do it.”

Sarabelle vigorously shook her head and took a step backward. “Uh-un. You can’t make me.”

“If Leander Swoopes really is as dangerous as you say he is, you need to. Think about other people besides yourself for once. Please. What if he hooks up with another woman?”

“Then I wish her better luck than that Lydia Sikes had,” Sarabelle said with a firm set to her jaw.

Lindsay realized that appealing to her mother’s altruism had been a mistake. Once again she had forgotten that Sarabelle was incapable of showing genuine concern for anyone other than herself.

“Well, what if he finds you before the police find him?” Lindsay demanded.

Sarabelle angrily threw down the waxing paper strips. “What are you gonna do? Turn me in?”

“If I have to,” Lindsay said.

Sarabelle gasped and clutched her heart. “My own flesh and blood?”

Simmy stepped between the two of them with her hands held up like a boxing referee. “Sarabelle, I think Lindsay might be right,” she said.

“Not you, too?” Sarabelle’s eyes darted around the room, as if she were looking for some means of escape.

“Honey, the last thing in the world I want is to hurt you,” Simmy soothed. “But if you come forward now, you might have a shot of cutting a deal. It’s been wonderful having you here, but we all know you can’t hide like this forever.”

Sarabelle’s melodramatic pose gradually softened. She looked back and forth between the two of them and finally slumped down into a chair. She was like a child, caught red-handed and out of lies. At last, she nodded.

“Do you want to call, or should I?” Lindsay asked Simmy.

“I’ll turn myself in,” Sarabelle said. “Well, what are you looking at me like that for? Don’t you trust me? I said I’ll turn myself in and I will.” As the silence continued, she said. “Fine. Lindsay can drop me off at the station, but I don’t want her going in with me.”

Although she took an inordinately long time to freshen up her makeup and style her hair, Sarabelle was as good as her word. She emerged from the bedroom looking like she was going to a photo shoot. “All right, let’s get this over with.”

“Aren’t you going to bring a bag or anything?” Lindsay asked.

“I’m not checking in at the Ritz,” Sarabelle replied, glaring at her daughter. “There is one thing we’ll need, though.” She walked into the kitchen and grabbed a flathead screwdriver from one of the drawers.

“What is that? A shiv?” Lindsay asked.

“It’s for you. Trust me,” Sarabelle said. She quickly embraced Simmy, and marched outside toward Lindsay’s mint green Honda Civic with the resignation of a convict about to face the firing squad. Lindsay opened the car doors and they climbed inside.

When Lindsay placed her key in the ignition, it fell straight out onto the floor.

“Turns out my car boosting skills are a little rusty,” Sarabelle said. “You’re gonna need to use the screwdriver in the ignition instead.”

Lindsay put her keys back in her jogging armband and reluctantly grabbed the screwdriver. She sighed deeply, rammed it in, and twisted it. The engine instantly purred to life.

Lindsay called Claire Burke on the way to the station to ensure that her mother was delivered safely into police custody. Claire thanked Lindsay for her help in convincing Sarabelle to turn herself in voluntarily, and said she would alert the public defender to prepare for her arrival.

“In all likelihood,” Claire explained, “she’ll be placed under arrest for her outstanding warrant, and then transferred to the county jail as soon as they can arrange it. The cells in Duck aren’t equipped for holding people for more than a day or two.”

As Lindsay relayed this information to Sarabelle, the older woman sat with her arms crossed and her jaw set in a rigid line. Sarabelle didn’t even give Lindsay the benefit of a backwards glance when, a few minutes later, she walked into the quaint municipal building that served as the Duck Police Headquarters.

As Lindsay drove back along Highway 12, she tried to piece together her feelings. She supposed she should be happy that Sarabelle had decided, albeit reluctantly, to help the police track down her aunt’s killer. It had seemed wrong that everyone, including Lindsay herself, had been carrying on with life as normal while her aunt lay dead in the county morgue. Lindsay’s own emotions had been more of shock and confusion than of grief or loss. She realized that she had mourned more for hospital patients that she’d only had the briefest encounters with than she did for this woman who she’d spent years living alongside, who was her own flesh and blood. She hadn’t even said a prayer over her aunt’s body, the way she would have for a complete stranger who died at the hospital. How could it be that a person’s death could inspire so little sentiment in those who supposedly knew her best? Perhaps it was because none of them had ever really known her, any more than one could know what’s inside of a sealed box.

Chapter 17

The next day, Lindsay’s morning run with Kipper took her through Duck’s tiny downtown. On her left, she noticed the wooden sign for Butterworth Antiques and Collectibles. The small row of shops that housed Wynn Butterworth’s store was cheerfully decorated for the holidays. White lights encircled the wooden poles that held up the front awning and metallic snowflakes dangled from the window frames. She saw that the lights were on inside the shop and—despite the fact that she was wearing her sweaty jogging clothes and had Kipper with her—she decided to take Butterworth up on his offer to stop by.

She found the old man perched on a stool that seemed far too small to uphold his considerable girth. She had to assume that there was a seat topping the legs of the stool; the way Butterworth’s buttocks draped over it, it was impossible to tell for certain. He was hunched over the counter, paging through a newspaper. His sharp eyes rose to greet her as she came in.

“Miss Lindsay!” He ran his hand over his hairless pate as if to straighten his long-gone locks. “I was beginning to think that you’d never find your way to me.”

“Well, here I am,” Lindsay smiled uncertainly. “Is it okay if I bring the dog inside?”

“Well of course. I keep bribes in stock for just such occasions.”  He withdrew a glass jar of dog treats and offered a small handful to Kipper.

Lindsay, meanwhile, took in her surroundings. The shop was piled high with an undifferentiated array of furniture and trinkets, almost like a commercial version of Simmy’s house.

“Get yourselves on in here and sit down on that chair.” In Butterworth’s High Tider accent, the offer came out as “Git yesefs on in hair ‘n set don on at chir.”

“Well, well, well,” he said, shaking his head. “How you been keepin’? I didn’t get the opportunity to give you my proper condolences the other day. I’m truly sorry for your loss. I must say I’ve never seen the like of it. Murder ain’t an everyday thing round here, and for Patty Harding to meet her end that way.” He let out a long whistle.

“I know. It’s big news.” Lindsay wasn’t sure what else to say. It felt false to accept his condolences, like accepting a prize she hadn’t won.

“Lord, yes. Front page on every newspaper from here to Raleigh. I hope you haven’t had reporters hounding you?”

The thought hadn’t even occurred to Lindsay until she’d spoken to her father the previous day. Because he had been named publicly as Patricia Harding’s next of kin, his phone had been ringing off the hook since the story broke. He’d finally unplugged the phone and enlisted some of his “fan club” ladies to turn away anyone who came to the door. Lindsay hadn’t looked at the paper or watched the news, but from what she understood, Leander Swoopes was being sought as a person of interest in the case. As yet, there had been no specific mention of Sarabelle or of her, so for the time being, she remained blissfully incognito.

“Thankfully, no. I’m staying in a hotel. I guess they haven’t been able to track me down yet,” Lindsay said. She ran her hand over the large, leather-covered rocking horse that stood like a sentinel alongside her chair. “How long have you had this shop?”

“Since the 80’s. This is my retirement project, but I been doin’ this now for longer than I ever worked. I guess I never expected to live this long,” he laughed. “In my earlier years, I ran a motel way down Kitty Hawk way. When I sold that on, I started doin’ this. I don’t hardly turn a profit, but it passes the time.” He smiled at her, his thin lips turning white as they pressed together. “I expect you’re wondering about why I wanted you to come down here and talk to me?”

Lindsay nodded. “You said that you had some stories you thought I should hear.”

“And so I do. So I do. You seemed surprised when I said that your Aunt Patty was a real hell raiser in her day. I realized that you probably only ever knew the old lady that she’d become. She didn’t use to be like that, all closed up on herself like an oyster. The War changed her.”

“I didn’t know she had anything to do with World War II. She would’ve only been, what? Fifteen?” Lindsay said.

“How much do you know about what went on out here during that time?”

“Hmm, I know about the German U-boats—how they sailed up and down the East Coast trying to disrupt the shipping lanes. I know that they sank a lot of U.S. ships and we sank quite a number of theirs. I’ve read about the blackouts along the coast, where residents had to cover their windows and put black tape over their car headlights.”

“Well, then, you already know a good sight more than most people. You see, during the War, and even well after, the government didn’t want people to fret. Didn’t release no news stories in the papers or nothin’ like that. They classified most of the information so that somebody living in Kansas or Kentucky wouldn’t’ve had no idea how bad things were for us out here. But we ‘Bankers knew. The War came practically right up onto our doorsteps.

“The blackouts and such all came about later on, once everybody got over the shock after Pearl Harbor, and the Navy got themselves organized,” he continued. As he spoke, Butterworth’s voice rumbled with emotion. His hands moved up and down as a unit, like a marionette. His oversized, snow white eyebrows, however, seemed unable to work in concert with each other. They took turns rising and falling, like they were counterweighted.

“In them early days, it was a surprise when the Germans started floating their subs out in the water off the Banks,” he said. “This was in 1942 that I’m talkin’ ‘bout. Almost every day that spring and on into the summer, we’d hear these loud booms from the ships gettin’ blowed up. Deep rumbles like they were quarrying rocks out under the ocean. Sometimes the walls of our house even shook with it, and I had one friend who got a crack, wide as your thumb, across the whole ceiling of his house.” Butterworth held up his fat thumb and looked at Lindsay over the top of it, like a portrait painter trying to get his subject into perspective.

He settled back on his stool and continued his tale. “Another buddy a’ mine, name of Tyrone, was out fishin’ with his old man one day. U-boat rose up outta the water not 10 yards off his starboard. Them U-boats wasn’t like regular subs, you see. They couldn’t stay submerged but for so long ‘fore they had to come up on take on fresh air. So, Tyrone and his old man see this thing risin’ up outta the water like a damn Moby Dick. That’s what they thought it was at first, a whale. But lucky for Tyrone, he didn’t stick around to make its acquaintance. Before you could say Jiminy Cricket, they were high-tailin’ it back to shore.”

In her many history courses, Lindsay had read about the time Butterworth described. However, seeing the bare facts in print was a very different proposition from hearing about these events first hand.

Butterworth, seeing that he held Lindsay’s rapt attention, took a wheezy breath and resumed his monologue. “We had to give up swimming that summer. The water had damn near turned to oil from all the boats that’d been sunk. You’d go in the water up to your knees and your legs would be soaked with the stuff. We’d have to go home and scrub ourselves with kerosene to get it off. Seemed like everybody had a story to tell. Some close call or another. But we all tried to carry on like everything was normal. What choice did we have?”

Shifting his weight on the creaky stool beneath him, he continued. “The U-boats ranged all up and down the coast, from Maine to Mexico,” he said. “But it was worst in Carolina. So many ships were attacked out here that the waters came to be called ‘Torpedo Junction’ near the Hatteras Lighthouse.” The word “lighthouse” sounded like “loythighss” in Butterworth’s Ocracoke dialect.

Lindsay didn’t want to hurry him, but her curiosity was piqued. “You said this had something to do with Aunt Harding?”

“Oh, Lord, yes. Rumor had it that Patty had the closest call of anybody. You ever been down to the British graveyards in Hatteras or Ocracoke?”

Lindsay nodded. She had, indeed, seen the final resting places of the unfortunate British sailors who’d been sent to America to help guard the shipping lanes. Their boats had been torpedoed by the Germans and their washed-up bodies had been dragged in by locals and buried together in small plots.

“Well, what people might not realize is that not all the bodies that washed up were dead ones. Now and again, you’d get some sailor who managed to survive the blast and swim his way onto the shore. If they were our guys, they were patched up and sent on their way. If they were Jerries, they’d be gathered up and shipped to POW camps. One day, Patty was out on the beach at night, looking for turtle’s nests. In them days, some of us still used to eat turtle’s eggs. This was ‘fore the endangered species people started rantin’ and ravin’ about it. Well, anyways, Patty saw this thing floatin’ out in the water. During the war, you could sometimes pick up some good stuff from the cargo ships that’d got sunk on the way over to Europe. You never knew. You might get yourself some lumber or some cotton cloth that hadn’t gotten wrecked by the salt water. Even the crates themselves could be handy to burn for firewood. One time I found me a case of lemons that were comin’ all the way from South America. Like I told you, you never could know.

“Well, that night, your aunt waded out and found herself a German sailor, floatin’ face up in a life vest but hardly breathin’. She musta liked the look of him, because instead of heading straight to the patrol station to report him, like we were supposed to, she took him off someplace and kept him.”

“Kept him?” Lindsay asked.

“Kept him like a pet. She brought him food and nursed him back to health, or so I heard. She was only able to keep it up for a month or two before somebody sold her out. Anonymous tip-off, I heard. Even keeping him that long was a mighty impressive achievement, though, for a teenage girl. These islands were crawlin’ with civilian patrols. We thought the Jerries were fixin’ to invade at any time—I reckon we weren’t far wrong on that score. It’s a miracle that she hid him as long as she did, and I expect it had to end sooner or later.”

“Couldn’t he have escaped? Did she keep him locked up or something?” Butterworth’s revelations were deeply disturbing for Lindsay, all the more so for the parallel to the more recent circumstance of Aunt Harding hiding Sarabelle in her house for months.

“There wasn’t nowhere he coulda gone to where he wasn’t gonna raise suspicions. Don’t know if he spoke any English, even, and everybody was tuned in back then, trying to listen out for a German or Jap accent.”

“What happened when they were discovered?” Lindsay asked.

“Well, he got sent down to a POW camp in Oklahoma. Heard he died before the war ended. I don’t think she ever got over it. She brought me a German gun to restore a few years ago. She said it had sentimental value. She didn’t say whose it was or how she came by it, but I knew.”

Lindsay was silent for a moment, remembering the gun lying on the floor of the shack next to her aunt’s body. “Was the gun valuable?”

Butterworth raised an eyebrow. “Not particularly. Mauser pistol. Not in very good condition, from being in the salt water, I suppose. And everybody and their Great Aunt Fanny seems to have a Nazi gun in their collection, which keeps the prices down. I tried to convince Patty to leave it as it was because I didn’t think it was even worth what it’d cost to restore it, but like I said, she told me it had sentimental value.”

“Speaking of sentimental things, have you ever heard of anybody named Rita Lutz? My aunt seemed to have some sort of attachment to her.” Since Butterworth was clearly plugged into the lore of the islands, Lindsay thought it might be worth a shot.

“Can’t say that I have,” Butterworth replied.

“What about Mari?” Lindsay asked, thinking of the worn scrap of cloth from her aunt’s safe. “Spelled with an ‘i’ at the end. Does that name mean anything to you?”

“Mari? There was a Mari Gilbert, used to live down in Kitty Hawk. She moved to California twenty years ago or more. Wanted to grow almonds. No, wait. Come to think on it, I believe that gal’s name was Marie.”

Lindsay thanked Butterworth and rose to leave, but then realized that something was troubling her. “Wait, didn’t Aunt Harding get in huge trouble when the soldier was discovered? I mean, what she did was practically treason.” Lindsay could scarcely believe that Aunt Harding had willingly risked her life for the love of an enemy soldier, especially when the stakes were so high.

“Well, she did and she didn’t. Her ma and her old man—well, to say they was cross would be the understatement of the century. From what I heard, they tanned her backside something fearsome and locked her in her room. I think everybody reckoned it was better to treat her like a fractious child rather than a grown-up traitor. Those of us that knew her before heard about what happened of course, but mostly everyone didn’t care to mention it. Like I said, the military and the government wouldn’t’a been too excited to have a story like that come out. Especially not at that time when we still didn’t have any vessels in the whole U.S. Navy fleet that could sink a U-boat. For people to find out that a Jerry was on American soil, hidden by a little teenage girl who’d outfoxed all the patrols for weeks on end?” Butterworth let out a low whistle and shook his head.  “No, ma’am. That’s the kind of thing that’s best kept hidden.”