Charlotte Douglas - Storm Season

www.millsandboon.co.uk

CHAPTER 1

CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 3

CHAPTER 4

CHAPTER 5

CHAPTER 6

CHAPTER 7

CHAPTER 8

CHAPTER 9

CHAPTER 10

CHAPTER 11

CHAPTER 12

CHAPTER 13

CHAPTER 14

CHAPTER 15

CHAPTER 16

CHAPTER 17

CHAPTER 18

CHAPTER 19

CHAPTER 20

CHAPTER 21

CHAPTER 22

CHAPTER 23

CHAPTER 24

CHAPTER 25

EPILOGUE

Violet Lassiter passed me the heavy blue-willow plate with a remarkably steady hand for a one-hundred-year-old. “Have a cookie, Miss Skerritt.”

She didn’t have to twist my arm. Fresh from the oven, the cookies smelled heavenly.

“They’re better with nuts,” she added in apology, “but Bessie can’t have ’em, so the rest of us have to suffer.”

“You eat too many sweets, anyway,” her eighty-four-year-old sibling, Bessie, countered.

“What do you think—” Violet accused her with a roll of her eyes “—that I’m going to shorten my life?”

Taking a cookie, I sat on the screened back porch of the modest cement-block home with the two elderly women, who were apparently unfazed by the ninety-degree heat and suffocating humidity of the September morning. Violet, tall and gangly with thick white braids wrapped around her head like a crown, wore a heavy sweater over her cotton housedress. Bessie, short and lean, was also dressed in a cotton shift and a cardigan, plus bright-pink sneakers and heavy flesh-toned nylons rolled just below her knees.

I’d first encountered the Lassiter sisters last June when Bill Malcolm, my fiancé and partner in Pelican Bay Investigations, had done background checks on volunteers for the local historical society. To his dismay, he’d discovered that Bessie had an arrest record for shoplifting. Further digging revealed she’d been stealing food for Violet after their Social Security money had run out before the end of the month. The judge had given Bessie probation, but his lenient ruling hadn’t solved the elderly women’s subsistence problem.

Bill and I had arranged for meals-on-wheels for the pair and had put together a gift basket to tide them over until deliveries began. To save the Lassiters’ pride, we’d fabricated a story that Bessie had won the basket in a grand opening raffle we’d held at our business. We’d presented them the basket of staples and goodies, along with our business card and instructions to call on us if they needed a private investigator, a request we never expected to receive.

Their call came yesterday.

I’d solved many cases during my twenty-three years as a cop and more recently for Pelican Bay Investigations, but I couldn’t guess what dilemma had prompted these elderly sisters to contact me. And I couldn’t get them to stop sniping at one another long enough to find out.

“Get Miss Skerritt more ice,” Violet ordered her sister in a drill-sergeant tone. “Her tea’s getting warm.”

“Just because you’re older doesn’t mean you can boss me around,” Bessie shot back.

“My tea is fine, really,” I said. “Now what—”

“You need to be bossed,” Violet said, ignoring me, “because you act like a child. I hope I live long enough to see you grow up.”

“Ladies.” I spoke loudly and firmly. The situation was spiraling out of control, sweat was soaking through the back of my blouse and all I could think of was how great air-conditioning would feel about now. “Why exactly did you want to see me?”

“We have a man,” Bessie announced with a gleeful expression.

I nodded but didn’t comment, not sure where this was going.

“A tenant,” Violet corrected.

“But he’s not a paying tenant,” Bessie added. “More like a guest.”

I gazed into the tiny house through the open back door but couldn’t spot anyone inside, and I was beginning to wonder if this mysterious tenant wasn’t senility’s equivalent of an imaginary friend.

“Where is he?” I asked.

“Over there.” Bessie pointed to a toolshed at the rear of the yard that backed up to the Pinellas Trail, a linear park built on an old railroad bed that ran the length of the county.

I narrowed my eyes, but the shed door was shut, and I caught no flicker of movement inside. With the windows closed and the Florida sun beating on the roof, the interior temperature had to be over a hundred degrees. If their “guest” was in there, he was well done by now.

“Oh…kay,” I said, not wanting to call her crazy to her face.

“He’s not there now, Bessie.” Violet’s condescending older sister voice reminded me of my own sibling, Caroline. “He’s gone out.”

“You have a man living in your garden shed?” I felt like Alice who’d tumbled down the rabbit hole.

Bessie nodded.

“What’s his name?” The investigator in me couldn’t help asking, while the saner part of my nature chided me for encouraging their delusions.

“He doesn’t have a name,” Violet said, “so we call him J.D.”

Curiouser and curiouser. The ladies had obviously lost it.

“J.D. for John Doe,” Bessie said. “He’s a lovely man.”

“Who doesn’t have a name.” An incipient ache flared behind my eyes.

“Well, he had a name at one time—” Violet began.

“—but he can’t remember it,” Bessie finished. “Can’t remember anything. Who he is, where he came from, not even his age, although I’d put him in his early sixties, if I had to guess.” She chomped the last bite of her third cookie, sans nuts.

“He has the nicest manners,” Violet said, “or we wouldn’t tolerate him. Why, for the longest time, we didn’t even know he was there.”

“We wouldn’t have known at all,” Bessie agreed, “if it hadn’t been for the Turk’s Cap bush.”

Violet nodded.

I was beginning to wonder if I were the one losing it. Nothing either of them said made any sense.

“That bush grew so high during the summer rains,” Bessie explained, “that it blocked the view from my bedroom window. So I went to the shed for the clippers.”

“We don’t use the shed much any longer,” Violet said, “since that nice young neighbor—”

“Mr. Moore,” Bessie said.

“Don’t interrupt,” her sister snapped.

“But you’d forgotten his name.”

“I didn’t forget. I hadn’t gotten to it yet.”

“So you don’t use the shed…” I prompted Violet in hopes of ending the bickering.

Bessie answered. “Mr. Moore mows our grass when he does his yard. He’s very thoughtful.”

“Thoughtful, my eye,” Violet said. “He got sick of looking at the jungle over here.”

While Bessie searched for a suitable comeback, I plunged into the void. “What did you find in the shed, Bessie?”

“Come and see for yourself.”

I set aside my glass of tea, pushed to my feet from the ancient metal glider and followed Bessie out the screen door. Violet, amazingly agile for a centenarian, dogged our steps as if afraid she’d miss something.

We followed a path of popcorn stone, set in thick St. Augustine grass, to the shed, constructed of the same concrete block as the house and apparently built at the same time, around 1940. The wooden door showed signs of rot, and several asphalt shingles were missing from the roof. A square of cardboard replaced a missing pane in one of two sash windows visible on the side of the shed that faced the house.