P.J. Alderman - Ghost Ship

“No.”

Jase held on to Walters a moment longer, then with a sound of disgust shoved him at Darcy.

“I did nothing wrong,” Walters sniveled. “I’m entitled to take back and protect what’s mine.”

“That refrain is getting old,” Hattie observed. “Can’t you encourage your friends to escort him off our property?”

“I’m working on it,” Jordan replied grimly.

“Working on getting away with murder, and blaming me for it!” Walters whined.

Before Jordan could point out the sheer idiocy of that statement, another patrol car and an ambulance pulled up, lights flashing. They were attracting a crowd—several neighbors had emerged from their houses, looking bewildered.

“I glimpsed a gun lying on the floor of the conservatory,” Frank told Jordan. “He must have dropped it when you hit him with the bat. I suspect it may be .22 caliber.”

“I’ll go get it!” Charlotte volunteered, sounding excited.

“ No! ” Jordan said hastily, envisioning a gun going off randomly. “Leave it alone; I’ll get it.”

“Get what?” Darcy asked, confused.

“He left a gun in the conservatory,” Jordan explained.

“I did not!” Walters yelled. “It’s hers , I’m telling you! How would she know it was there unless it was hers?”

Darcy sighed. “Leave the gun where it is. I’ll have one of my deputies bag it for evidence. We can test it to see if his fingerprints are on it.”

“I don’t own a gun, and I didn’t bring one with me!”

“We’ll see if it matches the bullet we pulled from Holt,” Darcy informed him.

“You know, I just don’t get it,” Jordan said. “Why are you so hell-bent to find those papers?”

“Oh, come on ,” Walters sneered. “Everyone knows you and Stilwell were looking into the murder of his ancestor. And that you’ll do just about anything to solve murders for the ghosts in this town. But it’s bad for business, don’t you see? I need Seavey’s ghost to hang around—he brings in more than half my bookings! I couldn’t have either of you figuring out what happened, so that Seavey would have crossed over permanently, now could I?”

Jordan gaped at him. “You’re shitting me.”

“Good Christ!” Seavey remarked. “Does he really think I would cross over and leave my hotel in his hands, to be run into the ground? The man is truly delusional.”

Darcy rolled her eyes. “Well, congratulations, Clive. You just got yourself arrested for attempted armed robbery. And provided an excellent motive for why you killed Holt. You’re going away for a very long time, which means you won’t be around to worry about the bookings in your hotel after all.”

“Thank goodness,” Hattie said. “I certainly wouldn’t wish his continued presence on Michael.”

“It’s not robbery if I’m retrieving what she stole in the first place.” Walters’s tone was sullen.

“That’s not how it works, pal. I have two witnesses who can testify that you attempted to break into Jordan’s house, armed with a handgun.”

“She has six witnesses!” Charlotte corrected.

“You can’t testify in a court of law,” Jordan pointed out.

“Sure I can—why couldn’t I?” Jase asked, then clued in. “Oh, got it.”

“Got what?” Walters asked suspiciously. “You can’t talk like that in front of me. That’s entrapment!”

Darcy closed her eyes, obviously reaching for patience. “Why don’t you save us all a lot of time, Clive, and just admit that you killed Holt?”

“ She killed Holt, I’m telling you!” he raged, spittle flying.

Darcy motioned to a deputy, handing Walters over to him. “Go with him to the hospital,” she told the deputy crisply. “After they set his ankle, move him downtown to a holding cell. I’ll be in tomorrow morning to take down his confession. Oh, and don’t forget to read him his rights. The good news, Clive, is that you’ll have plenty of time in jail to read law books and figure out how clueless you are about the justice system.”

“I’m not confessing to anything!” he snapped. “I want a lawyer.”

“In that regard, it appears that he is most knowledgeable,” Frank observed.

Chapter 19

AFTER her first good night’s sleep in two days, Jordan woke early and decided to take Malachi out to breakfast. Darcy had promised to call her as soon as she heard whether the ballistics for Clive Walters’s gun matched the bullet pulled from Holt’s corpse. If so, she hoped Walters would simply confess. Jordan didn’t have anything pressing until she was due at the marina at nine for the telephone interview with Bob’s historian friend regarding her sighting of the ghost ship. That left her with a couple of hours of rare peace and quiet in which to gather her thoughts and gain some perspective.

She shook her head while she hunted for Malachi’s leash. What a crackpot Walters had turned out to be. Who in his right mind murdered to keep a ghost on the premises to haunt a business, because it was good for the bottom line? Then again, maybe Walters’s reasoning wasn’t all that different from others who had killed for money.

For some reason, though, she felt bugged by the whole situation. All of the recent events—Holt’s discovering historic documents in the wall of the hotel suite, diving to retrieve sunken treasure off the Henrietta Dale , his murder, Walters’s subsequent frantic hunt for those documents—hinged on the events in 1893 leading up to Michael Seavey’s murder. And she still didn’t have a handle on everything that had happened back then. In fact, given how thin the historical sources were for that particular time frame, she might never know.

What had happened to the survivors of the shipwreck? Had Seavey been transported alive back to Port Chatham? If so, and if he had been murdered afterward, why didn’t he remember the time between his rescue and when he was killed? And why did Sam Garrett feel the need to protect the identity of the man he saw shoot Holt?

She yanked open drawers and stopped to peer into cupboards, trying to remember where she’d last stashed the leash. “Where’s your leash?” she asked Malachi.

He gave her The Look. “Roooo.”

“Helpful,” she said, then resumed her hunt.

If Walters was the killer, it seemed to her that her first order of business was to confirm some kind of connection between him and Garrett. She’d found no evidence that Walters could actually see ghosts. As far as she knew, Garrett had nothing to do with the Cosmopolitan Hotel. Which meant Jase might be correct that the connection could be familial. As he’d pointed out, even murderers had families.

She shoved the last drawer shut and straightened to stare at the kitchen while she mulled over that possibility. Both men undoubtedly suffered from mental instability, though in actuality, their formal diagnoses would be quite different: Garrett was clearly a sociopath, while Walters exhibited symptoms of extreme paranoia. Still, a history of inherited mental instability could be indicative of a family connection.

She also needed to see if she could find any further mention of Seavey’s murder. All of which meant she should keep reading through the historical documents she’d filched from the Historical Society.

Finally spying Malachi’s leash on top of the stove—how the hell had it gotten there ?—she tucked Eleanor’s memoir and the pages from Captain Williams’s diary under one arm, whistled for Malachi, then headed out the back door.

Though high clouds provided a pale gray cover, the temperature was mild, making for a pleasant walk to their favorite French restaurant. The prospect of a sinfully rich and filling breakfast, caffé breve , and a relaxed perusal of The New York Times struck her as the definition of pure bliss. She owed it to herself, she rationalized, to spend at least some time on those pleasurable pursuits before she cracked open Eleanor’s memoir, which she felt certain would make her want to pull her hair out.