Deadly Intentions Read online

  “Another thing I was wondering …” Luke hesitated, his voice trailing off.

  Jolene raised her left brow. “Yeah?”

  “How well do you know your Aunt Eliza?”

  “I don’t know her at all. None of us do. You probably know as much about her as we do at this point.”

  “Right. Morgan said you guys got a letter out of the blue.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Have you noticed her doing anything strange?” Luke asked. “I don’t mean to imply that she’s up to anything … I mean, I know she’s family and all, but it’s just that given the warning, I think you guys need to be extra careful.”

  Jolene thought about her aunt. The truth was, she did get a funny vibe from her, but it wasn’t anything she could explain.

  Her mind went back to the tour they’d given her on the first day and how it seemed like she was scoping the place out. Almost as if she was looking for something. Then again, maybe she was just sizing the place up to see what everything was worth—after all, she had as much right to the family heirlooms as Jolene and her sisters. And yesterday they’d found her coming up from the basement.

  “I’ll keep my eye on her,” Jolene said. She didn’t want to say anything negative about the woman unless she was sure.

  “Okay, in the meantime it might be wise for you girls to pair up and make sure you don’t go walking around alone.” Jake said. “You’ll be better able to protect yourselves if two of you are together.”

  Jolene shot him an angry glare. “Are you serious? I’m not bringing someone around with me all the time. Besides we each have our own businesses that we need to tend to.”

  “Jo, you know that the people Luke’s company deals with are real bad guys. You or your sisters could be hurt, or even killed.”

  “I know. I’ll be careful and I’m sure you guys will make sure Morgan, Fiona and Celeste are protected. But don’t forget I’m a trained detective and perfectly capable of handling myself. Plus I have a gun.” Jolene patted her purse, then slid off her desk. “And a job to do. So, if you’ll excuse me, I’ll be on my way. Alone.”

  Chapter Twelve

  Jebediah Powers was scraping barnacles off an old dinghy that rested upside down on two sawhorses when Jolene pulled into his driveway.

  “Hey, Jolene. What brings you here?”

  “Hi, Jeb.” Jolene got out of her car and came to stand beside him. Behind them were deep, dense woods. Jolene glanced into them uneasily, then chastised herself for feeling so skittish. She hoped she wasn’t getting paranoid now. “I came about the case you hired Jake and me for. I was wondering if you could tell me more about your traps.”

  Jeb stopped his work and brushed the back of his hand against his sweaty brow.

  “Well, like I told Jake, I drop my traps in the waters just east of the cove opening. Been settin’ my pots there for years.” A painful look crossed his face.

  “Uh huh.”

  “So, the other day I go out to check ‘em and I start pulling up the ropes and the lines are cut on most of the traps.”

  Jolene knew that lobster traps were set out on a rope that connected them to a buoy. The buoy floated above the water with the trap on the ocean floor. Lobstermen would grab the buoy with a gaffe and pull the trap up on a motorized pulley, then take out the lobsters, keep the ones that were legal size, bait the trap and throw it back in.

  “What makes you think Gordy did it, though? Maybe the line just broke,” she said.

  “The line didn’t just break. It was a clean cut. On purpose. Plus I had Billy dive down and all my pots were missin’ and most of the buoys were gone, too.” Jeb tilted his head and rubbed his chin. “‘Course they probably just floated out into the ocean with no traps to anchor them. Someone did it on purpose and Gordy’s the most likely suspect on-account-a the feud.”

  “Yeah, but it seems that’s a little drastic, doesn’t it? I mean, messing with a guy’s lobster traps is against the law. And neither of you ever went that far before, right?” As near as Jolene could remember the Powers-Ellis feud consisted mostly of pranks and practical jokes.

  Jeb shook his head. “Nope, we haven’t and our daddies never did, either. That’s why I’m so mad and I want proof. I lost almost all my traps, and the ones that weren’t gone didn’t even have any lobsters in ‘em … just a weird whale bone.”

  “Whale bone?”

  “Yeah some kind of whale jaw or maybe even a shark. You wanna see?”

  “Sure.”

  She followed Jeb over to a gray shed and watched while he wrestled the door open. He walked a few steps in, then reached up onto a shelf and pulled down a white bone about four inches long, the teeth still embedded.

  “You thought this was a whale jaw bone?” Jolene glanced incredulously at Jeb’s face as he nodded enthusiastically.

  She guessed he had flunked biology in school because it was a plain as day the jawbone she held in her hand wasn’t from any fish … it was from a human.

  ***

  Jeb was more than happy to hand the bone over to Jolene once she convinced him it was from something with two feet instead of two fins. Now, she just had to figure out what to do with it. She didn’t want to go back to the office in case Jake and Luke got all overprotective, but she didn’t trust the new sheriff, either.

  Luckily, she had a friend, Charlene Winters, who was now a rookie at the Noquitt Police Department. She glanced at her watch—she had just enough time to make a quick trip over to Charlene’s and still get home early enough to take that much-needed nap before dinner.

  Charlene lived in a doublewide mobile home in a well-kept trailer park. As Jolene approached the door, she noticed the mobile home was neat-as-a-pin. Flowers flanked the front in tidy rows and a colorful flag hung from the door. The smell of bacon, onions and beef hit Jolene and her stomach started grumbling as she waited for Charlene to open the door—it had been a long day and she’d forgotten to eat lunch.

  “Hey, Jo. What a pleasant surprise.” Charlene’s flushed face smiled at her from behind the screen door. She wrestled an oven mitt off her hand and pulled the door open.

  Jolene gave her old friend a hug, then stepped back to survey the food-stained white bib apron she wore. “Are you cooking something? It smells divine.”

  “Yes, come on in.” Charlene turned from the door and Jolene followed her to the small, bright kitchen. “I’m making beef bourguignon.”

  “Beef bourguignon? That sounds fancy.” Jolene eyed the cluster of pots and pans in the sink. “I didn’t know you were a gourmet cook.”

  Charlene laughed. “Are you kidding? You remember me in high school. I could barely make a peanut butter sandwich. But, once I moved out on my own, I got tired of peanut butter sandwiches pretty quick, so I took a cooking class at the college. It turns out that cooking fancy stuff is pretty easy.”

  “Really?” Jolene had never thought much about cooking—her sisters always made the meals. Maybe it was time she started pitching in.

  “Yeah. I’d invite you to stay, but it won’t be ready for another hour.”

  “That’s okay. My aunt is visiting and I should get home to have dinner with her. I just came by for a favor.”

  “Favor?” Charlene’s left brow ticked up.

  Jolene grimaced. She hated asking for favors, but she’d taught Charlene to shoot and that had helped her pass the police test, so Charlene owed her. She pulled the bone out of her pocket and held it up.

  Charlene gasped. “That’s part of a human jaw bone. Where did you get that?”

  “Jeb Powers found it in one of his lobster traps.”

  “Why didn’t he bring it to the police?”

  “He thought it was a whale bone!”

  Charlene’s eyes darted to Jolene’s face. “You’re kidding, right?”

  Jolene shrugged. “Nope.”

  “That’s crazy. Whales don’t have teeth like that.” Charlene took the bone and held it up, studying it from different angles. �
�It’s picked clean. Looks pretty old, too. I wonder how it got in the trap.”

  “I was wondering that, too. Maybe a lobster pulled it in or it floated in on the current. Anyway, it being there seems to indicate there’s a body somewhere out there on the ocean floor.”

  “It does at that.” Charlene said. “You should hand this to the police … officially, I mean.”

  Jolene’s stomach felt queasy. “I know, but seeing my history with the Noquitt police, I don’t really trust them to do the right thing … and this could be important to me. I’d feel better if you looked into it first.”

  “Me? Well, I can’t really do anything …”

  “Please,” Jolene cut in. “My mother died in those waters and her body was never found.”

  Charlene’s face turned sympathetic. Her eyes slid from Jolene to the bone and back again. “So what do you want me to do? Have it tested? I don’t know how much I can do without raising a red flag.”

  “I would be forever grateful if you would try.”

  “I guess I do owe you …” Charlene took a plastic baggie from a drawer and put the bone in it. “I’ll see what I can do without raising suspicions before I hand it over officially … but I’m not making any promises!”

  Chapter Thirteen

  Eliza pushed open the front door of the Blackmoore home and cocked her head to listen. The house was quiet, exactly as she’d hoped. She’d gotten her errands done early and even met with a few old friends, just like she’d told her nieces she was going to do … except these friends weren’t ones she wanted her nieces to know anything about.

  She knew the sisters worked during the day, which was why she’d rushed home. She had a job to do and it was best if she was left alone in the house to do it.

  Glancing back over her shoulder, she frowned at the Subaru parked in the driveway. Jolene’s car.

  Was Jolene home?

  No, the house was too quiet. Jolene and Celeste had probably gone out together in Celeste’s car after they dried off from their swim in the cove.

  Which made her frown even deeper. Just what did happen in the cove? Eliza had gotten a strange vibe from the girls. She knew they weren’t telling the truth, but why would they lie?

  She didn’t have an answer for that and couldn’t get sidetracked by trying to figure it out. She closed the door and stepped into the foyer, a hollow longing in her stomach.

  It looked almost exactly as it had when she’d lived here.

  Childhood memories flooded through her. She and her brother racing down the stairs. Her mother poking her head out of the kitchen to tell them to slow down.

  She’d lived in this house until she was twenty years old. Even after her brother had married and moved Johanna in, they’d lived happily here together. Once the kids came, though, she’d moved out on her own to give them some privacy. Still, they’d been close … until she’d been forced to move.

  No one, least of all her mother, had understood why she’d had to leave. Except Johanna. She could still remember the tortured look in her kind amber eyes the day they’d said good-bye.

  Eliza took a deep breath. No sense in reliving the past. It couldn’t be changed. Letting the breath out in a whoosh of air, she started up the stairs to the third floor.

  The third floor of the Blackmoore home was once the servants’ quarters back in the day when the family actually had servants. Now it was just a warren of rooms and alcoves that were filled with furniture, boxes and miscellaneous ‘stuff’. Nine generations of cast-offs were housed in the large space. Some valuable, some not so much.

  But one item up here was priceless … and that was the item Eliza was after.

  She stared into the cluttered space, inhaling the smell of old furniture. Dust tickled her nose. Light filtered through small windows in the dormers scattered along the length of the room. It was stuffy and hot. Eliza moved from the top step into the room.

  “Meow!”

  Eliza jumped, her shoulders tensing and her heart taking off like a racehorse. Then, her muscles relaxed when she saw the white cat at her feet looking up at her expectantly.

  “Jeez, Bella. You spooked me,” she whispered, then bent down to pet the cat who responded by rubbing her head against Eliza’s calf. A loud purr drifted up, soothing Eliza’s nerves.

  “So, where is it?” she asked the cat.

  As if understanding what Eliza wanted, Belladonna pivoted and flounced down the middle aisle toward the back of the room, where Eliza knew all the really old items were stored—even some things from the original owners, Isaiah and Mariah Blackmoore.

  Eliza followed at a more leisurely pace, taking time to look at the old furniture she remembered from her youth. She passed a mahogany marble top dresser with a large mirror in the center. A smile teased the corners of her mouth as she remembered herself as a little girl standing in front of that very mirror with her grandmother behind her, putting her hair in rag curls.

  A lot of the furniture that she remembered being in the house when she was little had been moved up here as the family expanded and replaced the old things with newer, modern furniture just as every generation before them had. You could find items lying around or stored in boxes that ranged from twenty to three hundred years old.

  Even the books spanned the centuries, Eliza thought, as the bookcase to the right caught her attention. She remembered that bookcase—it was where she’d found Isaiah Blackmoore’s journals years ago.

  With a start, she realized the books had been disturbed recently. She detoured toward the bookcase, bending down to look at the titles. Someone had definitely been looking at these books—they were all out of order and free from dust. Not only that, but the journals were missing.

  She pressed her lips together, a shallow feeling forming in the pit of her stomach. That meant that her nieces had read the journals. She wondered if they had been able to decipher them and how much the girls knew about Isaiah and Mariah Blackmoore and their unusual heritage.

  Sighing, she stood up. There was no time for that now. She was on a mission and she’d better complete it before the girls got home.

  She made her way out to the center aisle and started toward the back of the attic. Along the way, she stopped to run her fingertips lovingly over the carved mahogany top of a rocking chair that had been her mother’s. Her index finger traced the sharp edges of the floral pattern, her heart twisting as she remembered her mother sitting in the chair, rocking her as a child.

  “Meow!” Belladonna tore her from her thoughts and she nodded at the cat.

  “I know. I have work to do.”

  Giving the rocking chair one last caress, she ignored the salty tear that slipped from her eye as she followed the insistent cat further into the bowels of the attic.

  ***

  Creak.

  Jolene lay in a dinghy staring at the blue sky, listlessly drifting down the river that fed into the ocean at Noquitt beach. Mateo sat on the bench above her. Her guardian angel … or so she thought. He’d saved her from danger before, but why was he acting so cagey now? She was sure it was him she’d seen near her office, but why would he run?

  Creak.

  Clouds started to form in the sky above and Jolene suddenly felt cold. She shivered and Mateo looked down at her. But instead of his velvety brown eyes, they were red … glowing. He reached out toward her and she opened her mouth to scream.

  Creak.

  Jolene woke in a cold sweat, her heart pounding.

  A dream. It was only a dream.

  She lay still with her eyes squeezed shut while she waited for her heartbeat to return to normal. Her eyelids were as heavy as the lead sinkers she used for fishing and it was only a few minutes before she was drifting off to sleep again, the nightmare all but forgotten.

  Creak.

  What the hell was that noise? She burrowed into the soft bed. Just one more hour of sleep would be perfect.

  Creak.

  Jolene pushed an annoyed breath out through puffed ou
t cheeks as she flipped on her back, her eyes still shut, willing the annoying noise to stop so she could get some sleep.

  Creak.

  “Can’t a girl get a nap around here!” she shouted into the empty room. She considered pounding on the ceiling to get it to stop, then her eyes flew open wide.

  The noise was coming from the attic. Someone was up there.

  Who would be in the attic? One of her sisters? Jolene didn’t think so. Although they’d made the trip up there on more than one occasion during the past few years, they’d always had a good reason and even though they’d found quite a few treasures up there, the attic still seemed creepy to Jolene.

  They’d all been warned by their mother when they were little not to go there, and even though they’d had to go up in recent years, they still had an unspoken pact that they’d let the others know if they were going up.

  So, it couldn’t be one of her sisters. Which left only one other person.

  Aunt Eliza.

  Jolene reluctantly got out of bed. She was still dressed in her usual outfit of t-shirt and capris. She’d taken off her shoes for her nap, but didn’t bother to put them on. It would be easier to sneak up on whoever was in the attic that way.

  She made her way to the third floor and started picking her way through the maze of boxes and furniture. The creaking had sounded like it was right above her room, which meant Eliza, or whoever was up there, was in the far corner of the attic.

  Her photographic memory had catalogued the areas on the floor that creaked on one of her previous trips up there and she avoided those areas now, moving along silently. Not that she was planning a sneak attack or anything, but if Eliza didn’t know anyone else was up there, Jolene might have a better chance of figuring out what she was up to.

  Eliza was in the very back of the attic, bent over, her head inside a large box, her silver-white hair hanging down around her like a curtain. Items, presumably discarded from the box, were piled up around her. It was obvious the woman was searching for something.