“I wondered when someone would come,” he said. “My office, if you don’t mind? I’d prefer not to discuss this where others might overhear.”
His office was exactly what you’d expect—dark wood, theological volumes, and a window overlooking the cemetery. He gestured for us to sit in the worn leather chairs across from his desk.
“You’re investigating the murders.”
The words hung in the air like incense, heavy with the weight of decades of silence.
“We’re reviewing cold cases,” Dash said carefully.
Sutton moved to the desk, running his fingers along the worn wood. “George worked here for fifteen years. Every sermon, every wedding, every funeral planned at this desk.” He paused, looking at the wall that separated this office from the next. “George spent hours in that office. I could hear him through the heating vent, practicing his sermons over and over. Same passages, different inflections, trying to find just the right tone of righteousness.”
He moved to a filing cabinet that might have been here since Wesley himself walked the earth, its brass handles worn smooth by generations of searching hands. “He was meticulous about some things, careless about others. Which is why I have this.
“George Pickering was my mentor.” He drew out a composition book, the kind children use for spelling tests, its marbled cover faded to the color of weak tea. “Brilliant preacher. Complicated man. Terrible at keeping the confidences he’d been entrusted with.”
The notebook felt fragile in my hands, as if the secrets inside had weight enough to crumble the pages to dust. Sutton watched me hold it with the expression of someone handing over a loaded weapon.
“I found this tucked behind his commentary on Romans—ironic, considering what Paul had to say about judgment.” His laugh was dry as communion wafers. “I’ve kept it all these years, like a splinter under the skin. Too deep to dig out, too painful to ignore.”
The pages whispered against each other as I opened it, releasing the ghost of Pickering’s cologne—something pine scented and aggressive, the kind of aftershave that announced a man before he entered a room. His handwriting cramped across the pages like ants at a picnic, organized and relentless.
“He collected secrets,” Sutton said. “The way other men collect stamps or coins. Every confession, every whispered shame, every sin that walked through his office door—he wrote it all down.”
The entries read like a catalog of human frailty.
Margaret C. keeps a bank account in Charleston. Her husband thinks she’s visiting her sister. She’s visiting her husband’s brother. The Whitmore boy isn’t theirs by blood. Bought from a girl in Savannah, fifteen years ago. Cash transaction. They burned the real birth certificate. Judge Prioleau takes bribes. Not money—favors. Has a ledger of who owes what. Keeps it in his mother’s Bible.
Each entry was dated, annotated, cross-referenced. George Pickering had been building a map of Grimm Island’s sins, and everyone was marked on it.
“Good Lord,” I breathed, then caught myself. “Sorry. It’s just?—”
“Appalling?” Sutton supplied. “George confused knowledge with power, and power with godliness. He thought holding these secrets made him indispensable. Instead, it made him dangerous. I wouldn’t normally turn these over because as pastors, we do hear things from congregants that are kept in strictest of confidence. But there are certain things we would be obligated to report on if there were murder or child abuse for instance. I figured after so many years have passed that most of these people are gone and the stakes aren’t quite so high. I trust you’ll keep this in confidence?”
“Confidence is the nature of my business too,” Dash assured him. “But this will give us a good place to start. The investigators didn’t have this information back then.”
“Well, with Milton in charge it probably wouldn’t have mattered,” Sutton said. “Maybe I was meant to keep it all these years for exactly this moment.”
An entry from late August caught my eye, the handwriting more erratic, pressing so hard the pen had torn through in places.
Ruby knows about this journal. Saw me writing in it. Now she’s scared—not of me, but FOR me. Says I’m playing with fire, that some secrets on this island have teeth and claws. She wants us to leave, start over somewhere else, but I could never leave June. It would ruin me. She would ruin me. God help me, I don’t know what to do anymore.
The final entry was scrawled like a confession of its own, dated September 14, 1985—the day before they died.
I can’t shake the feeling I’m being watched. Ruby feels it too. She’s terrified, keeps looking over her shoulder. Says she saw someone following her home from work yesterday, but when she turned around no one was there. We’re meeting at Turtle Point tomorrow night. She says we need to talk about leaving, about disappearing before it’s too late. Maybe she’s right. Maybe I’ve been playing God for too long, collecting sins like baseball cards. Maybe it’s time to run.
“He was paranoid at the end,” Dash observed.
Sutton nodded slowly. “George had made so many enemies with this journal. Any one of the people he’d documented would have had motive to silence him. And Ruby—poor Ruby knew about the journal. That knowledge alone made her a target.”
As we prepared to leave, Sutton caught my arm with fingers that felt like bird bones.
“There was a witness,” he said quietly. “At Turtle Point the night they died. Elsie Crawford—chronic insomniac, walked her dog at ungodly hours. She saw something that night, told the police, but Milton dismissed her testimony. Said she was unreliable, prone to fantasies.”
He wrote down an address in Charleston, his penmanship as precise as his sermons. “She’s at Magnolia Gardens now—the assisted-living place. Her mind wanders sometimes, gets lost in the past. But when she’s clear, she remembers that night like it was yesterday. Says what she saw is burned into her memory.”
“What did she see?” I asked.
Sutton shook his head. “I only know what she told me years later—that she saw George and Ruby at Turtle Point, and that someone else was there too. But Milton buried her statement, never followed up. You’ll have to ask her yourself.
