“The Pickering–Bailey murders,” Dash said carefully.
The transformation in Bea was instant. Her theatrical manner dropped like a discarded costume, and for a moment, I saw the woman underneath—someone who’d lived through enough history to know which parts of it still had teeth.
“Ruby Bailey and Reverend Pickering,” she said slowly, as if tasting the names after years of not speaking them. “Lord, I haven’t thought about them in ages.” She helped herself to one of the apple turnovers Dash had brought, but her usual enthusiasm for pilfered pastries was absent. “Ruby cleaned my house on Thursdays. Every Thursday for three years, until…”
“You knew her?” Dash asked.
“Everyone knew Ruby, one way or another. She cleaned half the houses on the island—the big ones, the ones that belonged to the old families.” Bea settled into a chair with unusual solemnity. “She was married to Jimmy Thorne for a couple of years. Long enough to have a kid with him. But he was an abusive womanizer, and she left him and moved back home with her mother. Took the kid with her.”
The name fell into the conversation like a stone into still water, sending ripples through the quiet shop.
“Jimmy Thorne was rotten through and through,” Bea continued. “Used to knock Ruby around when he’d been drinking, which was most nights. But he had an alibi for the murder—was sleeping it off in the county lockup. Drunk and disorderly, as usual.”
Thorne. One of the old island families, the ones whose names were on streets and buildings and memorial plaques all over town. The Thornes had owned the marina before selling it to developers in the nineties, had run the ferry service before the bridge was built, had their fingers in every pie on the island until those pies started running out.
“Ruby was a beautiful woman,” Bea continued. “And she wasn’t afraid to use what the good Lord gave her. If it was me I would’ve picked someone wealthy and old enough to die and leave me all his money. But she picked George Pickering—a preacher with no money and a wife. I guess she didn’t get brains to go along with her beauty.”
“What was the boy’s name?” Dottie asked. “I remember he had the biggest eyes I’ve ever seen.”
“Good grief, Dottie,” Bea said. “Take your B12 vitamins. How can you not remember Michael Bailey?”
“Hush up, Bea. I know who Michael Bailey is. I just couldn’t remember his name for a minute. I remember the important things and that’s what matters.”
“Michael Bailey,” I said and then looked at Dash. “He runs the funeral home.”
Michael was a quiet man who’d probably buried half the island over the past twenty years, including Patrick. I remembered him from the funeral—professional, composed, with the kind of practiced sympathy that came from dealing with grief as a daily occupation.
“Poor thing was only ten when his mama died,” Bea said. “Can you imagine? Growing up knowing someone did that to your mother and got away with it? I can’t believe he stayed on the island. That’s a hard thing to carry around your whole life—people looking at you and remembering the scandal.”
I couldn’t imagine. Didn’t want to.
The morning was slipping away from me. The lunch crowd would start arriving soon—the ladies who ordered their Darjeeling and cucumber sandwiches—the business people grabbing quick takeout—the tourists looking for authentic island atmosphere.
“I should let you get back to work,” Dash said, but he made no move to leave.
“You’re leaving the box,” I observed.
“I thought you might want to look through it,” he said carefully. “You have a different perspective. You know the families, the connections that someone like me—someone not from here—might miss.”
It was true. Being an outsider on Grimm Island was like trying to read a book where half the words were written in invisible ink. You could see the obvious story, but the real narrative, the one that mattered, was hidden in the spaces between—in the feuds that went back generations, the marriages that connected unlikely families, the secrets that everyone knew but no one discussed.
“I’ll call the others,” Dottie said, meaning the rest of the Silver Sleuths. Since the Calvert case, they’d considered themselves an official investigative unit. “Walt will want to know about this. He’s probably got seventeen conspiracy theories about the Pickering–Bailey murders already.”
“Just seventeen?” I asked. “He’s slipping.”
As Dash prepared to leave—he had a meeting with the mayor about budget allocations, which sounded about as pleasant as a root canal performed by an angry dentist—he paused at the door.
“Dinner tonight?” he asked, and it was phrased as a question but felt like a foregone conclusion. We’d fallen into this rhythm without ever formally acknowledging it—three, sometimes four nights a week, he’d show up at my door with takeout from various restaurants, we’d spread case files across my dining room table, and somewhere between the sweet-and-sour chicken and the second glass of wine, we’d stop talking about murder and start talking about everything else.
“I’ll cook,” I offered, surprising myself. I’d been subsisting on takeout and tea shop leftovers for so long that my kitchen had started to feel more like a museum exhibit than a functional room.
“What are you making?” he asked, arching a brow.
“It’s a surprise,” I said, because I had no idea. I’d figure that out during the lunch rush, while making sandwiches and serving tea and pretending not to be thinking about a murder that happened when I was negative six years old.
After he left, I stood looking at the evidence box on my counter. It sat there like a portal to 1985, to a time when someone had killed two people and arranged their bodies like dolls, had cut out a woman’s tongue to make a point that apparently still needed making four decades later.
Chowder waddled over, his sailor hat slightly askew, and looked up at me with those bulging eyes that somehow managed to convey both unconditional love and deep skepticism about my life choices.
