I sat down at the large glass table, the room full of plants and water features. There was fruit, wine and cheese out already with a white-jacketed waiter standing nearby. “Apology accepted. May I go home now?”
“But my dear mayor, I’m so looking forward to having lunch with you. And there are some—discrepancies we should discuss before you go running back to get Chief Michaels out here.”
“What discrepancies?”
“Please, have some fruit. Pablo, my chef, is making us a wonderful quiche with fresh-baked bread. The wine is made from muscadines. I’m sure you’ll enjoy it.”
“I’m not really hungry.”
He stopped pandering and sighed. “You drive a hard bargain, Ms. O’Donnell. You’re just like your grandmother. Eleanore was a force to be reckoned with. I mourned her passing. She was so young. Is your mother like her?”
“My mother died a long time ago. I guess the women in my family don’t live long.”
“What a pity!” He shook his grizzled head. “As to those discrepancies, I’m not responsible for Max Caudle’s death. I can’t even imagine someone firing a cannon in this day and age. What an odd way to kill someone.”
“And Sam Meacham?”
“I’m afraid I had something to do with that, but not what you’re thinking. It happened with the best of intentions. I sent Roger to offer Sam someplace to hide until Max’s killer was found. He knew Roger since he’d been on the island with Max. Unfortunately, he took it the wrong way and jumped off the boat I’d sent for him. He had this odd notion that I wanted to kill him.”
He took a sip of the red wine in his glass. “My men tried to bring him back, but he swam away and they lost him. I heard his body washed up. Terrible thing. I truly meant him no harm.”
“Mr. Whitley, doesn’t it strike you as odd that your men meant no harm, but they kidnapped me? And they accidentally lost Sam at sea? I think there may be more going on than you think. Maybe you didn’t fire that cannon, but maybe one of your men did.”
“I don’t believe that’s true. But I’ll tell you what I know and we’ll see what comes of it—if you’ll have lunch with me and share Duck news. There’s a price to be paid for everything. This one isn’t too steep, I think.”
I agreed to lunch. What choice did I have? Maybe something he said would make sense and I’d be able to take it back to Chief Michaels. I grabbed a peach and cut a slice off with my knife. “All right. I’d like to meet the man who lost Sam at sea.”
“Of course.” He nodded at the waiter. “Roger has worked for me for years. He’d never kill anyone—unless it was an absolute necessity. And then never without my permission.”
Roger was summoned to our table, where he repeated the story—almost word for word—that Bunk had told me about Sam’s death being an accident. Both men looked at me, and Bunk asked me if I had any other questions. Only a fool wouldn’t know when they were caught between a cutlass and a dagger. I wasn’t going to get anything useful from them.
“A lot of bad things happen around you, Mr. Whitley. Like Wild Johnny’s death.”
“Please call me Bunk.” He stared off for a few seconds and smiled. “Wild Johnny Simpson. I haven’t thought of him in a very long time. I left him at the Blue Whale that night, completely alive, I assure you. He was going to take care of the property for me since the FBI had convinced me to leave town.”
“The FBI?”
“No. Not another question until I ask one of mine—what is Kevin Brickman like? I know a little about him. I would, of course, since I sold him the Blue Whale. But that was through my agent. Does he seem like the type to run an inn? I can’t imagine an ex-FBI agent cooking and cleaning.”
I told him about Kevin and all the work he’d done on the Blue Whale. “He’s even taking in all the historical items for the new museum. I think he makes a good innkeeper. You should try his lasagna sometime.”
“That’s right. The little museum blew up. Remind me before you leave to give you a handful of coins for the collection. I never got rid of the rest of the gold I found when I was young. There’s not much market for pirate gold, you know.”
“So the FBI asked you to leave Duck,” I said, reminding him where we were.
“Yes. They offered me a new name and a place to live for information I gave them about a gang of smugglers working in the area. I was small potatoes compared to them. I took them up on it for a while, but I could never live under the radar that way. I traveled to Europe and around the world a few times. I finally came back here. I want to die close to home, you see. I knew I couldn’t actually live in Duck again—no one would leave me in peace. Being here is very much like being at home.”
“And you gave Max more recent gold for his wife’s surgery a few years back.”
“It’s my turn.” He smiled at me like a kid waiting for ice cream. “How’s Millie doing? I hated when I heard Lizzie was killed. Is Millie still the ‘it’ girl she always was? That woman knew how to get under my skin.”
“I’m not sure about the ‘it’ part, but she’s doing fine. I thought you were in love with Miss Elizabeth, not Miss Mildred.”
He laughed and I could see something of the ladies’ man he had been all his life. “I loved them both. Never could choose between them.”
“And the gold for Agnes’s surgery?”
“You have it all wrong, Mayor. I gave Max gold for my daughter’s open-heart surgery. Max was a good man. He took good care of Agnes—better than I did. I wouldn’t have harmed a hair on his head.”
Now that was a story I’d never heard before. “Agnes Caudle is your daughter?”
Pablo served the cheese quiche and fragrant, homemade bread with little flower-shaped pats of butter. Bunk thanked him, then smiled as he buttered some bread and handed it to me. “Wait until you try this. You won’t believe how good it is.”
I waited impatiently for his answer to my question. The quiche set before me smelled almost as good as the bread.
“Agnes is my biological daughter. She doesn’t know it. When I heard she and Max were having trouble finding the money for her surgery, I brought him out here and gave him the gold. I wasn’t there for her when she was growing up. Not entirely my fault, but I wanted to do this thing for her.”
“How can she not know you’re her father?” I knew Floyd Reynolds, Agnes’s father. Did he know Agnes wasn’t his daughter?
“Agnes’s mother was Adelaide. Beautiful Adelaide. She was my soul mate. She and I were very much in love, but she was married. Back then divorce was a big deal, and Adelaide cared for Floyd and wouldn’t hurt him by leaving. She was a wonderfully kind woman. Could never even stand to kill a spider. She never told her husband that Agnes was my daughter. I trusted Max with that secret. He was the only one besides Adelaide and me who knew.”
“If Adelaide was married to Floyd, how did she know you were Agnes’s father?”
“There was a genetic marker. Nothing big. We could’ve done a paternity test, but it didn’t matter. We knew Agnes was my little girl. But Adelaide didn’t trust me to be the kind of father she knew Floyd would be.”
“And then Adelaide killed herself because of you.”
He sat up straighter in his wheelchair, shock and disbelief in his lined face. “What are you saying? Adelaide drowned. It was an accident. She didn’t kill herself.”
“I’m sorry.” I played with my linen napkin. I hadn’t realized it was a secret. “I guess you didn’t know. She took her own life.”