“Okay, I believe you,” she said.
“I’m greatly relieved.” His tone was wry. “However, I must insist that you make a point of notifying Seavey at once, and informing him of what you have learned. I grow weary from the inconvenience of avoiding him on the waterfront.”
She suspected it was more than that, but she didn’t want to push him any more than she had. “All right. You have my word that I will inform him sometime later today.”
Garrett shook his head. “Unfortunately, I don’t believe your word is sufficient. You see, I’ve always found that when threatened, people will do or say whatever they need to, to remain alive.” He stood, then placed his hands on the table, leaning over her. “You have twenty-four hours to do as I bid, or I will return to eliminate those you consider your friends, including this mutt. Do you understand?”
She swallowed. “Yes, I understand.”
He straightened, nodding. “Good. If you do as I request, this will be the last you see of me.”
“Thank God for that,” she muttered as he turned to fade away. With shaking hands, she picked up her bill and pulled out money to cover it.
“You’re as white as a sheet!” Marietta exclaimed as she came over to remove the plates. “Are you all right? My food didn’t give you indigestion, did it?”
“No.” Jordan mustered a thin smile. “Your food was delicious as always. It was just something I read—it made me lose my appetite.”
But as she walked back to Longren House, stopping frequently to kneel and hug Malachi, she suddenly realized her distress was partially caused by something she had read. Something that was even more shocking and horrifying than what she’d just endured.
She had a strong hunch she knew who had killed Michael Seavey after all.
Chapter 20
AFTER leaving Malachi in the care of Jase and Tom, she got into the Prius and headed for the marina. She needed to find Charlotte and ask her some pointed questions, but they would have to wait—she was running late for her appointment with Bob.
On the drive down, she was so distracted by her thoughts that she failed to take in any of the scenery. She did manage to avoid plowing through a couple of coach-and-fours, but otherwise, her mind was still focused on what she’d read and learned from Garrett over breakfast.
Michael Seavey had, in all likelihood, been the unconscious man the crew had taken off the Henrietta Dale in the first moments after the ship’s grounding. So it stood to reason that he’d been transported back to Port Chatham for medical treatment, and that he wouldn’t have remembered the trip. It also followed that if he had suffered from any sort of concussion, he could have remained unconscious for days. But she didn’t believe he’d survived that long.
Before leaving the house, she’d double-checked the date of the newspaper article in the library that Hattie had shown her that first night, the one recounting Seavey’s murder. The article had been dated just two days after the shipwreck, which in reality worked out to be little more than thirty-six hours after Seavey would have been brought back to town.
The Henrietta Dale had run aground late on the night of August 5, 1893, which meant that by the time Seavey reached Port Chatham for treatment, it had to have been the morning of the sixth. Which, in turn, meant that the murderer could have killed Seavey and dumped his body amid the chaos. It wasn’t a stretch to believe that his body wouldn’t have been noticed until the morning of August 7. The timeline worked.
And it would have been relatively simple to murder him, after all. The killer merely needed to be someone whose presence the rescue workers wouldn’t have questioned, who made it a point of being in charge of transporting the unconscious Seavey to a doctor’s infirmary. Once he had Seavey out of sight, it would have been easy to shoot him and dump his body under the wharf. All under the cover of darkness, if the killer had waited until that evening.
She pulled up in front of the Wooden Boat Society headquarters and killed the engine. Following a chattering group of tourists inside, she waited impatiently for them to move aside so that she could walk into Bob’s office. The sooner she got this call over with, the sooner she could go home and verify her suspicions with Charlotte.
“Sorry I’m late,” she said to Bob. “Has your friend called yet?”
“Nope.” He looked up from what appeared to be a mock-up of a brochure about the upcoming boat festival. “You’re good. When you didn’t arrive right on time, I sent him a brief email, asking him to delay his call by fifteen minutes, just in case.”
Jordan sat down across from him at the desk. “How do you want this to work? Do you want to put him on speaker, so that we can both talk to him?”
“Why don’t we see what his preference is?” Bob replied. “I hear you had another visitor at your house last night.”
“Yeah, Clive Walters.” She gave him a brief recap. “Darcy and I think he might have murdered Holt and broke into my house looking for the documents, because he was trying to keep Seavey around as a ghost to improve business.”
Bob leaned back in his chair, raising both brows. “Really? That’s pretty crazy.”
“Yeah, I thought so. We won’t know for certain until Darcy—” Her cellphone rang, cutting her off. “That’s probably her right now. Excuse me.”
She stood up and walked a few feet away, pressing the screen with her thumb to answer the call. “Tell me he’s our guy,” she said without preamble.
“I don’t know whether he is or not,” Darcy said, sounding tired and exasperated.
“You’re kidding me.”
“No. The ballistics on the gun match, but he’s lawyered up and not talking. Several guests also swear he never left the winetasting event that evening, and they would have no reason to lie for him. So if he slipped out, I can’t figure out how or when. And he’s definitely not confessing to the murder—only to wanting to stop you from getting hold of the documents you needed to solve Seavey’s murder. He’s claiming I’m protecting you and that you killed Holt.”
Jordan stared out the window at the neat rows of expensive power boats and yachts in the marina. “So other than the sheer insanity of his faulty mental processing,” she said slowly, thinking it through, “that means someone else might have planted the gun.”
“Tragically, yes. I freaking hate this case. As of now, I’m concentrating on Sally as a Person of Interest, because she has the strongest motive. That could evaporate, though, if her ISP verifies that she was using email at the time of Holt’s murder.” Darcy sighed. “I don’t suppose you remember the last time you were in the library?”
“No, not really … maybe that morning? I was gone all that afternoon and evening. And the house was wide-open. Anyone could have put the gun there.”
“Yeah, you wouldn’t want to lock your doors when you leave,” Darcy said sarcastically.
“Hey.”
“Sorry, I’m a little testy.” Jordan heard her fiddle with some papers on her desk. “I can’t believe I’m asking this, but can you question the ghosts and see if any of them know anything or saw anything? We could use the information to point us to the right person.”
“I can ask, though they disappear with alarming regularity,” Jordan replied. “One of these days I’m going to ask them where they go. Not, mind you, that I’m sure I really want to know.”
“Well, get back to me as soon as you can, will you? I’m booking Walters on the attempted robbery, but a lawyer will have him back on the streets within hours.”
“I’ll call you as soon as I know anything.” She ended the call. “Sorry about that,” she said, turning. “That was Darcy, as I suspected.”