A Touch of Gold (16 page)

“What about the pirate curse?” Joe Endy asked, raising his raspy voice to be heard in the room. “Rafe Masterson paid Max a visit, I’ll be bound. He took his gold back too. Nothing much you can do about it, Chief.”

“And I wouldn’t even try, Mr. Endy,” Chief Michaels told him. “Folks, I’m here to tell you that no pirate ghost is responsible for what happened to Max. I know all of you, some since you were kids. I like a good yarn as much as the next one, but that’s all Rafe Masterson is. A real flesh-and-blood killer is responsible for Max’s death and the mayor being injured. That scares me a hell of a lot more than any pirate ghost.”

Mr. Endy didn’t look too pleased with the chief’s statement. People usually humored the ninety-year-old around here. The chief had been a little blunt by Duck standards.

“So if it’s a real person responsible,” began Cody Baucum, one of the owners of the Wild Stallions bar and grill on the boardwalk, “do we have any leads about who it is?”

“We’re checking out every aspect of the situation,” Chief Michaels replied.

“In other words, no,” August Grandin said. He owned the General Store. “That’s police speak for we don’t know, right, Chief?”

The room kind of got out of control for a minute. I banged my gavel a few times and people began to settle down. I noticed Agnes Caudle in the back of the room as she slowly got to her feet. Seeing her there, the crowd quieted.

“I’d like to thank Chief Michaels and his officers as well as the members of the Duck Volunteer Fire Department for everything they’ve done. Max is gone, but he believed in this town. He wouldn’t want what happened to tear us apart. We have good people here, and they do the best job they can. Shame on any of you who don’t support them. That’s all I came to say.”

Agnes sat back down, wiping her eyes. She and Max had two daughters, who now sat on either side of their mother. I knew both of them from school. One was a little older than me and the other a little younger. I didn’t get along with either one of them.

“Thank you, Agnes,” Chief Michaels said, acknowledging her. “That means a lot to me and the rest of the department. We’ll find out what happened to the museum, but it’s gonna take some time. You all are gonna have to be patient and let the procedures work.”

Kevin got to his feet. I hadn’t noticed him there. “I believe you’re doing what you can, Chief. I’d like to suggest we begin thinking of ways to rebuild the museum. If we really want to do something for Max, it seems like that would be what he’d want.”

Everyone seemed to agree with his idea. Kevin offered to let the town use free space he had at the Blue Whale to store donations for the new museum. Vergie Smith, Duck’s postmaster, volunteered to collect donations to be used for a new building that would house the artifacts.

We all agreed to hold a memorial for Max at a time and date to be announced. I called the meeting to an end, and people began to leave, slowly since they had plenty to say to their neighbors and wanted to wish Agnes well.

Everyone seemed in better spirits now that there was something concrete and positive to do rather than just waiting to hear what was going on in the investigation. People always feel better when they have a plan of action. I thought the chief had done a good job of dispelling the pirate-ghost theory and I told him so.

“Thanks, ma’am. But you know there’ll be somebody who brings it up again. I think it’s easier for folks around here to accept that ghosts are responsible than it is for them to accept that a real person could’ve done this. By the way, I got an interesting call from Chief Peabody out in Corolla today. Seems he thinks you and Brickman were down there snooping around. Were you looking for Sam?”

“Something’s happened,” I confessed a little. “We didn’t find Sam, but we found a scooter he rented to go out and see the wild horses. He had someone with him when he left on the trip, but there was no sign of either of them near where we found the scooter. I asked Chief Peabody to check it out. He didn’t seem too happy about it.”

“I’ve told you before, Mayor, no one likes a person messing with their investigation. Sam might be a suspect in our situation, but his disappearance has to be handled by the Corolla police. You and Brickman need to stay out of it before you get in trouble. Walt Peabody isn’t as indulgent as I am.”

I’d never thought of Chief Michaels as
indulgent
, but I kind of agreed with him about Chief Peabody, especially given Peabody’s frosty reception of Kevin and me this afternoon. I glanced around the room, looking for Kevin—he seemed to be gone already. I didn’t see Shayla either. Best not to go there.

Instead, I helped Nancy clean up and put away all the extra chairs as people ambled back to their homes and businesses.

“Kevin was good tonight, huh?” Nancy asked. “He made people think about something they could do instead of everything they couldn’t do. I’ll have to look through my Duck memorabilia and see what I have. I think this is something we could all get behind.”

“And maybe the chief will solve the case while we get behind it,” I added.

Councilman Wilson coughed as he wandered up behind me. “I hope there are no hard feelings, Dae. You know I think the world of you and your grandfather. But politics is a tough business. You had it easy the first time around. It could get ugly this time. Better think before you take me on.”

It was a mystery to me why Mad Dog Wilson would give up his voting privileges on the council to be the mayor. I didn’t bother asking. I knew I’d find out at some point. Instead, I smiled at him—my big, mayoral smile. “With all respect, Councilman Wilson, you might want to think again before you take
me
on.”

Wilson nodded in an absent manner, wandering away as he always did, examining the chairs and tabletops for dust. Clearly he hadn’t expected me to talk back.

Nancy laughed. “You set him back a peg or two.”

“The incumbent is hard to beat. At least that’s what I’ve always heard.”

“That’s the spirit.”

“Speaking of spirits, I was wondering if you’d be willing to do some research for me?” I told her what I knew about Adelaide and her death.

“So we’d be looking for someone named Adelaide who drowned on the Atlantic side.” She wrote down the name on a scrap piece of paper. “Any other info you can give me?”

“No. That’s all I have. I think this would’ve been in the 1950s. But I’m not sure about that either.”

“I’ll be happy to research that, sweetie. You know how I love a mystery.”

The parking lot and the streets were mostly empty by the time I finished helping Nancy and left town hall. She offered me a ride home, but I wanted to walk. I waved to her as she pulled out on Duck Road.

I wasn’t worried about Mad Dog Wilson. I knew Max’s death and the destruction of the museum on my watch probably made him think I was vulnerable. He might be right, and he might even win the election. The one thing I had learned as mayor was that you could order more trucks of sand to build up the dunes, but you couldn’t save Duck from the people who live here. And people were as unpredictable as the Atlantic.

I walked down to the spot where the museum had been, hoping to find some clue I’d missed that had been left behind by the thorough investigation. Not a single piece of wood, artifact or rock was there. Only the bare concrete pad, blackened by shadows and the fire, remained as mute testimony that the museum had once stood there.

It would’ve been a good time to contact Max’s ghost—I had no doubt it was hovering close by his favorite spot. Maybe he had some idea about what had happened. Maybe he even knew who’d killed him. If wishing could make it happen, one of those shadows chasing the breeze would be him and he would tell me what I needed to know.

But I wasn’t Shayla, and even if I were, it wouldn’t necessarily mean I could contact him. The dead seemed to like to keep their own secrets, leaving us to discover them as best we could.

I walked back home to find Gramps in his chair with his feet up. He was watching
Dancing with the Stars
—one of his favorite shows. My mother had told me that he and Grandma had loved to dance when they were younger. They had even won several trophies. “Well?” he asked when he saw me.

I filled him in on what happened during the meeting—and after.

He laughed. “I guess Mad Dog thought he could get you to give up early before he had to work too hard.”

“Why does everyone call him Mad Dog? He seems pretty tame to me.”

“He used to be a stock car driver. He was fearless—until his car caught fire after a wreck. He was in pretty bad shape for a while. Never raced again. Maybe that’s why he went into insurance.”

“Well, I don’t plan to give up. He might beat me, though, if we can’t figure out what happened to Max. You know he’ll use that against me.”

“Ronnie will figure it out,” he assured me, eyes on the figures dancing across the TV screen again. “You’ll see.”

“Thanks.” I kissed his cheek. “Good night, Gramps.”

“Good night, honey. Sleep tight.”

I had just started up the stairs to my room when there was a loud knock on the front door. Being mayor meant my office moved to my home after hours, giving any resident the opportunity to call or drop by. Mostly to complain. “I’ll get it.”

I opened the front door to find both Chief Michaels and Chief Peabody on my doorstep, their police cars in the drive. Brad Spitzer, the arson investigator, was with them too. “Better put on some coffee, Gramps,” I said, turning back into the living room. “It looks like it could be a long night.”

Chapter 11

T
he five of us sat around the kitchen table with mugs of coffee and a platter of stale donuts. It was all I had to offer. I didn’t want to run to the grocery store—I was pretty sure they weren’t here to eat.

Chief Michaels and Chief Peabody glanced at each other as they came in, sat down and put their caps on the table. I noticed, despite the other differences, that both men took their coffee black—and wisely decided against a donut.

“I’ll get straight to the point,” Chief Peabody started. “I don’t know what you were doing out in Corolla today, Mayor O’Donnell, but we haven’t been able to find any trace of Sam Meacham. There’s been no record of his credit cards being used after he rented the Segway. No trace of him doing anything since the day after the Duck museum blew up.”

“On the other hand,” Chief Michaels cut in, “we found out today that the cannon from the Corolla Historical Museum
is
the weapon used to destroy our museum.”

Both men looked at Brad, who had helped himself to a donut and was dunking it into his coffee, which was heavily laced with cream and sugar. “Sorry,” he muttered with a full mouth.

He wiped powdered sugar on his napkin. “Yes. The results show that the piece of cannonball we found in the museum here matches the cannonballs used by the Corolla museum. They fire their cannon on holidays and so forth, which gave us a good comparison. The cannon had been fired recently, and the wheel length and size of the carriage match the wheel tracks the police found on the hill overlooking the Duck museum.”

“That only means the cannon did it, right?” I asked, looking at the two police chiefs. “Not that Sam did it.”

Chief Peabody slurped his coffee. “What do you know about Meacham?” he asked me. “How did you know he rented those scooters? We went over his place real careful.
We
didn’t know.”

Chief Michaels cleared his throat. “The mayor is gifted.”

“What do you mean
gifted
?” Chief Peabody demanded, glaring at us. “What the hell does that mean?”

Gramps poured more coffee. “Dae is psychic. She can see things the rest of us can’t.”

“Oh well, in that case, we’ll step aside and let her figure out the rest of it.” Chief Peabody sat back from the table and folded his arms across his chest.

“Gifted?” Brad ruminated over the word between bites of donut. “How does that work?”

“I touch things and get visions from them. I can also find things by touching the people who lost them.”

Gramps’s eyes narrowed, but he didn’t say anything.

“So you touched something that belongs to Sam and saw him in one of these
visions
?” Chief Peabody asked, his voice full of disdain.

“Yes.” I described what I’d seen and felt that had led me to the Wild Horse Preservation Society’s rescue station and the abandoned scooter.

“Why don’t you have her on the payroll, Ron? You could probably solve this thing in a day.”

“So you had a vision of where Sam would be?” Brad asked.

“And a man who was with him. He may have done something to Sam. He could be the one who killed Max too. Maybe Sam knew about the cannon and was going to say something.”

“That’s a lot of maybe.” Chief Peabody shook his head. “We don’t do police work on visions and maybes. What’s this fella look like who was with Sam?”