Chapter 1 #2
“Tell me about Ruby,” I said, because in my limited experience with murder, it always came back to the victims. They were the ones who mattered, whose stories needed telling, whose voices had been silenced but whose truths had a way of surfacing like bodies in the marsh—inevitable, patient, refusing to stay buried.
“Ruby Bailey was thirty-two,” Dottie said, her clinical tone at odds with the emotion in her eyes.
“Single mother, worked cleaning houses for the wealthy families on the island. She was pretty in that way that made certain men think they owned her, if you know what I mean. Dark hair, green eyes, a smile that could light up a room when she let it. Sang in the church choir and had a voice like an angel.”
She paused, and I could see her sifting through memories like photographs in an album, each one preserved in the strange amber of professional detachment.
“The autopsy showed defensive wounds on her hands and arms. She fought hard. Multiple contusions, a fractured orbital bone, three broken ribs.” Dottie’s voice dropped to barely above a whisper. “Someone cut out her tongue. Postmortem, thank God, but still.”
Marcus Wheeler’s newspaper rustled from the corner. He’d lowered it enough to peer over the top, his weathered face pale beneath its permanent sunburn.
“You’re talking about the Pickering–Bailey murders,” he said. It wasn’t a question.
We all turned to look at him. Marcus Wheeler, who’d been coming to my shop for three years and had never contributed more than a mumbled greeting and exact change, suddenly had our complete attention.
“My brother Tommy worked that case,” he continued, his voice rough with disuse or emotion. “Deputy Thomas Wheeler. Maybe you’ve seen his name in the files.”
Dash nodded slowly. “His reports are in here.”
“Tommy died in ’98. Heart attack, they said.
” Marcus folded his newspaper with precise creases, the same way he’d probably been folding it for fifty years.
“But he was never the same after that case. Used to wake up screaming about what he’d seen.
Kept saying the real killer was still out there, walking around free, probably having Sunday dinner with their family like nothing had happened. ”
He stood slowly, joints protesting with audible pops that sounded like punctuation marks to his story.
“Some things on this island are better left buried, Sheriff,” he said, shuffling toward the door. “But if you’re determined to dig them up, be careful who you trust. Forty years is a long time, but not long enough for some folks to forget. Or forgive.”
The door chimed as he left, the cheerful sound at odds with the weight of his warning.
“Well,” Dottie said after a moment. “That was sufficiently ominous.”
“Your autopsy report,” Dash said, pulling her attention back. “It mentions inconsistencies with the crime scene.”
“Everything about that scene was wrong,” Dottie said.
“Reverend Pickering was on his knees when he died—single gunshot wound to the head execution style—the angle of the wound was clear. Ruby was shot multiple times in the chest, point-blank range. The killer was up close and personal. But the bodies were positioned. Staged. The killer moved them into a lover’s embrace, so they held each other in death. ”
The shop had gone quiet in the way that happens when people are discussing the dead—a respectful hush, as if normal conversation might disturb them. Even the coffee maker seemed to percolate more softly, and the ceiling fan that usually squeaked on every third rotation had gone silent.
“Why would someone stage the scene like that?” I asked.
“Their relationship was a scandal,” Dottie said.
“Reverend Pickering was married with children. And Ruby singing in the choir every Sunday and meeting him in the cover of night. There were whispers, of course. It’s hard to keep something like that quiet.
You start to notice intimate looks and touches, and they weren’t too careful about it.
My best guess is whoever killed them wanted everyone to know what they’d been up to outside of the pulpit. ”
“Jealousy?” I asked. “Like the reverend’s wife?”
“That’s probably a good place to start,” Dash said.
The door chimed again, and we all turned with the guilty startle of children caught telling ghost stories.
But it was just Bea Livingston, sweeping in wearing a caftan that could have doubled as a sail for a small yacht.
Today’s was purple and gold with what appeared to be actual bells sewn into the hem, which announced her every movement like a one-woman parade.
“Whatever you’re all discussing looks serious enough to curdle milk,” she announced, making her way toward us with surprising grace for someone wearing what amounted to an entire fabric store. “Dottie’s got her death face on, and the sheriff looks like someone stole his patrol car.”
At eighty years of age, Bea had been married three times, widowed twice, divorced once, and was currently entertaining what she called “several gentleman callers,” though most of them were confined to the assisted-living facility on the mainland and could only call on days when the shuttle was running.
“The sheriff is reviewing cold cases,” I explained.
“Oh?” Bea’s eyes lit up with a gleam that meant gossip receptors had been activated. “Which one? Please tell me it’s juicy.”
“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.
“I know,” I told him. “But first, we have customers to serve.”
I hefted the evidence box under the counter, out of sight but decidedly not out of mind.
As I turned to greet the Methodist ladies, I caught Dottie watching me from her table.
She raised her teacup in a small salute—a gesture that somehow said she understood perfectly well that boxes full of old murders had to wait their turn, but that they would not, under any circumstances, be forgotten.
The lunch rush was about to descend upon The Perfect Steep like a plague of polite locusts, all wanting their specific teas prepared just so, their sandwiches cut in certain ways, their scones warmed to precise temperatures.
For the next three hours, I would be Mabel McCoy, tea shop proprietor, dispenser of Earl Grey and sympathy in equal measure.
But tonight, after I’d completed whatever culinary adventure I’d promised Dash, after the dishes were done and Chowder was snoring in his bed, I would open that box.
I would read about Ruby Bailey and Reverend Pickering, whose affair had scandalized the island.
About two people who’d died at Turtle Point in a violence that spoke of rage and twisted love and secrets worth killing for.
The door chimed again. More customers. The lunch rush had officially begun.
Forty years was a long time for secrets to ferment, like tea left too long in the pot—growing bitter, darker, impossible to swallow. But secrets, unlike tea, couldn’t simply be poured down the drain.
I smiled at the Methodist ladies and reached for my order pad, as if there weren’t a box beneath my counter holding the story of two people who’d loved unwisely and died violently.
As if the truth hadn’t been waiting all this time, patient as the tide, for someone to finally care enough to look.