Chapter 4 #2
The pages whispered against each other as I opened it, releasing the ghost of Pickering’s cologne—something pine scented and aggressive, the kind of aftershave that announced a man before he entered a room. His handwriting cramped across the pages like ants at a picnic, organized and relentless.
“He collected secrets,” Sutton said. “The way other men collect stamps or coins. Every confession, every whispered shame, every sin that walked through his office door—he wrote it all down.”
The entries read like a catalog of human frailty.
Margaret C. keeps a bank account in Charleston.
Her husband thinks she’s visiting her sister.
She’s visiting her husband’s brother. The Whitmore boy isn’t theirs by blood.
Bought from a girl in Savannah, fifteen years ago.
Cash transaction. They burned the real birth certificate.
Judge Prioleau takes bribes. Not money—favors.
Has a ledger of who owes what. Keeps it in his mother’s Bible.
Each entry was dated, annotated, cross-referenced. George Pickering had been building a map of Grimm Island’s sins, and everyone was marked on it.
“Good Lord,” I breathed, then caught myself. “Sorry. It’s just—”
“Appalling?” Sutton supplied. “George confused knowledge with power, and power with godliness. He thought holding these secrets made him indispensable. Instead, it made him dangerous. I wouldn’t normally turn these over because as pastors, we do hear things from congregants that are kept in strictest of confidence.
But there are certain things we would be obligated to report on if there were murder or child abuse for instance.
I figured after so many years have passed that most of these people are gone and the stakes aren’t quite so high.
I trust you’ll keep this in confidence?”
“Confidence is the nature of my business too,” Dash assured him. “But this will give us a good place to start. The investigators didn’t have this information back then.”
“Well, with Milton in charge it probably wouldn’t have mattered,” Sutton said. “Maybe I was meant to keep it all these years for exactly this moment.”
An entry from late August caught my eye, the handwriting more erratic, pressing so hard the pen had torn through in places.
Ruby knows about this journal. Saw me writing in it.
Now she’s scared—not of me, but FOR me. Says I’m playing with fire, that some secrets on this island have teeth and claws.
She wants us to leave, start over somewhere else, but I could never leave June.
It would ruin me. She would ruin me. God help me, I don’t know what to do anymore.
The final entry was scrawled like a confession of its own, dated September 14, 1985—the day before they died.
I can’t shake the feeling I’m being watched.
Ruby feels it too. She’s terrified, keeps looking over her shoulder.
Says she saw someone following her home from work yesterday, but when she turned around no one was there.
We’re meeting at Turtle Point tomorrow night.
She says we need to talk about leaving, about disappearing before it’s too late.
Maybe she’s right. Maybe I’ve been playing God for too long, collecting sins like baseball cards. Maybe it’s time to run.
“He was paranoid at the end,” Dash observed.
Sutton nodded slowly. “George had made so many enemies with this journal. Any one of the people he’d documented would have had motive to silence him. And Ruby—poor Ruby knew about the journal. That knowledge alone made her a target.”
As we prepared to leave, Sutton caught my arm with fingers that felt like bird bones.
“There was a witness,” he said quietly. “At Turtle Point the night they died. Elsie Crawford—chronic insomniac, walked her dog at ungodly hours. She saw something that night, told the police, but Milton dismissed her testimony. Said she was unreliable, prone to fantasies.”
He wrote down an address in Charleston, his penmanship as precise as his sermons.
“She’s at Magnolia Gardens now—the assisted-living place.
Her mind wanders sometimes, gets lost in the past. But when she’s clear, she remembers that night like it was yesterday.
Says what she saw is burned into her memory. ”
“What did she see?” I asked.
Sutton shook his head. “I only know what she told me years later—that she saw George and Ruby at Turtle Point, and that someone else was there too. But Milton buried her statement, never followed up. You’ll have to ask her yourself.
“George wasn’t entirely evil,” he said, and there was pleading in his voice. “He genuinely loved God, loved his congregation. He just…he confused being needed with being loved. And that confusion killed him.”
Outside, the afternoon had ripened into something overripe, the humidity so thick you could practically see it shimmer between the tombstones in the cemetery.
The dead lay in neat rows, their secrets safely buried, unlike George Pickering’s, which were about to be dragged into the light whether they wanted to be or not.
“Your house?” Dash suggested. “I should get my watch. And we need to process what we just learned.”
“I was going to make lunch,” I offered. “We can plan our next move.”
The walk back took us through Sunday afternoon Grimm Island—families heading home from church, teenagers escaping to the beach before their parents could assign chores. Eugene Bradshaw had set up his crystal healing station in the park for those interested in an alternative to church.
In my kitchen, I moved through the familiar ritual of sandwich-making while Dash sat at the counter, reading Pickering’s notebook more carefully.
“He mentions the Flamingo Motel repeatedly,” Dash observed. “Not just for his meetings with Ruby. He saw something there, or someone.”
“The blond woman,” I said, slicing tomatoes with perhaps more force than necessary. “She keeps appearing in the narrative but never quite comes into focus.”
I retrieved his watch from its place among my tea canisters. “Your watch,” I said, handing it to him.
He took it but caught my hand before I could withdraw it. “Mabel,” he said, and something in his tone made my pulse skip.
“We should talk to Michael Bailey tomorrow,” I said quickly. “Ruby’s son. He would have been ten when she died.”
“Old enough to remember things,” Dash agreed, but his thumb was tracing circles on my wrist, and I found myself humming nervously—a few bars of “Blue Moon.”
“You hum when you’re nervous,” he observed softly.
“Bad habit,” I managed.
“I like it,” he said, finally releasing my hand. “I should go. Tomorrow’s going to be complicated.”
At the door, he paused. “Be careful, Mabel. Someone killed two people to protect these secrets. Maybe more, if Pickering was right about—”
“Stay.”
The word escaped before I could think better of it, hanging in the air between us like a challenge.
He turned slowly, his expression unreadable. “Mabel…”
“Not for… I mean…” I took a breath, trying to gather words that kept scattering like startled birds. “We could just…be normal for an afternoon. Watch a movie. Order Chinese food. Pretend we’re not investigating a murder.”
“That’s a bad idea,” he said softly, but he hadn’t moved toward the door.
“Why?”
He stepped closer, and I could smell his cologne—cedar and something darker, like smoke. His thumb was still tracing those maddening circles on my wrist, each pass sending heat spiraling up my arm.
“Because,” he said, his voice dropping to that register that made my stomach perform complicated acrobatics, “you’re already driving me half crazy, Mabel McCoy.
Every time you start singing, every time you wear one of these dresses that make you look like you stepped out of a different era, every time you look at me like you’re looking at me right now.
” His thumb stilled against my pulse point, which was racing like I’d run a marathon. “If I stay…”
“We’ll watch a movie,” I said firmly, though my voice came out breathier than intended. “Something with explosions. Or car chases. Very unsexy car chases.”
He laughed—a real laugh that transformed his face. “Unsexy car chases?”
“The unsexiest. Maybe with Nicolas Cage.”
“You’re negotiating my staying with the promise of Nicolas Cage movies?”
“Is it working?”
He studied me for a long moment, and I could see him weighing something, making calculations I couldn’t follow. Then his shoulders relaxed, decision made.
“One condition,” he said.
“What?”
“Phones off. If we’re pretending to be normal, we’re committing to it. No case calls, no Silver Sleuths dropping by, no investigating.”
I reached for my phone and powered it down, the screen going dark with finality. “Done.”
He pulled his out, hesitated for just a moment—the sheriff in him warring with the man—then turned it off too.
“So,” I said, suddenly aware that we were alone in my house with no murder to investigate, no evidence to examine, no excuse for the proximity we’d been dancing around for weeks. “Nicolas Cage?”
“God help me,” he said, but he was smiling. “Yes. Nicolas Cage.”
We ended up on my couch, watching Con Air because it was the perfect combination of ridiculous and distracting.
Dash had removed his suit jacket and rolled up his shirtsleeves, revealing forearms that I tried very hard not to stare at.
I’d kicked off my heels and tucked my feet under me, the skirt of my church dress spreading across the couch between us like a fence made of fabric and good intentions.
“This movie makes no sense,” I said, stealing a piece of sesame chicken from his container. “Why would they put all these dangerous criminals on the same plane?”
“Because Nicolas Cage needed something to do,” he replied, his arm stretched across the back of the couch, not quite touching my shoulders but close enough that I could feel the heat of him. “Also, stop analyzing. You promised unsexy car chases and explosions.”
“There haven’t been any car chases yet. Just plane…hijacking.”
“Patience.”
On screen, Nicolas Cage was saying something about putting the bunny back in the box, and I found myself laughing at the absurdity of it all—the movie, this afternoon, the way Dash’s fingers had somehow found their way to playing with the ends of my hair, so gently I might have been imagining it.
“Your hair smells like vanilla,” he murmured, and when I turned to look at him, his face was closer than I’d expected.
“It’s the shampoo,” I said stupidly, my voice barely above a whisper.
“Mabel.” The way he said my name made it sound like a prayer and a curse all at once.
“Very unsexy movie,” I reminded him, though my eyes had dropped to his mouth. “Nicolas Cage. Explosions.”
“Right,” he agreed, but neither of us looked back at the screen.
The afternoon stretched between us like taffy, sweet and pulling tighter with each passing moment.
The sun had shifted to that golden hour light that made everything look like a painting.
We’d migrated closer somehow, my head on his shoulder, his arm around me, both of us pretending this was casual, normal, not a careful negotiation of boundaries we weren’t quite ready to cross.
By the time the credits rolled, I’d somehow ended up tucked against his side, his arm around me, both of us pretending this was casual. Normal. Just two people watching a movie.
Except my heart was racing, and I was acutely aware of every place our bodies touched, and this didn’t feel casual at all.
“I should go,” he said quietly, but neither of us moved.
“Probably,” I agreed.
When he finally stood, the absence of his warmth felt like loss. At the door, he kissed me good night—warm, lingering, familiar. The kind of kiss that felt like a promise without specifying what was being promised.
“Lock your doors,” he said against my hair.
“Always do.”
After he left, I stood there for a moment, my lips still tingling, my heart doing complicated things in my chest. Then I picked up my phone and turned it back on to find six missed calls from Dottie.
I called her back immediately.
“We need to meet,” I said. “All of us. Tomorrow morning, before the shop opens. We have new information about the case.”
“What kind of information? And why haven’t you been answering your phone? I was about to send Walt over there.”
I looked at Pickering’s notebook on my counter, then thought about the afternoon I’d just spent pretending murders didn’t exist. “The kind of information that suggests Ruby and Pickering weren’t the only victims. This goes deeper than we thought.”
Through my window, Grimm Island basked in its evening peace. But somewhere out there, someone had successfully hidden the truth for years. Tomorrow, we would start pulling at threads that might unravel everything.
Some secrets, I was learning, were patient. They could even wait for a Sunday afternoon to end.
The question was whether we were brave enough—whether I was brave enough—to drag them into the light while also navigating whatever was happening between Dash and me.
Because that was becoming a mystery all its own.