Chapter 11
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Wednesday morning arrived wrapped in fog so thick the harbor disappeared entirely, leaving only the mournful call of the foghorn and the scent of salt marsh that crept through every crack and crevice of The Perfect Steep.
I stood behind my counter, staring at a teapot I’d apparently been holding for the better part of five minutes without pouring a single cup, while Carly watched me with the expression of someone witnessing a slow-motion catastrophe.
“You’re doing that thing again,” she said.
“What thing?”
“That thing where you’re physically present but your brain is somewhere else entirely.
I’m going to assume you’re solving murders in your head.
’Cause you’re definitely not making tea.
” She gently extracted the pot from my grip.
“Mrs. Hartwell has been waiting for her English Breakfast for ten minutes. She’s started tapping her nails on the table. You know what that means.”
I did know. Mrs. Hartwell’s nail-tapping was the auditory equivalent of a countdown timer on a bomb.
The door swung open, and Walt appeared with a clipboard in one hand and a determined expression that hinted he was about to reorganize my entire life whether I liked it or not.
Behind him came Bea in an emerald caftan that looked like it had been woven from peacock feathers and audacity, struggling slightly with a folding table.
Deidre brought up the rear, her ever-present tote bag on one shoulder and what appeared to be a tactical planning board tucked under her arm.
“We’re commandeering your back room,” Walt announced, not bothering with preamble.
“I can see that,” I said, watching as they maneuvered the table through the doorway with the kind of coordinated effort that suggested they’d planned this operation down to the last detail. “Good morning to you too.”
“No time for pleasantries.” Walt was already disappearing into the back room, the sound of furniture being rearranged with precision echoing through the doorway. “We’ve got a situation that requires immediate tactical response.”
“A situation,” I repeated.
“You,” Bea said, pointing at me with one finger heavy with turquoise rings. “You’re running yourself into the ground trying to run this shop and solve a murder. Both are full-time jobs. It’s not sustainable, and frankly, watching you try is exhausting for the rest of us.”
“I’m fine—”
“We’re staging an intervention,” Bea declared. “A hostile takeover, if you will. The Silver Sleuths are taking over tea shop operations. You’re going full-time on the investigation.”
I opened my mouth to protest, but Carly was already untying my apron. “They’re right. You can’t keep doing both. And honestly? I’d rather work with them than watch you set another batch of scones on fire.”
“That was one time—”
“Yes, but it still smells like someone set a Christmas tree on fire.”
I pursed my lips together, trying not to be insulted. I never burned things in the kitchen, and I wasn’t a fan of what this slipup was doing to my reputation. Grace covered a lot of sins, but apparently not burning the scones.
“It was cinnamon scones,” I said for lack of anything better in my defense. “And there are worse things than the smell of Christmas trees.”
Carly muttered something under her breath and went to wait on a customer at the register.
The bell over the door chimed, and Dash walked in wearing his uniform and an expression that suggested he hadn’t slept much better than I had.
His gaze found mine immediately, something passing between us that felt too weighted for a Wednesday morning in a tea shop—concern, determination, and something else I wasn’t ready to name.
“Tell me you have coffee,” he said.
“This is a tea shop.”
“Tell me you have something with enough caffeine to jump-start a corpse.”
“I have a French press in the back for emergencies.” I gestured toward the back room, where Walt’s organizational sounds had reached a crescendo. “Though fair warning, it’s become Silver Sleuth headquarters.”
“Excellent.” He headed toward the back, then paused, turning back with his hand on the doorframe. “You’re not going to fight them on this, are you? The takeover?”
“So you’re in on it too?” I asked, brow arched in question.
He just grinned. “You’re a stubborn woman, Mabel McCoy. I don’t know why I look forward to these moments.”
Twenty minutes later, I stood in my own back room feeling like a stranger at my own party.
The space had been transformed into something that looked like a cross between a war room and a particularly organized craft fair.
The murder board now occupied the entire back wall, photographs and documents arranged with the kind of precision that suggested Walt had used a level and possibly a protractor.
Tommy Wheeler’s files spread across the folding table in neat stacks, each labeled with color-coded tabs.
Even the lighting had been adjusted—a clip-on lamp now illuminated the center of the workspace with the intensity of an interrogation room.
Chowder had claimed the one armchair as his command post, wearing the yellow hoodie I’d dressed him in this morning—a casual choice that suggested he wasn’t particularly invested in today’s investigation. He watched the proceedings with half-lidded eyes.
“Dottie called from the hospital,” Bea announced, consulting her phone. “Hank’s children arrived about an hour ago. They’ll stay with him through lunch, which gives Dottie time to work with us this morning.”
“How is he?” I asked.
Walt’s expression tightened in a way that said more than words. “Awake. Alert. Can’t remember a blasted thing about Tuesday afternoon. The neurologist says the trauma wiped out everything from when he dropped you at the hardware store to when he woke up in the hospital. It’s just gone.”
“Convenient,” Dash muttered, pouring himself coffee from the French press with the concentration of someone performing surgery. “For whoever hit him while he was looking for parking.”
“Medically sound, though,” Deidre added, pulling out her reading glasses. “Head trauma affects memory consolidation. It’s not unusual for patients to lose hours or even days around the time of injury. Sometimes it comes back, sometimes it doesn’t.”
“We need to go through everything systematically,” Walt said, tapping the murder board with a pointer he’d produced from somewhere. “No more reactive investigation. We’re getting strategic.”
Dash leaned against the wall, coffee cup in hand, that intense focus I was beginning to recognize settling over his features.
“Agreed. The attack on Hank could be coincidence, but nothing was stolen from him. The car wasn’t taken.
If it’s connected to the case, and I think it is, then someone’s escalating.
Which means we need to be smarter about how we move forward. ”
He pulled out his phone, scrolling through messages. “I heard back from the Beaufort investigators this morning. They pulled footage from every business with cameras in the area around the municipal parking lot where we found Hank.”
“And?” Walt leaned forward, his coffee forgotten.
“Not much.” Dash’s frustration bled through each word.
“The parking lot itself doesn’t have cameras—budget cuts from two years ago.
The restaurants along Bay Street have security, but their cameras face their own entrances and registers, not the street or parking areas.
Best they got was footage from the bank on the corner—shows Hank’s Buick driving past toward the lot around 2:47 p.m. yesterday, but the angle doesn’t capture the lot itself. ”
“How convenient,” Bea said, her voice sharp as glass. “The one afternoon someone gets beaten half to death in broad daylight, there’s no footage of the actual attack.”
“There’s more,” Dash continued, his jaw tight.
“A clothing boutique two blocks over had a camera that captures part of the sidewalk. Around 3:10 p.m.—which fits our timeline for when the attack likely occurred—they picked up someone walking quickly away from the direction of the parking lot. Dark clothing, average height, but the angle’s wrong and the image quality is poor.
Can’t make out features or even determine gender with certainty. ”
“So we’ve got nothing,” Deidre said flatly.
“We’ve got timing,” Dash replied. “Hank dropped you off at the hardware store around 2:45. You were inside with Frank for roughly twenty-five minutes. That gives us a window between 2:50 and 3:10 when someone attacked him in broad daylight in a public parking lot on a Tuesday afternoon.”
“It was crowded too,” I said, remembering the packed streets, the tourists, the families strolling Bay Street. “That’s why he had to drop us off in the first place—there wasn’t any street parking available.”
“Which means someone either got very lucky,” Walt said slowly, “or they knew exactly when and where to find him. Knew he’d be alone in that parking lot while you two were busy talking to Frank.”
The implication hung in the air like smoke. Someone had been watching. Waiting.
“The Beaufort PD is treating it as assault with intent,” Dash said.
“They’re canvassing businesses, interviewing anyone who might have been in or near the lot during that time frame.
But so far, no witnesses have come forward.
The lunch crowd had thinned out by then, and most people were either inside shops or along the waterfront where the weather was nicer. ”
“Whoever did this picked their moment carefully,” Deidre observed, her voice quiet but firm. “Knew when to strike, where the cameras weren’t, how to make sure they couldn’t be identified.”