Chapter 12
CHAPTER TWELVE
Holloway’s Hardware looked exactly the same as it had yesterday—same cheerful red letters, same brick facade that had probably been there since Eisenhower was president, same bell that announced our arrival with oblivious enthusiasm.
But walking through that door felt different this time, like returning to a restaurant where you’d found a hair in your food.
Everything appeared normal on the surface, but you couldn’t quite forget what lay beneath.
Frank Holloway glanced up from behind the counter, and I watched recognition hit him like a physical blow. His earnest expression—the one that had seemed so genuine during our first visit—flickered and died.
“Sheriff Beckett,” he said, his voice flat and unwelcoming. “Mrs. McCoy. Wasn’t expecting to see you folks again so soon.”
“Funny thing about photographs,” Dash said, pulling out the church picnic picture and laying it on the counter between a display of cabinet hinges and a bin of assorted washers. “They have a way of telling stories people forgot to mention.”
Frank’s face went through several interesting color changes—pale to flushed to pale again, like watching a very anxious traffic light. His hand moved toward the photograph, then stopped, hovering above it as if touching it might burn him.
“July 4, 1985,” I said, keeping my voice pleasant. “First Methodist Church. That’s you in the third row, isn’t it? Holding one of your daughters. Your wife, Sandra, beside you.”
The silence that followed felt about as comfortable as a mammogram.
“Jimmy,” Frank called toward the back of the store, his voice strained. “Can you handle the front for a bit? Need to talk to these folks in my office.”
We followed him past displays of power tools and paint cans stacked like colorful towers, into the small office that smelled like old coffee and unspoken confessions.
Frank sank into his desk chair, the old wood creaking under his weight like a sigh.
“Sandra and I were members,” he said, hands flat on the desk as if anchoring himself. “Joined about six months before I started working for Milton. She grew up Methodist. Wanted the girls raised in the church.”
“And you didn’t think to mention this when we came asking about a double homicide that happened at your church?” Dash’s voice was pleasant. Too pleasant. The kind of pleasant that meant someone was about to find themselves in very deep water.
“I didn’t think it mattered.” Frank pulled off his glasses, cleaned them with his flannel shirt—buying time to construct his defense.
“Spent decades trying to forget I was ever part of that place. Sandra and I left six months after the murders. Couldn’t sit in those pews anymore, listening to whoever replaced Pickering talk about God’s love while everyone pretended two people hadn’t been executed and dumped on the beach. ”
“But you knew them,” I said. “Ruby Bailey cleaned houses. Did she clean yours?”
“Once a week. Tuesdays.” Frank’s jaw tightened like a vise. “She was good at her job. Efficient. The girls liked her—she’d bring them little toys from the dollar store sometimes. Nothing expensive, just little things. Stickers. Cheap bracelets. Sandra used to make her lunch.”
“And Pickering?”
“I knew him the way you know a pastor. Shook his hand after service. Sat through his sermons. Brought covered dishes to potlucks.” Frank looked up at us with weary eyes.
“But I didn’t know them. Not really. Didn’t know Ruby was being threatened by Crenshaw.
Didn’t know about the embezzlement until Tommy started investigating.
Just knew what everyone else knew—they were having an affair, and someone killed them for it. ”
“Did you suspect who killed them?” Dash asked.
Frank was quiet for a long moment, wrestling with something internal. “Everyone suspected everyone. That’s what Milton’s circus accomplished—three different people confessing, all of them recanting, nobody knowing what was real anymore. But I didn’t have answers then, and I don’t have them now.”
The room felt heavy with the weight of old secrets and older guilt.
“I’m sorry I wasn’t more forthcoming,” Frank said finally.
“I told myself it didn’t matter that I’d been there.
That being a congregant didn’t make me complicit.
But I see how it looks—like I was hiding something.
I wasn’t. I was just trying to keep my distance from something that nearly destroyed my partner. ”
Dash gathered the photograph, slid it back into the folder with deliberate precision. “If you think of anything else, call me.” He pulled out a business card, set it on Frank’s desk. “Someone’s already been hurt trying to stop this investigation. The next person might not be so lucky.”
Frank nodded, his face ashen. “I understand.”
We left him sitting in his office, surrounded by decades of paperwork and the ghosts of decisions made when he was young enough to think running away would solve anything.
Outside, the humidity hit like walking into a steam bath.
“He’s telling the truth,” I said, sliding into the passenger seat of Dash’s SUV. “He doesn’t know who killed them. He’s just scared and ashamed.”
“Yeah.” Dash started the engine with more force than necessary. “But he confirmed what we suspected. This wasn’t about passion. It was about money.”
The drive back to Grimm Island felt longer than usual, the highway stretching out through marsh and pine forest that all started looking the same after a while. Dash was quiet—that focused quiet where I could practically hear his brain working through evidence, sorting and cataloging possibilities.
“I want to review Tommy’s files tonight,” he said finally. “See if there’s anything that points more definitively at Crenshaw or the other board members.”
“What about Stephanie?”
“Her too. But I want leverage first. Real evidence, not just connections.” His hands tightened on the steering wheel. “Scared people don’t talk unless silence becomes more dangerous than confession.”
We crossed back onto Grimm Island as the afternoon light started its slow fade toward evening. The familiar sight of live oaks and antebellum houses should have felt like coming home. Instead, it felt ominous—all that carefully maintained beauty hiding something festering underneath.
That’s when my phone rang. Dottie’s name flashed on the screen.
“Mabel,” she said without preamble. “Where are you?”
“Just crossed the bridge from Beaufort. What’s wrong?” The urgency in her voice made my stomach clench.
“It’s Jane Sutherland. Someone found her body an hour ago.”
The bottom dropped out of my stomach. “Where?”
“The Flamingo Motel.” Dottie’s voice had gone clinical—that medical examiner tone she used when things got too real for normal emotions. “Mabel, she was shot. Same caliber as Pickering and Bailey.”
Dash’s head snapped toward me. He was already reaching for his radio.
“What room?” I asked, though part of me already knew the answer like a song you’ve heard before.
“Twelve,” Dottie said. “Same room number where Ruby and Pickering used to meet.”
Through the phone I could hear the controlled chaos of the hospital—monitors beeping, voices murmuring instructions, machines keeping people alive who wanted to die and people dying who wanted to live.
Jane Sutherland. Who’d investigated the church finances in 1985.
Who’d tracked Ruby’s and Pickering’s movements like a bloodhound following a scent.
Who’d left town the moment their bodies were found and stayed gone for decades, scared enough to abandon her entire career and disappear into someone else’s life.
“We’re five minutes away,” I told Dottie. “I’ll call you back.”
I hung up and looked at Dash, whose knuckles had gone white against the steering wheel. “Why would Jane Sutherland come back to Grimm Island after all these years? Why stay at the Flamingo?”
“Maybe she was coming to meet someone—maybe even Bea. Or maybe the killer found out she was still alive and lured her back.” Dash’s voice was grim.
“But they made a mistake this time. Fresh crime scene means fresh forensic evidence—DNA, fingerprints, security footage from a renovated motel that definitely has cameras. If ballistics confirms it’s the same gun, we’ve connected three murders across four decades. ”
Something almost predatory flickered across his face. “They stayed hidden for decades by being smart. But desperation makes people careless.”
Five minutes later, we pulled into the parking lot of the Flamingo Hotel, and I barely recognized the place.
Gone was the seedy motel where Ruby and Pickering had conducted their affair for fifty dollars a night and the desk clerk’s practiced blindness.
Someone had poured serious money into transforming it—cream-colored siding that gleamed even in the fading afternoon light, sage-green shutters, tasteful brass lettering where the old neon flamingo had once flickered its invitation to sin.
The parking lot held Teslas and Range Rovers instead of Ruby Bailey’s Mercury Cougar with its dented bumper and impossible dreams.
Yellow crime-scene tape fluttered across room twelve’s door like a funeral ribbon.
Dash’s patrol vehicles crowded the small lot.
Deputy Harris stood near the entrance with the hotel manager—a man in his thirties wearing the kind of carefully casual clothes that cost more than my monthly mortgage, gesticulating with the desperate energy of someone trying to contain a public relations disaster.
Probably explaining how this sort of thing never happened at the new Flamingo, as if renovation could exorcise ghosts.
Harris spotted us and walked over, his young face looking older than it had this morning. Murder did that—aged you in hours instead of years.
“Sheriff. Mrs. McCoy.” He nodded at me. “Victim is Jane Sutherland, sixty-four. Checked in yesterday afternoon under her own name, paid cash for two nights. Housekeeping found her around one o’clock.”