SEAL in Savannah (Deadly Destinations #1)

Chapter 1

“Family is so important in the South,” the woman to my right said into my ringing ear.

My lips squeezed into a tight smile, and I gave her one good head nod in agreement. The tips of my fingers ached as they dug into the side of the airplane’s armrest. I didn’t dare relax them. They might have been the only thing keeping our plane in the air.

The woman beside me chuckled as she waved her short plastic cup in a wide arc to encompass the rest of the plane’s occupants. With her other hand, she flipped back a piece of her blonde hair, the opposite color of mine. “It will be a pity if we all die, and they never see us again.”

Our plane lurched and took my heart right along with it. The beats quickened, and I sucked in a gasp of stale air. I didn’t want to die in a plane crash. “Yeah, it will really tick off my mother if I miss her fiftieth birthday party.”

It was one week after my twenty-fifth birthday. If I lived to see it.

“Have no fear, Elenore.” She gave my hand a quick pat before taking another swig of the red-colored drink in her glass. “I read a study that said most plane crashes happen at takeoff or landing. That’s when these metal birds just snap to pieces.”

“That’s… reassuring.” I guess.

The plane’s steady bouncing intensified, and the drink carts stowed behind the flimsy curtain in front of us rattled.

A woman in the row behind mumbled a prayer under her breath.

Her hands stretched out to grab the entirety of my seat back, giving her something to hold on to.

It didn’t seem like a bad idea, but one look from the woman next to me stopped me in my tracks.

We’d only met at the start of our flight, and I’d already forgotten her name, but she was in the aisle seat, and I didn’t want to risk her not letting me out in case the plane made a landing.

It wasn’t just our hair colors that didn’t match.

Her persona took up her seat and the empty one between us.

Something about her screamed, “listen up,” while I tried to take up the least amount of space possible in my window seat and elsewhere.

“Exactly,” she said, agreeing with my earlier half-spoken statement. “There’s no point in worrying over something you can’t control. That’s why you should have ordered the drink.” She jiggled her now mostly empty glass at me. “Enjoy life until the dismount.”

A ding cut through the clatter and the pilot’s voice crackled out of the overhead speaker. “Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. We’re about to begin our descent into Savannah, Georgia…” the high-pitched squeal of tires and metal rattling drowned out the rest of his speech.

“Oh, now we can worry,” she said, and I swear she almost sounded happy about it.

“Great.” I closed my eyes and wished the jarring turbulence to ease as we lowered. The plane’s trajectory changed, but we continued bouncing along. My seat wobbled right along with my stomach.

I sent up a quick prayer, even though I hadn’t entered a church since sixth grade when my mother dropped me off for their summer program so she had a week of evenings to herself. Her words, not mine.

“You’ll love Savannah…” she said as the plane gave a particularly nasty jolt forward and we leaned with the nose of the plane. “If we live. How long are you staying?”

My fingers locked on to the armrest with renewed vigor. “Only a few days, but I’ll be working.”

“Oh, yes, for your podcast.” She finished her drink and looked around like she expected a flight attendant to run up with a trash can.

It wasn’t my podcast, but I didn’t bother to correct her. I wasn’t an anything at the moment. Not after losing my job because of “cutbacks and reduced sales” two months earlier. Even the job title of “Podcast Researcher” was temporary for this gig only.

My friend—the actual employee—sent me in her place to research the unsolved case of Lisa Boyd for Death Finds You First. The number one true crime podcast for the last three months.

Something happened—maybe we died—but the plane jerked, creating a half-second of weightlessness that ended like a bolder in my stomach. Someone half a plane behind us let out a quick scream. The person holding on to my chair back flinched. Her mumbled pleading turned into a chanted rosary prayer.

The woman next to me—what was her damn name—shook her head in dismay before twisting her torso to peek between the seats at the woman behind us. “God is pissed we’re in his domain.” She untwisted herself and fixed her hair. “This is why I normally fly first class.”

I nodded in agreement again, but I was pretty sure the first-class passengers were riding the same rollercoaster of airwaves as us.

The plane seemed to level out, and the turbulence slowed.

For some reason, the lack of movement made my stomach take one more tumble, and I slowed my breathing to stop my airport dinner from coming up.

We just needed to get this metal canister on the ground. If that happened, I’d be the best damn one-off podcast journalist the world had ever seen. Probably.

Lisa Boyd’s death happened thirteen months earlier and the local media called it “the case with no clues.” That wasn’t totally true, as the police had a few things to go on, but no clues sounded better than one crappy clue.

A bar patron found Lisa’s body in the bathroom of a local establishment in the tourist district of downtown Savannah.

The killer hadn’t left any notes or DNA.

Rather, the only thing missing from the scene was Lisa’s half-carat ruby ring she’d gotten as a gift from her husband before his passing.

Even with the lack of jewelry, my new best friend—the podcast producer—didn’t believe robbery was a motive.

She had an extensive watch list of true crime documentaries and murder shows with an eighty-five percent correct guess rate.

She was also the type of person who tracked the number of times she guessed a murderer correctly, so I normally just went with whatever she said.

And she said it wasn’t a robbery.

So, it wasn’t a robbery.

A soft whinnying clambered into my ears, and my chest loosened a fraction as the landing gear lowered from the plane. A few moments of intense rosary reciting behind us and our wheels hit the ground with two jumps.

The people sitting around us burst into cheers and claps. “Thank you, Jesus,” burst through my eardrum from the woman behind me.

“Well, look at that. We survived,” my row mate said. “As long as we taxi back safely.”

I refused to worry about the few hundred feet to our arrival gate. We said goodbye to one another as I grabbed my single carry-on from the overhead bin and made my way off the plane, happy to be alive.

My hands still had a slight shake by the time I entered my Uber outside the main pickup point.

Night had already fallen over the city while we were in the air, and I watched the lights of the city fly by as we made the twenty-minute drive to my Airbnb.

Thankfully, the driver wasn’t in a chatty mood.

A light drizzle started as we left the airport’s twisted roadways and headed toward the city.

Unfortunately, the quiet in the car gave my brain time to overthink.

We were fast approaching my destination where tomorrow I had to pretend to be a serious journalist. I’d be deep diving into an unsolved murder case with exactly zero experience besides an overview of my best friend’s write-up on the case.

Delaney—said podcast producer and best friend extraordinaire—believed Savannah was a city seeped in mystery and Southern charm. She said ghosts haunted the very places I’d be walking. It all kind of freaked me out. But I needed the money, vacation, and distraction.

I pinched my arm to make sure the plane hadn’t actually crashed, and now I was a Savannah ghost stuck in a time loop but never able to reach my Airbnb on Broad Street. It stung. So not a ghost then.

Or what if we were supposed to crash? Since we’d made it safely now, all the flight passengers were about to star in our own Final Destination remake.

Would that be worse? I guess it depended on how I went out.

I scanned the roadway for a truck carrying a bunch of stacked logs, but thankfully we’d turned into a residential street. No murderous lumber here.

If I died during this excursion, it was all Delaney’s fault—even if she meant well. She’d better be the biggest crier at my funeral. With the way my life was going, she and my mother might be the only mourners. They were all I had left at the moment.

After being unable to find a new job for over a month, I’d given up the lease on my apartment and was in the process of moving home with my mother when Delaney’s father had a stroke. My lack of commitments made it easy for me to step in for her and help with this project.

I’d thought a free vacation and a small paycheck sounded like a great idea before I returned to the job search. Delaney promised me a Savannah adventure, but after that plane ride, maybe I should have stayed home. My nerves couldn’t handle much more adventure.

The light drizzle turned into a steady splatter of rain by the time the Uber slowed. I checked the map on my phone and saw my destination to my left. Rain covered the window as I tried to squint through the glass. “I’m here?”

“That’s what the app says,” my driver replied, sounding slightly annoyed at the question. He stared at me from the rearview mirror, and I took that as my cue to get out, even with the rain.

The shaking in my hands had stopped, but as my feet hit the clean sidewalk outside the car, my anxiety kicked in again. Rain drops coated the tops of my shoulder, soaking through the light jacket I’d worn to ward against Savannah’s April weather.

From the trunk, the driver grabbed my suitcase and handed it to me with a quick wave of goodbye.

I stared down the street, first to the left and then the right.

In front of me—where the app said I’d be spending the next week—was nothing more than a black metal swinging gate.

To the side, a two-story blue home looked like it belonged in a Civil War movie and to the right, an even taller white home definitely housed a Civil War soldier at some point.

My heart rate kicked up as I walked back and forth between the two buildings, looking for the number attached to my rental.

A tall figure, shrouded in the night’s darkness, stepped around the back of the blue building and started for me.

He was tall, even from a distance, and I turned around, looking for somewhere to flee with my heart beating hard in my chest. It was only a road behind me, though.

“What are you doing out here in the rain?” his deep voice rumbled as he marched forward.