A Timely Vision

Everyone looked at me. Kevin moved his hand away slowly. It made me wonder if he’d held my hand to comfort me or to see if I could find the key.

“Are you talking about the key?” he asked.

“Yes. It’s an old skeleton key. And it’s in the drawer behind the cash register in the bar.” I smiled at him and ate a few French fries as our food arrived. I was showing off a little, but it was exciting.

Shayla groaned, and Tim complained, “I wanted to go over there, Dae.”

“Me too,” Shayla added.

“You guys can still come over,” Kevin assured them. “I think Dae might be a little quick on the draw anyway. There’s no drawer behind the cash register. It’s up against the wall. There isn’t anything behind it. I sanded and repainted that whole area. There’s nothing there.” He held out his hand. “Want to look again?”

I realized then that he had held my hand to see if I could tell him where the key was. It made me a little surly, I’m afraid, since I realized something else when he was touching me. I felt more than friendly toward Kevin, despite my protestations to Shayla. “I don’t need to look again. It’s in a drawer behind the cash register in the bar. Take it or leave it. Once I see something, I don’t need to look again.”

“Okay.” He put his hand down. “We’ll all go look after dinner.”

“No thanks to you, Miss Kill Joy,” Shayla hissed across the table.

“No need to be so hard on Dae,” Tim said. “Speaking of which, there might not be anything for the SBI to ask you about tomorrow. When we arrested the boy who took your purse today, we searched his motel room and found a hundred purses stuffed in the closet. He’s been here a few weeks from Virginia Beach. Seems like he has a record there for doing the same thing. The chief and I figure he might have gotten a little rough with Miss Elizabeth when he stole her purse.”

“So you found her purse in his closet?” I asked, hoping he was right and it was an outsider who had killed her.

“Not exactly. Not yet anyway. It’s taking a while to go through all of them,” he explained. “But by this time tomorrow, we could have all the answers.”

I recalled the way the purse snatcher had shoved me against the wall when he’d taken my purse. If he’d done something of that nature to take Miss Elizabeth’s purse, I could understand how she could have been hurt—or worse, in this case.

“And that’s how it goes from a simple purse snatching to armed robbery,” Kevin said. “They find out they can do it, and it escalates.”

“Poor Miss Elizabeth. I hope he killed her dead before he left her out there.” Shayla sighed as she nibbled at a barbecue chicken leg.

“Shayla!” I couldn’t believe she’d say something like that.

“What? I was only hoping she wasn’t left out there, unable to get any help. I’d rather be dead than out there in the dunes barely alive with the gulls and the turtles eating me. You ever see what they can do to a body?”

“Well, we don’t know for sure yet what happened,” Tim said. “I hope we can get a confession from this boy and put it all behind us. The chief and I don’t like loose ends.”

He smiled at me and winked. I’d lost my appetite after Shayla’s remark. The conversation turned to the upcoming dance in the park and other less gruesome things. Everyone was done eating a few minutes later. Shayla and I stepped outside while Tim and Kevin paid for dinner.

“I hope Tim’s right about this kid being the killer,” Shayla said after taking a deep breath of night air, which was sweetly perfumed by the roses blooming near the restaurant entrance.

“So do I. It’s bad enough it happened. I don’t think any of us wants to think someone who lives here did it.”

“I guess it was a close call for you today,” she suggested. “I mean, that boy could’ve killed you too.”

“If he had, I promise I would’ve come back and told you.” I knew Shayla’s one earthly goal (besides money, great boyfriends and everyone’s respect) was to find proof that there was an afterlife. We’d talked about it many times. Shayla and I believed the souls of the dearly departed were never far away. Proving it was another thing.

“You’re a good friend, Dae O’Donnell. If I go first, I swear I’ll come back and visit you too.”

I smiled and encouraged her. We didn’t write anything in blood, so I was probably safe. I believed in the afterlife too, in ghosts. But I didn’t need to prove anything. There was only one person I wanted desperately to see again.

Duck Road was crowded as we walked down to the Blue Whale Inn, on the Atlantic side of town. It took a good fifteen minutes to get there from downtown Duck, a long walk compared to the five minutes between my house and Missing Pieces.

We passed the walk-through where Kevin and I had found Miss Elizabeth. I couldn’t keep from shivering as we neared the spot. The wind off the ocean stirred the sea oats, some of them still smashed flat from the investigation. They’d have to be replanted. I made a mental note to put the public works guys on it.