A Dying Tide

By Nancy Kreml

Murder was the last thing Gen and Cammie wanted or needed in their lives. They’d left the complications of work and city life. Marriage had even left them—Gen was divorced and Cammie was widowed—so coming back to the old house on the marsh at Lafayette Beach was supposed to be a new start in a new life. But a dead body found nearby, a threat to a local community, and something destroying the marsh itself drew the sisters into a search for the source of the darkness. Under the ancient oaks dripping with moss, in the sunny channels of the tidal creek, and at home in the old house, the sisters try to remake their own lives, but the clouds of danger are closing in.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Nancy Kreml
• Release date: Jul 5, 2017
• ISBN: 9781370098743

Book preview

A DYING TIDE

By Nancy Kreml

A Dying Tide

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2017 Nancy Kreml

This book is available in print at most online retailers.

Thank you, Betty Mandell!

And also thanks to Jane Davis, Cindy Roof,

Lisa Cheeks, Jane Pine, Sara Pope, Becke Turner,

and especially to Bill Kreml

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events, places, etc., is purely coincidental.

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to your favorite ebook retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

Prologue

The darkness felt thick, too thick to breathe. Adele woke gasping. In her sleep, she’d rolled over to the empty side of the bed, the place where Mark should have been, and tumbled into a deep, echoing pit. What was she dropping toward? She couldn’t move or scream, could hardly breathe, and still kept falling, endlessly.

And suddenly woke.

The sense of falling had been so vivid that she couldn’t tell for a few moments what had waked her. Gradually the vertigo subsided and the bed became a solid base. Adele finally drew in a breath that seemed to reach her lungs, and reached over for the light.

Nothing happened.

Damn, she thought. Lightbulb.

And then she realized that the outside lights were out too, and the red numbers of the clock that usually cast a dim glow were dark as well.

Shit. The power company. And what’s their excuse this time? No storm, no ice. But no power. Shit.

Adele felt the floor with her toes, searching for the slippers that had escaped under the bed, while fumbling blinding on the nightstand for the flashlight she’d learned to keep there.

Finally she found the shoes and the light. She pulled a sweatshirt on over her pajama top and walked across the carpeted bedroom. The darkness of the rest of the house seemed huge.

Mark should be here now, she thought. Whatever time it is, he should be back. He promised.

She opened the sliding door and walked on to the deck, where she stopped in puzzlement. Through the pines and myrtle she could see lights next door, and lights shone from houses further down reflected in the water. They had power over there, so why didn’t she?

A gentle splashing came from the direction of her dock. Soft, but going on for a while, clearly not a leaping fish. Maybe a raccoon, washing in the creek.

Adele walked down the boardwalk toward her dock, stopping suddenly at the new sound, a rustling in the bushes near her.

And then she heard the sliding doors of her house slam shut. The lock clicked.

Fear ran through her body like a charge of electricity and her heart began to pound. No wind blew, and the doors were heavy and stable. Suddenly she wanted desperately to be inside.

As she strode toward the house, trying to move quietly along the cone of light the flashlight thrust ahead of her, she heard the rustle again. In panic, she ran toward the house.

Something heavy crashed into her body from behind.

She fell heavily to the dock, landing solidly on her kneecaps. The sudden pain consumed her for a moment.

As the shock ebbed, she realized that someone was there, someone who pulled her hands tightly behind her back, and a new agony stabbed through her shoulders. In silence, the person behind her jerked her arms, a twist so sharp that she obeyed immediately and stood on wobbling legs.

Please, who are you? Her voice broke. What do you want? My money’s in the house, but I’ll get it for you.

Silence responded, but a shove told her to move toward the end of the dock. Stumbling, she lost a slipper, and tried to scream. A second rough jerk brought agony to her arms, and she closed her mouth.

At the end of the dock she stopped, looking at the boat tied to the dock. She’d seen it before, but she couldn’t recall where. Maybe it had been a part of the dream.

Her arms were suddenly released, but before she could turn, something heavy and brutal crashed into her head. She felt the crunch as the blow crushed her skull. The lights disappeared as the water rose to meet her.

Chapter 1

You took my crabs! I had at least fifteen this morning and now my trap is empty.

The woman on the elaborate new dock croaked like a disturbed egret.

No, ma’am, I’m sorry, but I sure didn’t do that. The boy answered from his beat-up jon boat, slowing the motor to a low putter. It was low tide when I got here and they was getting all dried out in the sun, so I just put some water in your bucket and dumped them in. But that’s every crab that was in that trap, ma’am, I promise you it is.

Are you telling me I can’t count? What if I get the police over here to arrest you for trespass? I know you stole those crabs! Her voice rose to a piercing shriek.

Gen and Cammie could hear her from their own weather-beaten dock further down the tidal creek. The sisters eyed each other, Cammie rolling her eyes in horror as the voice ranted on behind her.

I know she’s got a good heart, but she could offend an alligator, said Gen, who had heard Adele often at meetings of the LaFayette Beach Town Planning Council, where Adele’s harsh voice ground down opposition like an electric sander. She’s not worrying about the purity of the environment now.

No, sounds like she’s getting after some kid. You recognize him?

He looks like the boy we saw out at the shrimp boats this morning—but he looks too young to be working the boats.

Maybe we should try to stop Adele before she lets go. She’s capable of making this into a major incident.

Maybe we should leave her alone. Cammie looked at Gen with a clear if unspoken warning to mind her own business.

No, I’ll do it, said Gen, and stepped down into her old yellow kayak. She pulled against the current toward the sound of the shouting, past the other docks along the way. A sleek motorboat sat in mid-channel, idling. Gen recognized Jinko Meggers, leaning back with a half-empty glass in his hand, his face already red under his thinning sandy hair. Jinko was a local real estate developer who’d never quite dropped his fraternity-boy-at-the-beach lifestyle, even as he slid toward his fifties.

Looks like that cracker’s messing with Adele’s stuff, Jinko said as she slid past him. There ought to be a way to keep that trash out of our creek, don’ cha think?

Gen waved and pretended not to hear. Jinko’s arrogance could get her past civil conversation in less than a minute, and one fight was enough for the afternoon.

Paddling hard, she reached the other dock before Adele had finished dialing the cell phone in her hand.

Wait a minute, Adele, Gen panted as she pulled the boat to the dock and held on with one hand, shading her eyes with the other to look at the furious woman.

He went under my dock and took my crabs! And now he’s trying to come up with some story about it, but just look in his bucket and see what he took! Adele was breathless too, with anger.

There was no way to tell whether the crabs in the boy’s bucket had come from his net or Adele’s trap, but before Gen could offer a suggestion, the boy had jumped up on the dock. His sunburned face twisted into a grimace of anger, he grabbed the bucket of crabs and dumped it at Adele's feet.

The crabs immediately scrabbled over the wood, some falling into the water but others menacing the woman's sandaled feet with their powerful blue claws. She shrieked and ran up the boardwalk, almost tripping over the heavy wrought-iron anchor that sat on the boardwalk. Gen climbed onto the dock with her paddle and began knocking the remaining crabs into the water. The boy stood with an amazed look, his mouth half-open, as if someone else had thrown the crabs.

I'm sorry! I didn’t mean to! He grabbed at one final crab that had headed down the dock toward the screaming woman. Yelping when a claw seized his finger, he jerked the crab off and tossed it with a quick motion of his other hand.

He turned to face Gen looking anguished, his pinched finger in his mouth.

What did you think would happen? Gen put down her paddle and turned to face him.

I mean, I just didn't think. It was dumb. I'm sorry.

Adele had stopped screaming and was starting to punch numbers into her phone.

Wait, Adele! Gen moved towards her, the boy following. He's apologizing. Let's talk to him, at least.

But Adele was beyond appeasement. He's going to be in that jail today, she insisted, and stalked off to her house, her red shoes slapping the deck.

Gen and the boy looked at each other.

She may actually call the police. My name’s Genevieve Stackhouse, in case you need some help. You come tie my boat, and I’ll try to stop her, said Gen, pulling herself onto the dock.

I’m Lonnie—Lonnie Foster, said the boy, tilting back his faded red baseball cap to look at her, his hazel-green eyes wrinkled against the sun. He was gangly but graceful, like a young horse. We just moved into Ocean View, me and my mom. And my stepdad.

He leaned down to tie Gen’s kayak, floating beside his old green johnboat that was decorated with a homemade attempt at camouflage.

Ocean View. The name of his neighborhood filled out the story for Gen. Ocean View had been built on the southern end of the island across from Gen and Cammie’s house thirty or forty years ago when land at LaFayette Beach was cheaper. Its houses were small, asbestos-sided, and close together. People who lived there worked around the island and in the nearby town of Prince Frederick—the men were plumbers, shrimpers, mill workers, and the women who didn’t work at the mill earned their living in grocery stores and beauty shops. People shared a few docks in Ocean View, and went fishing in old johnboats or walked down to the bridge and tossed in crab lines. Children played kickball in the streets, people cooked out on little decks in the summer, and dogs milled around the streets in friendly gangs.

But Seagrove Plantation, where now Gen trotted along an elegant boardwalk towards Adele’s door, offered a wider, more manicured landscape. Lying even further north along the mainland side, it held luxurious houses set in large lots, bordering the golf course which had been highly touted as green, with lakes and even little hills that the developers created and tried to make seem natural. The housing market had crashed not long after it was set up so many of the lots were still vacant, but some of the houses had been sold to retired couples or were occupied only rarely since the wealthy owners summered in the mountains or still worked in big cities far away. A guard manned the gate from the highway and no gates at all opened in the other fenced sides. Adele’s house would have fit easily into any inland suburban neighborhood, with its stucco walls and ornate entrance. The garden was lush and carefully tended, the windows polished and gleaming.

Gen caught up to Adele by the back door, surprised to see tears running down the woman’s red face. Her expensively streaked and set hair was tousled, Gen saw, and the make-up that usually adorned her plump, blue-eyed face was almost gone. For the usually immaculate Adele, she was a mess. Gen felt a pang of sympathy well up under her indignation at the screamed threats to the boy in the marsh.

Is something else wrong, Adele? Gen tried to sound concerned, but Adele was not interested in compassion.

What do you think? That boy!

Adele, we can work this out. I know throwing the crabs was stupid, but…

He started with the crabs and next week he’ll be taking my boat or breaking into my house. There’s a reason why we don’t let people drive down here--we ought to be able to fence off the creek, too. Gen, you just can’t let people like that do whatever they want and go wherever they want, you just can’t. You see how he attacked me for nothing.

But we don’t know anything about him, Gen suggested, trying to find the right words to make Adele see reason. At least the woman was talking now, not screaming, though her harsh voice was still accusatory.

That’s exactly my point—we don’t know. He might be in some kind of gang or be a drug dealer or—or even a terrorist for all we know. You city people might be used to that, but down here we try to be more careful.

But before we call the police, shouldn’t we at least try to learn a little bit more? Gen bit her lip, thinking that her family had come to this beach for generations, owned their house for at least eighty years, and yet Adele saw her five years in a gated community as constituting local status.

In answer, Adele slammed the door. Defeated, Gen trudged back down to the dock, but the boy was no longer there. She untied her boat, slipped in, and turned to paddle home.

Gen had spent a lot of her life trying to help boys like Lonnie, more often finding them in the ragged projects in Philadelphia. Too many had wound up dead or behind bars, but she still believed, was always going to believe, that she could work with any community to find a way to save some of the kids. But until she’d come back home to LaFayette Beach, she’d never tried to deal with people like Adele. Gen felt a stab of doubt and, beyond that, fear for Lonnie. Was this going to be his first step on the path to a cell?

She sat in the kayak a moment, trying to calm herself, then looked ahead as she started to paddle home. The rising tide rolled softly between banks of rich golden spartina, reflecting the intense blue sky. And Jinko Meggers still sat in his boat, watching with narrowed eyes.

Just as she drew near, Jinko threw his boat into gear and sped away, not caring that he made a wake that rocked her like breaking surf.

Gen and Cammie sat under the house cleaning and picking the fresh-boiled crabs at an old table covered with newspapers. Gingerly touching the steaming shells, Cammie cracked the legs and Gen sliced open the bodies. Slowly the bowl of sweet white meat grew full. Jones slept with his doggy head on his paws while Maude the cat searched the nearby grass for crickets and anoles. Otis Redding’s voice drifted down from the CD player in their kitchen above as the sun sank lower and long shadows stretched across the golden light on the marsh grass, catching the brilliant white of egret wings as they gracefully rose from their fishing posts.

It had taken a long time for the sisters’ lives to change so that they could finally live here in the old house on the edge of the marsh at LaFayette Beach, a barrier island with a coastal forest along the tidal creek and marshland. Houses like theirs dated from the 1920’s, when a few fishing clubs and family beach houses nestled modestly among the vined and mossy oaks. The house their grandparents had created from an old fish camp was small, a cabin really, built of weathered cypress. A screened porch almost as big as the house itself surrounded the small inner rooms. Safe from flood and hurricane, the house perched on stilts that raised it well above the bush palmetto and cassina bushes around it, the bedroom windows opening into the branches of the oaks. The rooms were musty and sweet with the scent of old cypress walls. After years of work in cities inland or up north, Gen and Cammie had returned to the house that had meant so much to them as they grew up.

So you didn’t make any headway with Adele, questioned Cammie.

None. She’s decided to get that kid and nobody’s stopping her. She’s a bulldog when she starts.

More like a bullfrog.

True. I can’t imagine how Mark lives with that, day after day. Mark was Adele’s husband, a younger man who’d moved to the area to marry her after a whirlwind courtship that had caused some gossip.

Maybe she’s got a good side we don’t see. Maybe she’s great in bed.

Maybe she’s quiet in bed…I haven’t seen Mark around much lately, mused Cammie.

Cammie, I think she could really be trouble for that kid. And he’s a sweet one.

Cammie’s eyes darkened. Hey, I thought you were going to live the simple life down here—no rescues, no crusades. No stress.

Gen looked away. Yeah, she’d survived the operation and the chemo and the radiation, and now she had hair and strength again. She’d meant to live a peaceful life down here, out of the city madness that she knew had made her sick. But Lonnie had just floated up on the tide, without her looking for him.

She tried to be light. I can just worry about him part-time, then. Won’t make it a full-scale project.

Yeah, right. I’ve seen you stay ‘uninvolved’ before. Cammie said.

CHAPTER 2

Gen woke the next morning to the hacking sounds of Maude throwing up on the bed. Maude was a rough and rangy orange tabby, an expert hunter. But sometimes she caught something cats weren’t meant to eat, and paid the price. Looking closer, Gen saw that Maude’s orange-brown nose was swollen with a sting or bite. The cat looked miserable, the white underlid rolled halfway up her eyes. Sighing, Gen rolled out of bed and pulled on her shorts and tee shirt. The vet, Natalie Simpkins, was an old childhood friend--if Gen could get Maude in the carrier and to the vet’s office by opening time, she could get in with no appointment.

Luck and skill got the reluctant cat into the box, and soon Gen and Maude sat in the waiting room. In spite of the early hour, they were not first in line. Already sitting in a blue plastic chair was a slender man with dark eyes and unshaven face—Mark McLeod, Adele’s husband. His blue shirt was rumpled and his good looks were clouded with worry as he sat holding a trembling Jack Russell, obviously much sicker than Maude. They waited. The room smelled of antiseptic and dog hair, and the walls were hung with New Yorker cartoons of dogs and cats. Restless in the carrier, Maude wailed, a deep mournful sound.

Mark smiled at Gen. Not a happy cat.

Indeed not. But your dog looks a lot sicker—what’s wrong?

I’m not sure. I came home for the first time this week last night and Adele had gone out. I found him like this. The little dog, motionless except for his shivering, hardly seemed to be a Jack Russell at all. Gen couldn’t remember ever seeing him sit still until now.

How long has he been like that?

Mark glanced at her quickly and looked away. I… haven’t talked to Adele yet.

Adele off on her own—hmmm, thought Gen. Adele and Mark seem like an unlikely pair. Mark’s attractive in a kind of dark, sensitive way—the receptionist is eying him. Adele’s loud demands must be wearing. And she’s clearly older than he is—she met him on that cruise a couple of years ago. He sure moved up in Ribideau pretty fast, Gen calculated. He must have had money to invest. But he seemed tentative and unsure, compared to Jinko Meggers and the other high rollers who made up the Ribideau Group, the developers of Seagrove Plantation. Women sure like him, at least the ones I’ve seen—but he’s not my type at all.

The silence grew awkward. I just saw Adele yesterday. Gen started to tell Mark about the shouting match at the creek, but thought better of it. She didn’t mention the dog being sick, then.

Yeah. Well. Mark looked around.

The door opened and Natalie Simpkins, the doctor, walked out. She looked as elegant as a model, her short Afro outlining the distinguished curve of her neck and head, her brown skin smooth as a teenager’s. Hi, Mark, hey Gen. Thanks for waiting. Joey’s not here, so things are taking a little while. Mark looked relieved when Natalie beckoned him in, but must have decided to leave the dog there. He was out in less than five minutes, giving Gen an embarrassed quick wave as he slipped past her, out the door.

Ashley came around to pick up Maude’s carrier and was greeted by a growl.

I’ll get it! Gen carried the box into the exam room and opened the door. Maude reluctantly stepped out of the carrier. Her nose was even more swollen and she was panting.

Okay, we can see this problem! Natalie held the cat steady, her long tapering fingers gentle but strong. Allergic reaction, probably a bee or scorpion bite. Let’s give her some adrenaline and antihistamine and keep her till evening, just to be sure.

Sounds good. She’s a tough one, but a bite like that…

Yeah—even the tough ones have a weak spot. Natalie smiled, her dark eyes crinkling at the corners. She looked almost Ethiopian with her long nose and thin lips, though her family had come from West Africa many generations ago.

How are you doing, back here in the home country? Natalie’s low voice had a teasing tone, but Gen knew she also meant her question.

Looks like it’s working out OK with Cammie—so far at least!

Natalie shook her head. You must be good women. I love my sisters, but try to live with one of them—man! It would be murder, at least. If not World War III.

So far no heavy artillery, Gen laughed.

Hey, why don’t you meet me here late this afternoon so we can get a drink before you take the patient home? How’s six o’clock?

Sounds good. See you! Gen hugged Natalie and left her to the next patient, an elderly Labrador.

Cammie had gone to a chiropractor in Charleston, so Gen spent the day alone, slashing back the smilax and grape vines choking the cassinas and wax myrtle that grew around the house. By afternoon she was hot, scratched, chigger-bitten, and more than ready for a drink. After a quick shower in the outside stall, she threw on a sleeveless cotton shift and a pair of flip-flops, wrote a quick note to Cammie, and quickly set off to Natalie’s clinic. She drove slowly west along the dirt road to the highway, then turned south and sped up until she reached the strips of business that had sprouted up along both side of the busy road. Natalie’s clinic was part of a block of low stucco