04 Lowcountry Bordello(18)

“How many webcams do we have in the Explorer?”

Nate rolled his lips in, looked thoughtful. “A dozen of the air purifiers.”

“That should do it. But no need to bring them up. We need some snacks. Cheerwine and Dove Dark Chocolate Promises. Something salty. Bottled water. Other than that I think we’re good.”

Nate shook his head and silently chuckled. “I’ll be back shortly.”

I called my sister, Merry, and asked her to swing by and see about Rhett. “I’m not going to make it back to Stella Maris until tomorrow, probably late in the day. Play with him for a while, will you?”

“Of course,” she said. “I’ll go by this afternoon when I get home. I need some quality time with my ‘nephew.’ We’ll go for a walk on the beach. Do you want me to take him home with me?”

“Why don’t you just stay in one of the guest rooms at my house like you’re going to do while we’re in St. John? You pack lighter than Rhett does.”

“Okay. Are you getting nervous?”

I smiled. “Not really. I got it right this time. I’m excited. Mamma’s nervous enough for both of us.”

Merry laughed. “That’s for sure. See you in a bit.” She ended the call.

I squinched my face at the phone. She wasn’t going to see me until late tomorrow, if then. I shrugged it off as Merry being at work, eager to get off the phone, distracted.

After checking the view from both front bedroom windows again, I moved the upholstered armchair over to the corner between the right front window and the window facing south on Church Street. Then I grabbed a couple pillows from the daybed and fashioned a lap-desk. So much had happened so fast. I hadn’t had a chance to process everything.

My instincts were to dig straight into deep background on Thurston Middleton. But I needed to organize my thoughts. Like evidence, I needed to log and tag each fact. This case felt like a bowl of spaghetti in my brain. So many pieces already piled on top of each other and twisted together. I needed to sort what we knew into possibilities—feasible theories, or narratives of the crime. I pulled out my laptop and started a case file.



 Because I had no proof there’d been a body in 12 Church Street the night before, and I had unequivocally witnessed—and documented—a body-free parlor, I started with what I knew: Seth Quinlan was blackmailing my client’s wife. Olivia had gone to the house the night before to meet with her aunt. While there, she’d seen what she believed to be a body in the parlor. With excruciating detail, I documented the lack of evidence indicating a murder had been committed on the premises.

Then I created a profile on Seth Quinlan. I logged into a subscription database and located his birth certificate. No father was listed. He was roughly twelve years older than us. I checked public records. He owned no property I could locate except a 2010 Dodge truck. He had no adult criminal record, and no civil suits had been filed against him.

I was able to pull a copy of his driver’s license from another database. At six feet three inches tall, two hundred twenty pounds, with long, unruly, medium brown hair, and hazel eyes, he was a nice enough looking man in an outdoorsy kind of way. I wondered why he’d never married, moved away from his aunts.

A quick property search told me The Willow-Mary Trust owned the house at 12 Church Street. It didn’t take long to verify that Willowdean Beauthorpe owned half interest in the trust, and Olivia Beauthorpe Pearson had inherited the other half. This kind of information is only available if you know what to look for, which accounted for why I’d missed it a couple years back.

Only after I’d documented all the facts did I allow myself to create a sub-file labeled “Speculation.” Here is where I would list all the possibilities. Speculation and possibilities were not admissible in court.

I heard Nate on the stairs before the door opened.

“Annelise sent up cookies.” He set down the camera equipment, then crossed the room and bent to give me a kiss that made me lose every thought in my head. When he stood, his smoky blue eyes held mine. “I missed you.”

“I missed you too.”

“We need to wrap up this sordid business so we can go back to dreaming about our honeymoon.” He handed me a napkin with two iced Christmas tree cookies.

“That gets my vote.” I refocused, with great effort. “If you want to put the camera here, I can move. I thought the angle was better from the left window.”

“This will work just fine.” He went about setting up the tripod and camera.

“I’ve documented thoroughly how I don’t think there was a body in the house across the street last night.”