Pippin liked Daisy. She was direct, yet approachable. “I don’t exactly know.”
Daisy pushed up her glasses and gave her an amused smile. “Let’s start with the basics then. Do you like sci fi? Romance? Westerns? Mystery—”
“No. I mean yes. I mean, actually, I’m not much of a reader. And I’m not looking for a book like that. At least…I don’t think I am.” Pippin shook her head, not at all sure how to explain what it was she needed. The memory of her and her mother in the middle of the street, right here in front of the library, wouldn’t shake loose from her mind. The odds were slim, but maybe she’d find the answer here. “My mother saw this book once when I was really little. Something in it made her really upset. I have this vague recollection of her telling my father that she’d thought for sure he would never come home again.”
“And you’re looking for that book?” Daisy picked up a pen and pulled a small pad of paper in front of her. “Tell me what you remember.”
Pippin smiled faintly at her, grateful that Daisy didn’t think she was crazy for trying to find what was sure to be a needle in a haystack. “Not much, really. A woman was passing us in the street, and she dropped the book. I think it was thick.”
“Hardcover or paperback?”
Pippin closed her eyes and imagined the scene, just as she had a hundred times before. “Paperback, I think. I remember picking it up, then my mom saying that no wife would greet him. Or sing to him. Something like that. No children at his knees.”
Daisy made a note on her pad of paper. “Got it. What else?”
“It was windy. A storm was blowing in. We’d been at the pier. When the book fell in the street, I remember the wind whipping the pages back and forth. Then they just kind of stopped. That’s when my mom looked at the book and kind of freaked out.”
“Okay.” Daisy didn’t look surprised. She pushed at her glasses again.
“Have you heard that story about my mom?”
Daisy shrugged. “Small town, you know.”
Pippin waited, letting the silence stretch, hoping Daisy would tell her about the rumors. After a moment, she said, “The story’s become…legend. Your mom fell to the ground and started muttering under her breath. Something about someone not coming home, and that the curse was true.”
A chill crawled over Pippin’s skin. She could almost hear her mother sobbing, saying those words over and over.
“Who do you think she was talking about?” Daisy asked.
Pippin answered without a doubt in her mind, although she didn’t understand how or why. “My father.”
Chapter 7
“But in a solitary life, there are rare moments when another soul dips near yours, as stars once a year brush the earth. Such a constellation was he to me.”
~Madeline Miller, Circe
When Pippin returned to the old house on Rum Runner’s Lane, she saw Grey standing outside the crime scene tape that encircled the boat in the side yard. Next to him was a portly man with short graying hair dressed in a navy-blue uniform. And in her peripheral vision, she caught a glimpse of the elusive honey-colored dog vanishing into the bushes.
She wanted to chase the dog, but she couldn’t. Her heartbeat ratcheted up and she hurried across the yard to Grey and the officer standing with him. “Have you found out something?”
Grey’s afternoon stubble shadowed his face, specks of orange hair peeking through. The second he looked at her, she knew. “Pippin,” he said. “This is Lieutenant Roy Jacobs from the Devil’s Cove Police Department. He’s the officer in charge of the investigation.”
She noticed the rectangular gold bars on both sides of his shirt collar. Instead of giving her comfort, that the case was in the hands of someone highly qualified, they made her skittish. Her arms hung by her sides, every nerve in her body suddenly alight. “What have you found?”
“Ma’am,” the lieutenant said. “I’m sorry to report to you that the remains found in the boat are those of your father, Leonardo David Hawthorne.”
Heat immediately flamed her face, and her heart threatened to pound right out of her chest. She’d known it deep down, of course, but hearing the words spoken aloud made it written in stone. She’d hold onto all the anger she’d harbored over the years if it meant Leo was still alive. Now it couldn’t be taken back, and the idea that her father was out there, still living, was a dashed dream. “How do you know?” The words came out sounding stronger than Pippin had anticipated given the fuzziness that filled her body.
“Three things,” Lieutenant Jacobs said. “A ring found next to the body, which, based on a wedding photo of your parents, belonged to your father. A set of keys, which includes keys to this house, the boat, and what we believe is a key to the old marina gate.”
“That’s all circumstantial…or non conclusive…or whatever,” Grey said. His arms were crossed over his chest as if they were a barrier to the information the lieutenant was throwing at them. “Right? It still might not be him.”
The Lieutenant looked at Grey. “The final confirmation just came in from the medical examiner in Greenville. She was able to use records from the dentist your father went to as a child.”
The intermittent sound of a nail gun came from one of the open windows of the house, along with the chatter of Travis, Jimmy, and Kyron, but it faded away for Pippin. She felt her chest start to cave in on itself. Dental records. She’d thought that was nothing more than a TV shortcut, but apparently not. The lieutenant seemed to hear her thoughts. “We can’t use them to identify an unknown victim, but we can to confirm an identity. Aside from the fact that this was your father’s boat, the other pieces of evidence led us to seek final confirmation that the body is his.”
Pippin’s emotions spun out of control. All these years she’d thought Leo had walked out on them. She’d sometimes pictured him out there in some unnamed harbor town starting a new life. Other times she imagined him as a captain out on the open sea, caught in a storm, wishing more than anything that he could get home to her and Grey.
She’d maintained hope that he’d come back. Even when Grandmother Faye had finally given up, Pippin had believed it was possible.
But now she knew. He was dead. And not only that. “He was murdered,” Pippin said, more to herself than to Grey and the lieutenant. Because how and why would her father have climbed into the lowest hatch of his own boat?
Plain and simple…he wouldn’t have.
“A twenty-year-old murder,” Jacobs said, sounding like he’d already designated it as a cold case file.
Grey spun to face the police officer, the bands of his neck straining. “But you’re going to try to solve it, right?”
Jacobs patted the air with one hand, palm down. “Simmer down there, Mr. Hawthorne,” he said, trying to placate Grey with his slow southern drawl.
Grey seethed. “I’m not going to simmer down. You just told us that our father’s body has been rotting on his own boat for twenty years. I want to know what you’re going to do about it.”
Jacobs sighed. “Look. I know you want answers. I’m heading up the investigation, and I’ll do my damndest to get to the truth. But I have to be straight with you. After twenty years, the odds of us finding the perpetrator are slim.”