Bonbon With the Wind Read online

  Whatever the woman was saying to him, seemed to cause him a great deal of upset. Joe shook his head violently, then with a jerky movement, he pulled his cart away from her as fast as his short legs could carry him.

  By the time he reached us, he had his head down, and he was muttering to himself, turning his head side-to-side with an agitated jerky motion.

  “Are you okay?” I rushed to his side, concerned for the poor man. If he had indeed encountered Florence, I understood his upset. She often reduced me to a nervous, dithering idiot whenever I encountered her.

  “Am I—?” He looked up at me with surprise. “Oh, um, hello Althea, Charity.”

  “It’s just Penn,” I corrected. He must have been talking with Florence. She was one of the few people on the island who still insisted on calling me by my cringeworthy first name, Charity.

  “Who was that woman?” Althea asked.

  “Did she say something to upset you?” I asked at the same time.

  “Just-just seeing her was upsetting enough, don’t you think?” His pale brown eyes grew wide. “But, yes, she warned me. And…oh!” he exclaimed as if he’d just realized something. “Do-do you know what that means?”

  “She threatened you?” I’d experienced the wrong end of her anger a time or two myself. Florence loved to issue her tight-lipped threats.

  “Ain’t that what she does?” he asked.

  “That’s my experience,” I said.

  At the same time Althea cried, “Who? Who were you talking to?”

  “The Gray Lady,” he growled. His thinning hair, dyed an unnatural shade of orange, lifted from his head in the stiff pre-storm breeze rushing in from the ocean and waved around like tentacles.

  “No,” Althea gasped. She pressed a hand to her mouth.

  I frowned.

  “Who else would it be?” he shouted. He then shook his head seemingly startled by his own outburst. “Of course it was her. She told me—” He swallowed hard. “She told me the storm would be bad.” Moving quickly, he slammed his metal detector into its slot on his beach cart. “I’ve got to get out of here. I shouldn’t have stayed so long.”

  Althea grabbed his arm to keep him from escaping. “That was her? Really her?”

  I turned back searching for the woman who had been talking with him. But the beach was empty.

  That was impossible. People didn’t simply vanish.

  “As ghostly as they come,” Joe was saying to Althea. “Could look straight through her and see the dunes and houses beyond her as clear as if she weren’t there at all.”

  “Ghost,” I hesitated to even say the word. “As in…?” I couldn’t even complete the thought because it was nonsense.

  Both Joe and Althea nodded in unison.

  “She’s as fearsome a sight as they’ve said she would be,” Joe said and then shivered.

  “The Gray Lady,” Althea whispered with what sounded like a great deal of awe.

  “Sounds like a bunch of nonsense to me.” I snapped. Talk of the supernatural always made me prickly and rude.

  “Not nonsense. Not at all. She’s an apparition that appears to people on Camellia Beach before storms,” Althea said. “She’s not nearly as popular as the Gray Man who shows up to warn residents on nearby Pawley’s Island. He’ll tell them that a hurricane is on its way. He’s achieved international fame. I think he even has a Twitter account.” Althea paused for dramatic effect. “The Gray Lady doesn’t simply warn residents of hurricanes. To see her is a warning of impending doom. How she does it seems rather cruel. According to the lore, nothing you do can change your fate. You’re doomed. The storm is going to wreck your life. And now you know it.”

  Even in the early morning light, I could see that Joe’s complexion had paled.

  “Althea! You’re scaring poor the man for no good reason. There’s no such thing as ghosts. And even if there were, they wouldn’t go around scaring random beachgoers.”

  “Sorry, Joe,” Althea said. She really did sound sorry too. “I-I didn’t mean…I mean, the tales might not be one hundred percent correct. There might be a way to—”

  “I don’t think that’s helping,” I said. “Joe? Are you okay?”

  He wasn’t okay. The words had barely escaped my mouth when he pitched forward and landed hard on the ground right next to where Stella had been digging. His unexpected fall frightened my little pup so much she darted behind my legs and started barking again.

  Good gracious. Had the poor man dropped dead from fear?

  Alarmed, I knelt beside him. “Are-are you okay?”

  I didn’t know what I’d do if we suddenly found ourselves dealing with a suspicious death. Hours before a hurricane made landfall certainly wasn’t a good time…as if there could ever be a good time for someone to die.

  He didn’t move.

  “Joe?” I whispered.

  His body remained as still as death.

  Oh, no…

  Without warning, Joe rolled over onto his back.

  I screamed.

  He thrust a sandy lump of rock toward me.

  I lurched back and screamed again.

  “What’s wrong with your friend?” he asked Althea.

  “I thought you were dead,” I answered for her.

  “Dead? Hardly.” He shook the sandy lump at me again. “Do you know what this is?”

  Both Althea and I shook our heads.

  He scrambled to his feet. I followed.

  With his wide, flat thumbnail, he chipped away the dried sand to reveal a round disc that glimmered kind of like gold. “It’s a Spanish gold coin, possibly from the eighteen hundreds.”

  “Cool,” I said peering at the coin closely. “So you didn’t suffer from some kind of attack or faint?”

  “Me? Faint?” He snorted. “I’m as healthy as a twenty-year-old. I saw your dog playing with this. And I had to get it.”

  The sun was starting to rise. A red glow formed right under the dark clouds on the horizon, making them look as if the storm clouds were bleeding. I shook that crazy thought away. Worry over the hurricane was making my thoughts as fanciful as Joe and Althea’s. “I need to get back to the shop. Stay safe, Joe. And don’t worry about silly ghost stories. Make good decisions, and you’ll be fine.”

  “You don’t understand what this means.” He grabbed my arm and shook the coin frantically. His entire hunched body started to tremble. “I didn’t think anyone would ever find it. Not a bit of it. But we now have evidence that it exists. Heck, I didn’t really think it existed. I just…”

  “You mean?” Althea sounded almost as excited about his little gold coin as she had about the Gray Lady.

  Joe nodded. “Yes. I do mean it. This coin proves that Blackbeard’s treasure was actually buried here. And dagnabbit, I can’t do a thing about it because of that storm and-and—” He threw a worried look over his shoulder to the place on the beach where he’d spoken to the Gray Lady. “I have to go. I can’t stay. It isn’t safe. I have to leave the island. It’s not safe out here for me. It’s not safe for anyone.”

  Chapter 2

  “We expect the first of the outer bands from Hurricane Avery to reach our coastline by five P.M. This is going to be a devastating storm, y’all. If you haven’t already evacuated, do so now,” the announcer on the shop’s radio implored shortly after I’d returned from the beach.

  The two-story white clapboard building was home to my chocolate shop and the Drop-In surf shop next door. Upstairs were two apartments. I shared the apartment directly above my shop with Althea’s mom, Bertie Bays. Harley Dalton, the island’s surfing lawyer, rented the other apartment. The entire building leaned to one side as if the prevailing winds were slowly pushing it over. It’d survived more than a hundred years of storms.

  Even though the Chocolate Box wasn’t officially open for business, it was already buzzing with activity. Althea, her face flush with excitement, rushed through the front door of the Chocolate Box shortly after me.

  Wanting t
o keep Stella close to me (but out of trouble), I took her to the shop’s back office where I kept an overstuffed dog bed and two ceramic bowls. I filled one with cool water and the other with a carefully measured serving of her food. Before closing her inside the office, I told her to behave herself. She nudged my hand with her coal-black nose as to say, “Have you just met me?” She then barked several times to make sure I understood who was actually in charge.

  I chuckled and shook my head. That dog of mine always had to have the last word.

  When I returned to the front of the shop, I found Bertie tending the coffee station, filling to-go cups and handing them out. I recognized among the crowd several town council members, half the fire department, a few young police officers, several fellow business owners, and contractors who’d been working day and night to board up the island’s houses and businesses.

  Nothing was for sale today. We were providing coffee and tea and what was left of our chocolate stock as a thank you to those who had to stay and work to keep the island safe.

  The Chocolate Box had been in operation in this same building in Camellia Beach, making chocolate from the cacao bean, for generations, being passed down from family member to family member. It had been my grandmother’s dying wish that I did everything in my power to continue the work my ancestors had begun. While I knew I’d never match Mabel’s ability to run this shop while also protecting the island’s tight-knit community, I took the heavy mantle of responsibility seriously. Even if the only thing I could do was to hand out coffee and good cheer before the storm arrived, that was what I planned to do.

  “I double-checked all of the equipment in the kitchen before unlocking the front door. You did a good job sealing everything in plastic,” Bertie said to me. She then handed a cup of coffee to Camellia Beach’s police chief, Hank Byrd.

  Bertie was dressed in another one of her touristy Camellia Beach T-shirts. This one had a cartoon picture of a muscle man flexing his arms while dressed in nothing but a tiny red swimsuit. The caption said, “I don’t need a permit for these guns.”

  Her black hair was meticulously curled. Her neatly trimmed nails had been painted the same shade of red as her cartoon man’s swimsuit. I puzzled over that. She never painted her nails. Why would she start now when we had so much else to do to get ready for the hurricane?

  But then Bubba Crowley, the president of the local business association who resembled a gentle giant, wandered over and bussed a kiss on her cheek. Bertie blushed and batted him away. Her reaction answered my question about her painted nails. Bubba must have finally started to succeed in his quest to win her over.

  Before I could tease her, Bertie blurted out, “Althea told me about what Joe Davies saw.”

  “About the gold coin? I hardly think one old coin proves there’s pirate treasure on the island,” I said.

  “I agree.” Bertie handed a cup of coffee to Bubba and winked at him. “I meant about the Gray Lady.”

  It was as if someone had flipped a switch and turned off the sound in the shop. The cacophony of excited chatter and nervous laughter came to an abrupt stop. The only sound for nearly a minute was the hiss of the growing wind outside.

  “He clearly didn’t want to tell us who he was really talking to.” I turned and frowned at Althea. “I think she looked like Florence.”

  “The Gray Lady?” Bubba drawled in that deep and slow good-ole-boy tone of his. “Joe actually spoke to her?”

  “Poor devil,” the police chief grumbled.

  Before anyone else could offer their opinion, the copper bell above the door rang. An older man dressed in wrinkled dress pants and a stained white button-up shirt staggered in. He swept off his tweed hat to reveal a bald head and said somewhat breathlessly, “I need to find Joe Davies.”

  “Why do you need to find him?” I asked.

  “If he has any kind of brains in his head, he’ll be long gone by now,” Bubba told the man before he’d had a chance to answer me. “You should wait until after the storm to look for anyone. The residents will be scattered to all corners of the Southeast by now.”

  “He might have decided to stay,” the stranger said. “Don’t some people stay and ride out storms despite the mandatory evacuation order?”

  Bubba exchanged a glance with the police chief.

  “Only fools with rocks for brains choose to ignore evacuation orders. We can’t rightly force them out of their homes. But as soon as we finish here,” Byrd said as if he were doing something more important than drinking free coffee and eating fistfuls of Bertie’s sea salt caramels, “we’re going to go door-to-door and write down their names so we can notify next of kin after the storm.”

  “Have you tried his cottage?” I asked the stranger.

  “No one answered when I knocked,” the stranger admitted. “But I thought…I mean…I hoped that perhaps he wasn’t home and that’s why he hadn’t opened the door.”

  That was a curious way to say that. If sounded like he thought that Joe might be hiding inside his own house. But that didn’t make sense. Joe would have no reason to hide inside his house just because a stranger came knocking on his door.

  “Why do you want to talk to him?” I asked again.

  “I…um…it’s a private matter,” he mumbled.

  “We were talking to him on the beach a little while ago. But he rushed off, saying he needed to evacuate,” I said. The back of my neck prickled. “Sounds like you just missed him.”

  “Like Penn said, he’s gone inland. Try back after the storm,” Bertie suggested as she handed the stranger a cup of coffee. “We’ll all be back assessing the damage and putting our lives back in order after the evacuation decree is lifted. I’m sure Joe would appreciate any extra help you could offer cleaning up debris from his yard or getting the boards off his windows.”

  The man held the cup at arm’s length. His brows flattened. His gaze shifted from person to person in the room. With a huff, he jammed his tweed hat back on his head. “I’ll be back,” he grumbled and then hurried out of the shop.

  No one spoke for a few moments.

  “And you saw her too?” Bubba leaned in close to my face to ask. “You and Althea?”

  “What?” I was still watching the stranger through the shop’s plate glass window. He’d stopped under the large oak tree in front of the shop. His mouth twisted into a scowl that made the prickles on my neck turn into a full-scale shiver. The Spanish moss dangling from the oak’s massive branches waved as if trying to shoo the odd stranger away.

  “The Gray Lady? You actually saw her?” Bubba persisted.

  “I saw a woman from a distance,” I admitted. “She wasn’t a ghost. She was a person. Kind of looked like Florence. By the skittish way he was acting I’d guess she was Florence. She tends to scare the heck out of anyone she encounters.”

  Althea shook her head in disagreement. “The Gray Lady looked all wispy.”

  Several people in the crowded shop gasped.

  “The sun hadn’t come up yet. Everything looked wispy.” I tried to explain.

  “Joe said he could see straight through her,” Althea argued.

  “Joe needs glasses. And it was still dark out,” I pointed out. But it was hopeless. Everyone was set on believing some ridiculous ghost story.

  “That’s bad news for the town,” the police chief said as he sipped his coffee. “But there ain’t really anything we can do about it.”

  “We can get out of town,” Bubba reminded us.

  “Already planned to,” someone else said.

  “Y’all should be gone already,” Hank seemed to direct that comment to me.

  I held up my hands. “Once we’re done serving the coffee this morning, we’re leaving. The car is already packed.”

  “That’s right,” a welcome voice rumbled directly behind me. “I caught Troubadour and stuffed him—spitting mad, mind you—in that cat carrier Bertie gave me. I think that’s the last of the preparations for upstairs.”

  A blush
must have traveled up my face, because hearing his voice made me feel suddenly all hot and…well…happy.

  I spun around and somehow found myself wrapped in Harley Dalton’s strong arms. “I’m anxious to get as far away from here as possible and yet I’m also terrified to leave. Does that even make sense?” I asked as I pressed my face to the shoulder of his black cotton T-shirt.

  He kissed me on the top of my head. “It makes perfect sense.”

  Blushing even harder, since I knew everyone was watching and would be talking about how close Harley and I had been getting lately, I peeled out of his embrace.

  I’d sort of inherited Harley with the shop. He had been my grandmother’s lawyer and he was mine. The sight of him made my heart thump like crazy in my chest.

  He was slightly taller than me, which was saying something, since I towered over most men. I liked being able to see him eye to eye. His brown hair was in need of a trim. It curled at the ends in the humid air that had blanketed the island. His soulful green eyes watched me with a look of concern that made butterflies flutter in my belly.

  “Let me count your fingers. Any mortal scratches?” I said, reaching for his hands. Troubadour was a hairless cat that had belonged to my grandmother. When Mabel had died, Bertie had adopted him. For the most part, Troubadour was a friendly cat, and he was absolutely in love with Harley, shamelessly rubbing against his legs whenever he stopped by to visit.

  However, this utterly docile cat turned downright feral when it came to dealing with Stella or whenever he had to ride somewhere in his cat carrier. He’d also once attacked my mother, Florence. Not that I held that against him. I considered the attack a sign that Troubadour possessed a fine sense of judgment.

  Harley wiggled his fingers. “All attached and accounted for.”

  “And Gavin? Is he coming with us or did he leave with Jody?” I asked referring to his eleven-year-old son. He shared custody with his unpleasant ex, Jody Dalton.

  “Jody took Gavin to visit the theme parks in Florida.”