Cape Refuge, Page 2

  Again, there was applause and laughter, and Morgan grabbed Blair’s arm and covered the microphone. “You’re turning this into a joke!” she whispered through her teeth. “Mama and Pop are going to be mortified! You are not helping our cause!”

  “I can handle this,” Blair said, jerking it back.

  Morgan forced herself between Blair and the microphone. “Your honor . . . uh . . . Mr. Mayor . . . council members . . . I am so sorry for my sister’s outbursts. Really, I had no idea she would say such things.”

  Blair stepped to her side, glaring at her as if she’d just betrayed her.

  “But I think we’ve gotten a little off track here. The fact is that Hanover House doesn’t just house those who’ve gotten out of jail. It also houses others who have no place to go.”

  Art Russell grabbed the mayor’s microphone, sending feedback reverberating over the room. “I don’t think Cape Refuge is very well served by a bunch of people who have no place else to go.”

  “Well, that’s not up to you, is it, Art?” Blair asked, her voice carrying over the speakers.

  “If I may,” Morgan said, trying to make her soft voice sound steady, “the question here is whether there’s something illegal going on at Hanover House. And unless there is, you have no grounds for closing us down.”

  The crowd applauded again, but Sarah, the swimsuit-clad councilwoman, dragged the microphone across the table. The cord wasn’t quite long enough, so she leaned in. “If there aren’t any dangerous people staying at the bed-and-breakfast, then how come 20/20 said Gus Hampton served time for armed robbery and didn’t even complete his sentence? And how come your husband was at the dock fighting with your parents just this morning, complaining about Hampton? I heard it myself. Jonathan didn’t want you working there around Hampton, and he said it loud and clear.”

  Blair’s eyes pierced Morgan. “Why didn’t you tell me this?” she whispered.

  “It wasn’t relevant,” Morgan hissed back, “since I didn’t think you’d be the one speaking for us.”

  The council members all came to attention, their rocking stopped, and they waited for an answer. “If there isn’t any danger at Hanover House,” Sarah repeated, “then how come your own family’s fighting over it?”

  Blair tried to rally. “Well, Sarah, when Jonathan gets back here, you can ask him. But meanwhile, the question is simple. Do you have the right to shut down Hanover House, and if you do try to close it, are you financially able to handle the lawsuit that’s going to be leveled at this town . . . and maybe even at each of you individually?”

  “They can’t file a lawsuit,” Fred said, his face still red.

  “Watch us,” she bit out. “And the chances of your reelection would be slim at best, since the people of this town love my parents. Most everybody in this town has benefited from their kindness in one way or another.”

  The crowd applauded again, and cheers and whoops backed up her words. But Morgan realized that it wasn’t the cries of the people that would decide the fate of Hanover House. It was those angry members of the city council, sitting there with their hackles up because Blair had insulted them.

  “Some call that kindness, others call it naivete,” the mayor said. “They’ll believe anything anybody tells them. Just because some convict claims he wants to change, doesn’t mean he will.”

  “Thank goodness they believed your daddy,” Blair said, “or you might not be sitting on this island in some overpriced chair!”

  As the crowd expressed their enjoyment again, Morgan pressed her fingertips against her temples and wondered where her parents were. If they would just rush in right now and take over the microphone, she knew they could turn this around.

  While the mayor tried to get control of the crowd again, Morgan looked fully at Blair, pleading for her to surrender the mike and not do any more harm. But Blair’s scathing look told Morgan that her sister was in this to the end. The burn scar on the right side of Blair’s face was as red as the mayor’s face. It always got that way when she was upset, reminding Morgan of her sister’s one vulnerability. It was that imperfect half of her face that kept her unmarried and alone—and it had a lot to do with the hair-trigger temper she was displaying now.

  “Order, now! Come on, people—order!” the mayor bellowed, banging his gavel as if he were hammering a nail.

  The sound of sirens rose over the crowd’s noise, cutting across the mayor’s words and quieting the crowd. Those on the east side of the building, where Morgan and Blair stood, craned their necks to see out the open window, trying to figure out where the fire trucks and police cars were heading. As one after another went by, sirens wailing and lights flashing, Morgan realized that something big must have happened. The island was small, and the sound of sirens was not an everyday occurrence. But now the sound of several at once could not be ignored.

  When the front doors of the room swung open, everyone turned expectantly. Police Chief Matthew Cade—whom friends called simply “Cade”—stood scanning the faces, his skin pale against his dark, windblown hair.

  His eyes fell on the sisters at the front of the crowd. “Blair, Morgan, I need to see both of you right away.”

  Morgan’s eyes locked with her sister’s for a second, terrors storming through her mind.

  “What is it, Cade?” Blair asked.

  He cleared his throat and swallowed hard. “We need to hurry,” he said, then pushed the door open wider and stood beside it, watching them, clearly expecting them to accompany him.

  Whatever it was, Morgan realized, he couldn’t or wouldn’t say it in front of all these people. Something horrible had happened.

  Melba Jefferson, their mother’s closest friend, stood and touched Morgan’s back. “Oh, honey.”

  Morgan took Blair’s hand, and the now-silent crowd parted as they made their way out. Cade escorted them into the fading sunlight and his waiting squad car.

  C H A P T E R

  2

  Jonathan Cleary pulled his truck onto the gravel driveway at Hanover House and parked in the shade of the wax myrtles that reached up to the cloudless sky. The front door to the big yellow house usually sat open, and from the driveway one could see through the glass storm door into the welcoming front room.

  He glanced toward the side of the house, to the three red cedars where Thelma and Wayne always parked their old Buick Regal. It wasn’t there now, and neither was the old black pickup that Gus Hampton drove, or the little Honda in which Rick Morrison scooted around town.

  He took the porch steps two at a time and rushed through the storm door.

  “Thelma! Wayne!” he called as he stepped into the front room. There was no answer, so he went halfway up the staircase and peered up to the second floor. Thelma and Wayne’s bedroom looked empty from there.

  They were probably already at City Hall, making their speech—undoubtedly glossing over the risks taken in this house each day. He went further up the steps and glanced into his own bedroom. Morgan had left the door open, after he’d asked her repeatedly to keep it closed and locked. He didn’t like the idea of his private things being open for anyone to steal. It wasn’t as if the tenants around here didn’t have clouded histories. At any given time, there was likely to be someone staying here who’d served time for armed robbery. Morgan’s trust level in the tenants’ “changed lives” bordered on naive. But he supposed she’d come by it honestly. Her parents had spent years instilling that in her.

  He closed and locked the bedroom door, then gave a cursory glance around the hallway at the tenants’ locked doors. They weren’t nearly as trusting of each other as Morgan or her parents were.

  He hurried back down the stairs and looked around the phone for a note or message of some kind, but there was none.

  He left the house again, this time locking the front door behind him. It was a rule in the house that the last one to leave should lock it, but that rule was seldom enforced even by the Owens themselves. But Jonathan never forgot.

>   He stepped out onto the porch. From here he could see the beach across the street, with a clear view of Wassaw Sound. Just to the left, the sound opened into the Atlantic. It had always been Jonathan’s opinion that Hanover House occupied the best spot on this small barrier island east of Savannah. No wonder the city council wanted to close them down. The council’s hope, as far as Jonathan could figure, was that, without tenants, Thelma and Wayne couldn’t afford to keep the house. If it ever went on the market, there would be some fierce competition to buy it and turn it into condominiums or a high-priced hotel. As much as Jonathan meant what he’d told Thelma and Wayne this morning about moving, part of him wished he hadn’t made that vow. He’d grown to love this huge old house; it had so much more personality than the old two-bedroom home he’d grown up in.

  The chairs on the beach that belonged to Hanover House were empty. The tide was low, so the chairs seemed far back from where the waves slapped at the shore, teasing and reaching, then fleeing back out into the Atlantic and chasing back again.

  He got into his truck and sat for a moment, thinking. He could drive back to City Hall and see if Thelma and Wayne had made it yet. On the way, he could swing by the dock and see if they had gone by the warehouse where they held church services on Sunday. It would be just like them to find some wayward soul waiting there. They left the door to the building unlocked for that very purpose. Jonathan expected the piano to disappear any day now, along with the carved wooden pulpit that sat at the front of the room.

  But you couldn’t tell them anything. They were as hardheaded and stubborn as anyone who’d ever put their stamp on this island. And he’d said as much to their faces this morning, in front of God, the breakfast patrons of Crickets who sat listening through screen windows, and his deckhand preparing to take his rig out.

  He supposed he owed Thelma and Wayne an apology for the public attack. He should have waited until later when they were alone, but he hadn’t wanted to explode in front of Morgan. She had asked him to trust her judgment, and he knew better than to tell her he couldn’t. Her faith in their tenants was blinding her to the risks. It was a hard thing to ask a newly married man to stop worrying about his bride’s well-being.

  He had still been stewing when he’d arrived at the dock that morning and begun preparing his boat for his morning tour. The heat index had already hit record highs, and even at that early hour, humidity rode thick over the Bull River, just a couple of miles from where it joined the Atlantic. A few of the tourists who had hired him to take them saltwater fishing were already waiting near the boat.

  He had seen Thelma and Wayne go into Crickets, the hole-in-the-wall restaurant and bar that looked like a rotten screened porch. Crickets did its best business in the early morning or late night hours, when the breeze was cooler as it swept through the place.

  Thelma and Wayne often showed up there as the sun came up, hoping to build relationships with the fishermen and dockworkers who took their meals there. Many of them wound up joining the little warehouse church, and some of them became temporary residents of Hanover House.

  Jonathan wished his in-laws would just eat breakfast at home with Morgan and stop beating the bushes for ex-cons and strays who had wandered in from nowhere. The sight of them going into Crickets had levered his anger up a notch, so he had decided to confront them right then and there.

  He had told his deck hand that he’d be back in a minute, and he’d crossed the pier to the screen door of the old restaurant.

  His mother-in-law, dressed in a yellow blouse too bright for this time of morning, was sipping coffee when she spotted him, and her eyes lit up in that way she had, as if he was just the one she’d been waiting to see. But he knew she made everyone feel that way. “Jonathan, have you had breakfast yet? Sit down and let the Colonel fix you some bacon and eggs. Colonel!” she called to the proprietor, “get Jonathan here—”

  “I ate,” he said, cutting her off.

  Wayne grinned up at him. “I swanny, I think he’s the only fisherman on this island who gets up and shaves in the morning.”

  “Oh, hush,” Thelma told her husband. “It pays to look nice, doesn’t it, Jonathan? And it’s good for business. People have more trust in a clean-cut fellow.” She reached out for Jonathan’s hand. “Come on, honey, sit down and have some coffee.”

  Jonathan shoved his rough hands through his sandy, windblown hair. “I don’t want to sit down,” he said. “I wanted to talk to you about Gus Hampton. I’m worried about Morgan being in that house alone with him.”

  Thelma’s face twisted in weariness, and she expelled a sigh. “Jonathan, not that again. Gus is a good man, and you don’t have to worry about him.”

  “Are you willing to bet your daughter’s life on it?” Jonathan asked her.

  She met her husband’s eyes, and Wayne got up to face Jonathan. He was a big man, at least as tall as Jonathan, who stood six foot three. “Jonathan, what’s the matter with you?” His voice was gruff and way too loud, to compensate for his poor hearing. “Now, I’m proud to call you my son-in-law, and I feel real secure that Morgan has you looking out for her. That’s the way it’s supposed to be. I know that whatever happens to me, you’ll always take care of her. So I don’t fault you for your concern. But you knew where she lived and that she helped us at Hanover House before you ever started dating her. You didn’t seem to care who lived in our house when you were coming over every night for supper. You got along just fine with everybody then.”

  “But I see things now that I didn’t see then,” he said in a low voice, hoping Wayne would take his cue and lower his as well. “And there’s something about Gus Hampton that I don’t trust.”

  “Just because he’s Jamaican and has an accent—”

  “It’s not that!” Jonathan said.

  “Is it because he’s black?” Thelma asked. “Because if it is, Jonathan, I have to say that I’m disappointed in you—”

  “No, it’s not because he’s black! It’s because he’s as big as a football lineman and sneaks around like a prowler and looks at my wife—”

  “Sneaks around?” Wayne boomed. “When does he sneak around?”

  “Last night,” Jonathan said. “I couldn’t sleep. I got up about two-thirty. I was going to go downstairs and read, and here he came up the stairs, walking so quiet you wouldn’t have even known he was in the house.”

  “For heaven’s sake,” Thelma said. “Jonathan, he was being considerate. Trying not to wake us up!”

  “I don’t trust him!” he said. “And neither does anybody else on this island, which is exactly why the city council wants to close us down.”

  “That’s not going to happen,” Wayne said. “We found out a few things that we’re going to bring out tonight at the council meeting, and I guarantee you, those council members will get off our backs.”

  “What, so you can just keep inviting criminals and rapists and murderers to come and live in the house with my wife?” Now he was talking too loudly, and the other patrons were silent, undoubtedly tuning in to every word he and Wayne said.

  Thelma sprang out of her seat and grabbed Jonathan by the arm. She was only five feet five, and three inches of that was the curly gray hair that padded her head. But she had a way of making a big man seem small. “Outside, Jonathan,” she said through her teeth. “You’re about to make me mad.”

  “I’m gonna make you mad?” he asked as she escorted him through the screen door. Wayne stalked behind them, his heavy boots clomping on the hollow floor. The door bounced shut behind them.

  “Now you look here!” Thelma said, turning him to face her when they were out of earshot of the crowd in Crickets. “We have enough problems in this town with people spreading lies about our tenants and the work we do. But it will not come from our own family. Do you hear me?”

  “Why won’t you listen to me? I can’t sleep nights. I have nightmares about that man hurting Morgan—”

  “We can’t help your nightmares,” Wayne said, lo
ud enough for everyone inside to hear him anyway. Even the tourists waiting at Jonathan’s boat seemed to be listening now. “All we can tell you is what we know. I don’t invite anybody to live in our house unless I’ve worked with them for a long time and I know their character.”

  “Worked with them in jail, you mean!” Jonathan said. “Some of them are con artists. They’re going to show you whatever you want to see, if they know you’re the one who can get them a job and a place to live when they get out. But what if they’re not rehabilitated? What if it’s just an act?”

  “Jonathan,” Thelma said, “those people are saved by the blood of Christ just like you were. Gus Hampton was a drug addict who stole to support his habit, and he’s been clean for five years.”

  “Only because he’s been locked up, Thelma.” Jonathan shook his head and took a few steps away from her, then turned back. “Are you both telling me that you don’t even think it’s possible that someone could pull the wool over your eyes? That someone might pretend to have cleaned up his act just to get out of jail?”

  “We have to have faith that God will work it all out, Jonathan,” Wayne said.

  Jonathan’s voice rose again. “What if there were clear signs that this guy was bad news? What would it take for you to throw him out?”

  “A lot.”

  “Your daughter’s rape? Her murder?”

  Thelma grabbed his shoulders and shook him, her eyes flashing lightning. “That will not happen, Jonathan. Do you think you love my daughter more than I do? I have seen that man on his knees, weeping his heart out over gratitude for Christ’s redemption,” she said. “We would no more throw him out than we would throw you out, Jonathan.”

  “I asked you a question,” he bit out. “What would it take?”

  Wayne finally stepped between them, as if he feared Thelma might hurt him. “Jonathan, we screen every applicant from the jail who wants to stay in our home very carefully. We don’t take all of them. They have to promise a lot of things to stay there. Hours a day of Bible study, a full-time, steady job, work around our house to keep things going, community service, church attendance. They’re basically under my thumb while they live there, and you know that I don’t let ’em off the hook. Not everybody wants to live by those rules, but Gus did. And he’s followed them to a T. He hasn’t done anything to deserve your accusations.”