Wilmington, NC 03 - Murder On The Ghost Walk

up in England. You know how decadent the Anglos are, and their boring country weekends . Shelby laughed and said next time they were going to have the men hang their neckties on the door knobs."
    "Oh, Jon, how tacky." I wrinkled my nose.
    "I felt the same way. When I got a whiff of what was going on, I thanked her for dinner and I was out of there. I never accepted another invitation."
    "I wonder if their little fun and games backfired. Maybe someone got hurt. By the way, who were the members of this group of swingers?"
    "Let's see, there were the Cushmans, Gordon and Cecily. You remember her. She's the big true-crime writer. She's made so much money with her books, they've got a house on Orange Street and a beach house.
    "And as you said, Sherman and Muffie Warner who live next door to Reggie and Shelby. Sara Beth Franks, the artist. I suppose now they're all suspects."
    "Yes, but suspects in whose murder? Till the skeletons are identified, we don't know who died."
    "My money's on Reggie and Shelby."
    "Guess mine is too." I decided to take Jon into my confidence. "Jon, I think Melanie might have been friends with Shelby and Reggie too."
    "Melanie? I never saw her with them. We were all in high school together, but after school, we went our separate ways, went away to college , drifted apart. Why do you think Melanie was involved with them?"
    "Tommy found an antique brooch that had slipped down inside Shelby's sofa. That brooch is Melanie's. So she was in their house sometime before they were murdered. Or before they moved away. Or whatever became of them."
    "Maybe she lost it when she was looking at the house to buy it," Jon suggested.
    "She'd never have sat on that sofa then. It was filthy. No, she lost that brooch when Shelby and Reggie lived there. She was with them."
    Out of the corner of my eye I glimpsed a figure standing just inside the open French doors. I turned to him, thinking he was our waiter and I'd been craving Roy's famous chocolate rum cake. Instead of the waiter, I caught Detective Yost staring at me, the kind of look a man gives a woman when no one's watching. Naked. Raw. Embarrassment flickered across his face for an instant, then disappeared. How long had he been standing there? And how much had he heard?
    Jon turned to him and they shook hands. While the two men sized each other up, I regained my composure.
    "Good evening, Miss Wilkes."
    "Good evening, Detective Yost." Now it was my turn to study him, but I did so openly.
    Again, he was dressed beautifully in a summer-weight, light charcoal pinstripe suit over a blue shirt with a red and blue rep tie. He held a drink that looked like scotch.
    I glanced down to check my own outfit and reassured myself I was appropriately dressed in black silk slacks and a white silk shirt. "You must be off duty, Detective ."
    "Off duty but never off the job, Miss Wilkes," he replied with a cocky grin.
    I smiled. "Glad to see you have a sense of humor."
    He smiled back. "I was going to call you later but when I saw you and Mr. Campbell out here, I decided to give you folks the good news. Forensics is finished with the house. You can go back to work whenever you want."
    "That is good news. I'd invite you to join us out here but there's scarcely enough room for our two chairs."
    "I'm fine where I am," he said and leaned a shoulder against the doorjamb.
    Nick Yost was a very self-contained man. Or was that part of the facade? Again I wondered how much he had heard .
    I looked from Yost to Jon. Two really attractive men had come into my life. But the charge I felt, like a current of high-voltage electricity, flowed from Nick Yost. He was one sexy guy.

1 1

    I loved coming home to my cozy cottage on Summer Rest Road . Before Mama got ill, she'd promised me I could live in the small blue cottage she owned next door when I returned home after college.
    I'd spent most of the money I'd inherited from Daddy on school and on start-up expenses for my business. Now I was living on the last of it. I'd had practically nothing to spend on furnishings for my first home, but paint is cheap.
    It took a week to paint the bungalow's four rooms. Selecting pastel hues that replicated the colors of the seascape outside my windows -- the pale blues of the Waterway and the sky, the golden pallet of the sun-washed marshes -- I transformed the inside of my house into a place of warmth and hominess.
    A trip t o Mama's ancestral home in Savannah yielded treasures fit for a fine antiques