Wilmington, NC 04 - Murder At Wrightsville Beach

another woman whom I recognized immediately: Diane Sherwood, homicide detective for Wilmington PD. She was dressed in beach clothes like us, shorts and a tee shirt. But she was outside her jurisdiction. What was she doing here? On vacation? A friend of the doctor's?
    Instantly the gallery was filled to overflowing with detectives. The Chief must have sent the whole team. How often did peaceful, quiet, family-style Wrightsville Beach get a homicide? Probably almost never. This was a place where families vacationed, where people bicycled and rollerbladed and went out for fish suppers. Where the sun shone and the sky was always Carolina Blue. Bad things did not happen at Wrightsville Beach.
    Melanie, Kelly, and I were herded into a corner. Diane Sherwood flicked a cool eye over us and strolled over. "Don't tell me," she said. "You found the body. Nick is right. You are a magnet for murder!"

2

    The police moved us outside to a bench in front of the gallery while a forensics photographer took pictures of the "crime scene" and the doctor examined Val's body. I still couldn't believe that she was dead. "Why would someone shoot Valentine Russo?" I asked, echoing the police officer.
    "Well, obviously, someone wanted Uncle J.C.'s latest painting bad enough to kill for it," Kelly pronounced.
    "You know, Kelly, I've been thinking about that and it just doesn't make sense. Okay, so somebody wanted J.C.'s painting, but then why take all the other paintings? From the descriptions in the brochure, they were works of art by unknowns. Why would someone steal them? They could be purchased for about a hundred bucks a piece?"
    "People kill wantonly these days for the most insignificant reasons," Melanie said, fanning her face with her hand. "The politicians have made it too easy to get a gun."
    Melanie sells really expensive coastal properties. She's been voted Wilmington's top realtor time and time again and I am so proud of her. She's older than me by eight years, thirty-four to my twenty-six.
    Our mother, Claire Wilkes, had named us Melanie and Ashley. Mama had always been besotted with Gone With the Wind. I've often wondered if his name was what initially attracted her to Daddy, the late Judge Peter Wilkes. But then she'd fallen madly in love with him, for what woman could resist my darling father with his courtly, Old South manners. Melanie and I have often joked that it was a good thing we didn't have a brother, for surely Mama would have named him Rhett Butler Wilkes!
    For sisters we're as different as night and day and there's no familial resemblance between us. Melanie favors our mother, Claire Chastain Wilkes, with her creamy complexion and vibrant auburn hair, eyes that are intensely green and gold. I take after Daddy, Peter Wilkes, having inherited his delicate heart-shaped face, and eyes that are so deeply blue-gray they sometimes appear lavender. I've also got his abundant dark hair that curls tenaciously in our humid climate.
    The police cars had attracted a crowd. Then the curiosity seekers spotted Kelly and went wild. If it were not for the police barricade and the officers assigned to secure the perimeter, we would have been mobbed.
    Kelly's picture was often featured on the covers of People and Town & Country, Vogue and Harper's Bazaar. Her mother Babe Lauder had been a top model in the sixties. Kelly used the Lauder name although she was Ted Douglas's daughter. Like Babe, Kelly was a natural blonde with hair so pale it was platinum. Her eyes were big and china blue, and her skin was very fair. She withdrew a tube of sun block from her straw tote bag and began rubbing cream on her arms.
    Although Babe and Ted lived in New York, Kelly had spent her high school years in Wilmington, staying with the Lauder patriarch, Joseph Lauder, at the Lauder family homeplace on Grace Street. She and Melanie had been best friends in high school and have remained best friends ever since.
    I watched idly as two additional patrol cars pulled up and parked crosswise on Lumina Avenue, closing off the street. The officers got out and shepherded the crowd away from the gallery.
    "Well, then," I said, continuing our argument about the crime, " if Val was killed because she was trying to prevent a robbery, why was she sitting at her desk? If she had tried to thwart a robber, there would have been signs of a struggle, things would have been knocked over, and we would have found her lying on the floor, not sitting there behind her desk as if