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“I was just talking to Dad about it,” Tyson went on. “We’ve been trying to sell the place for years, as is, but now with all this bad publicity and the fact that the old house is literally crumbling down, maybe we should tear the old house down.”
“Oh.”
“I know. The historical society is already making noise about it. Dad calls them the ‘hysterical society.’ ”
“The society has a point.”
“Yeah, I know. But so do we. We need to sell this place, at least most of it. Crap!” The yellow jacket was back and he swiped the air vainly again. “Must be a nest somewhere.” The wasp wouldn’t give up, buzzing around his shiny head. He grabbed a baseball cap from the front seat, jammed it on and walked closer to Nikki’s car. “They’re scavengers, you know. Eat meat, even their own kind. Little cannibal bastards.” He walked over and pulled the gate shut, then tested what appeared to be a new electronic locking system on the gate. He pointed a remote device at it and the lock clicked loudly before he tried to open it manually, pulling on the rails. It didn’t budge.
“This won’t keep anyone who really wants to get in out,” he admitted, “but if someone shows up, we’ll know immediately. Well, eventuall
y.” He pointed to a camera poised in a tree just on the other side of the gate. “And we’ll see who it is. Digital camera, sends the images constantly. I put that one up, but it’s just a stopgap until the security company puts in a whole system. Should be all hooked up by the end of next week. It would be sooner, but the security company’s on overload, trying to restore everything that got knocked down during the hurricane.”
She eyed the camera and nodded.
“Soon, we’ll have more of the same around the house, too.” He spied a piece of remaining yellow crime scene tape, swore under his breath and yanked it off the fence, then wadded it up and stuffed it into his pocket. “This is the kind of publicity we don’t need.” He glanced up at the camera again. “Once we’re operational, if anyone had the stones to try and bury any more dead bodies, we’ll catch them.”
“Let’s hope no one does.”
“Amen to that.”
She changed the subject. “You lived here for years, right?”
He nodded. “Me, Dad and Mom and Grandma.”
“And the staff.”
“Yeah, oh, yeah. Only the maids stayed at the house, though. The others, like Wynn Cravens or Margaret Duval, they didn’t live in.”
“Margaret Duval?” she repeated.
“Yeah, she was Nana Beulah’s nurse, so she was there a lot, even spent some nights at the house, I think.”
“Before you moved into Savannah?”
“Yeah.” He nodded, his blue eyes watching a squirrel scamper up the trunk of one of the live oaks just beyond the fence. “Nana Beulah stayed on for a few more years—God, was it, like, maybe ten? I don’t really remember. Anyway, eventually she needed round-the-clock care in a modern facility, one without all the steps that are in the house here, and eventually we closed everything down. The only one who stayed on the payroll was Wynn for a while. We needed someone to look after the place, but eventually we had to let him go, too.”
“Twenty years ago,” she said, thinking aloud. “You all still lived here then? When the Duval girls went missing?”
“I guess.” He turned to look at her and she had a flash of memory from her own youth. He was much younger, a tall, cocky youth who knew he was handsome, athletic and rich. She remembered him playing football on the backyard behind the house with her brother Andrew and a couple of other boys, Jacob Channing and Bronco Cravens. All shirtless and sweating, muscles gleaming as they ran over the grass of the terraced lawn. They were all connected by this piece of property with its shadowy history.
Now, Tyson, heavier and harder-edged than the boy she remembered, was nodding, his eyebrows knitting. “Yeah. Mom, she’d wanted to move for years, ever since we lost Nell, but Dad and Nana, they didn’t want to leave. Eventually, Mom convinced Dad and so we did.” He lifted a shoulder. “Like I said, Nana stayed on. Wouldn’t budge. Until she absolutely had to.” He eyed her quizzically, his arms folding over his chest.
“I never met Nell,” she said.
“She died a long time ago.” His countenance changed, growing more solemn.
“You were there?” Nikki asked. “The day she drowned.”
He closed his eyes for a second and sighed through his nose. “Yeah, not a good day. Jacob and I were swimming in the river. She saw us and followed. But she didn’t know how to swim, and we were into what we were doing, jumping off this log into the river, we didn’t see. Didn’t even know it until it was too late. We tried to save her, but—” He lifted the hat from his head and rubbed his scalp. “Not something I like to think about.”
“You were swimming with Jacob? Jacob Channing?”
“Yeah, we were neighbors. Hung out a lot in the summer. Just had to be careful, sometimes a gator is up here, but that day—?” He squinted and looked up at the sky. “That day the gators weren’t the problem. Look, I don’t even know why we’re talking about this. It was a really tough time. Especially for my mom. It’s one of the main reasons we moved.”
He looked as if he was about to end the impromptu interview. Nikki said quickly, “You dated Ashley McDonnell in high school, didn’t you?”
“What?” He appeared surprised. “Where did that come from?”
