Hide and Seek

HIDE AND SEEK A MANGROVE BAY MYSTERY JOY PATRICK MERMAID SISTERS PUBLISHING, INC. Copyright © 2023 by Joy Patrick All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review. * * * Book cover design by Chris Hunter CONTENTS Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 3 Chapter 4 Chapter 5 Chapter 6 Chapter 7 Chapter 8 Chapter 9 Chapter 10 Chapter 11 Chapter 12 Chapter 13 Chapter 14 Chapter 15 Chapter 16 Chapter 17 Chapter 18 Chapter 19 Chapter 20 Chapter 21 Chapter 22 Chapter 23 Chapter 24 Chapter 25 Chapter 26 Afterword CHAPTER 1 When Vivian Blake looked back on it later, she was surprised to recall that it wasn’t the sight of her uncle’s body itself that stuck with her. Rather, it was those countless clumps of dust swirling around his motionless frame. These gargantuan dust bunnies had been permanent fixtures of the cavernous garage since Vivian could remember. They seemed to belong there as much as Uncle Don himself did, always blowing and tumbling this way and that beneath the low-mounted shelves and work tables as though they had important business and couldn’t be bothered to stop and explain themselves. No matter how many times Viv had plucked or swept them from the floor, they simply rematerialized soon after, multiplying like actual bunnies until she finally gave up and accepted that maybe they had as much right to be there as she did. So they kept on contributing to the comfortably familiar sights and smells of the garage, the ones Viv had been happily taking in since she was a little girl. Oil and varnish, sawdust and fur, old flannel, and hanging above it all, the vaguely-mildewed odor of stacks of catalogs and magazines that had survived a flood or two. Now, though, a couple of unpleasant new aromas had been added to the overall potpourri of the place, namely the squeaky black rubber smell of policemen’s boots and the copious cologne used to cover up too many late nights at the station. The chatter and squawk of cop radios surrounded Viv, echoing the malignant buzzing of her own thoughts as she stared at her uncle’s body in disbelief. It felt like an obscenity, that he should have expired with such indignity in the garage where he had spent nearly every waking hour of his life. He was so proud of this place where he was forever surrounded by the countless knick-knacks he’d collected over a span of roughly seventy years. A sea of gems and minerals sparkled on the shelves, a hundred different iridescent colors, polished and unpolished, jagged and smooth. Framed fragments of dinosaur egg shells, fossilized marine life, and “Alamogordo glass” from the first nuclear test site in Nevada were mounted on the walls in meticulous rows. A trio of Victorian doll houses stood stoically side by side, filled to overflowing with miniature furniture and objects as though the occupants of all three had died at once and yielded three concurrent Lilliputian estate sales. And then there were the plastic cabinets with tiny drawers full of jewelry and precious stones he liked to tinker with. The dozen or so antique clocks and pocket watches he’d been painstakingly restoring. The chairs and tables he’d been refinishing for various friends and neighbors. The ancient and crumbling books he’d been restoring to their former glory. The fruit baskets of junk plucked from a hundred different flea markets and garage sales that he hadn’t even begun to properly sift through yet. Everything just as Viv remembered from the innumerable afternoons she had spent in this cathedral of the fantastically random, where Uncle Don had taught her to worship and revere things that others had thrown away; to learn all she could about them, to rediscover the essence of them, to reconstruct them with the utmost patience and care so they might serve a purpose again. The only part of the garage that ever made Viv uncomfortable had been the taxidermy. That, too, had been one of Uncle Don’s quiet obsessions. Viv had never understood it and found it extremely unsettling for a person to willingly surround themselves with dead things. There were deer heads and mallards, naturally, from the hunting seasons, as well as a dozen or so squirrels arranged on the wall as though they were scurrying up it. There was a preserved marlin with startled yellow eyes and carefully shellacked blue skin. There was a set of bleached shark jaws that looked big enough to swallow a person whole, as well as the pebbled emerald head of a massive alligator. The most unsettling specimen, though, as far as Viv was concerned, was the snarling, glass-eyed Florida black bear. It was displayed up on its hind legs, its long arms extended, its claws huge and hooked. She had always walked in a pronounced semicircle around this beast to avoid getting too close, as though she’d been worried that it might spring to life again. On those rare occasions when Viv had suggested that such trophies might be a tad morbid, Uncle Don had patiently insisted that the opposite was true. He had hunted these animals, yes, and so now he honored them by co-existing with each of them from then on. Viv still found it a bit macabre, but she patiently endured it so she could spend hours with her beloved uncle in his favorite space. Of course, he had long since become “Uncle Don” to the rest of Mangrove Bay as well. That was what everyone had called him, and he’d answered to it gladly. He'd offered his services as a freelance handyman, but he’d worked as the town’s genial chief custodian for roughly sixty years—emptying the trash cans on Main Street, sweeping up after parades and festivals, repairing the various brown-spitting faucets