Come Shell or High Water

Book 1: Haunted Shell Shop Mystery

by Molly MacRae

Genres: Amateur Sleuth; Craft & Hobby Cozy Mysteries; Punny book titles; Paranormal Cozy Mysteries

Synopsis

When widowed folklorist Maureen Nash visits a legendary North Carolina barrier island shell shop, she discovers its resident ghost pirate and the mystery of a local’s untimely death . . .

As a professional storyteller, Maureen Nash can’t help but see the narrative cues woven through her life. Like the series of letters addressed to her late husband from a stranger—the proprietor of The Moon Shell, a shop on Ocracoke Island, off the coast of North Carolina. The store is famous with shell collectors, but it’s the cryptic letters from Allen Withrow, the shop’s owner, that convince Maureen to travel to the small coastal town in the middle of hurricane season. At the very least, she expects she’ll get a good story out of the experience, never anticipating it could end up a murder mystery . . .
 
In Maureen’s first hours on the storm-lashed island, she averts several life-threatening accidents, stumbles over the body of a controversial Ocracoke local, and meets the ghost of an eighteenth-century Welsh pirate, Emrys Lloyd. To the untrained eye, all these unusual occurrences would seem to be random misfortunes, but Maureen senses there may be something connecting these stories. With Emrys’s supernatural assistance, and the support of a few new friends, Maureen sets out unravel the truth, find a killer, and hopefully give this tale a satisfying ending . . . while also rewriting her own.

Release date: June 25, 2024

Publisher: Kensington Books

Print pages: 304

Sample

On the tail of a hurricane, half-drowned in the chaos of whirlwind, deluge, thunder, and lightning, I washed up on Ocracoke Island.

Okay, it wasn’t that dramatic. Hurricane Electra had blown through that week in mid-September but, as Atlantic hurricanes go, Electra was medium to mild. And I had arrived on Ocracoke, but I hadn’t washed ashore. I know a ranger in the U.S. Park Service, and she took me over in her boat, that afternoon, when she went to survey damage to the national park campground. I was half-drowned, but half-drowned by my assumptions, not the storm.

“Love the pink life jacket, Maureen,” Patricia had said over the gurgling engine noise of her boat before we set out from Hatteras Landing for the crossing to Ocracoke. Patricia Crowley and I have known each other since college, thirty-plus years. We don’t see each other often, but she always looks unruffled and in control when she’s in uniform. “The pink looks good with your white knuckles. We haven’t left the dock yet, though, so you might want to give your grip a rest.”

My hands, both of them glued to the edge of whatever you call the dashboard thing on a Park Service boat, looked fine to me. “This cabin’s kind of small—”

“It’s a pilot house.”

“—and we’re standing shoulder to shoulder in it,” I pointed out, “so if I get seasick, I’ll step outside.”

“No, you won’t.”

“Okay.”

Patricia also sounds unruffled and in control when she’s in uniform. Despite her calm, my knuckles and I did not relax. That’s why, by the time Patricia eased the boat away from the dock, my knuckles looked like bleached bones. I stopped looking at them and concentrated on not whimpering. Or being sick.

“It’s getting kind of rough,” I said in a conversational whimper.

“This is the smooth part. Wait’ll we hit the waves in the inlet.”

“Maybe we should turn back?”

“Nope.”

“Okay.”

“I’m doing you an unauthorized favor by taking you along,” Patricia said. Shouted, because the engine was making more noise. “Remember that, in case anyone has occasion to ask, because it isn’t regulation, but we’ll get around that by not saying anything or, if pressed, by saying that a lot of what happens before, during, and after a hurricane isn’t regulation.”

“I really appreciate this.”

“Good. You should. And I’ll appreciate it if you return the favor by not falling overboard and by hoping we don’t founder.”

“Founder?”

“Sink.” She patted me on my drawn shoulders, and I thought about screaming “Don’t take your hands off the steering wheel,” but I didn’t want to distract her, in case it wasn’t called a steering wheel. It didn’t strike me as the best time for nautical vocabulary lessons.

On the other hand, the best time to go shelling on the sandy ribbon of barrier islands off the coast of North Carolina is after a big blow like Electra. And because I’m a former malacologist (a biologist who studies mollusks, although freshwater mussels and not seashells, in my case), I could sort of make a case for being there. But confusion, disruptions, and mopping up follow even a mild hurricane. There was danger in the surging waves, and evacuated tourists hadn’t been given the all-clear yet to return and finish their idyllic beach vacations along the Outer Banks.

Also, there’s that former thing. I was a working malacologist, but those jobs, like some of the rarer freshwater mussels, are hard to find. I’m all about shells, though. I’ve been collecting them, and folklore, fables, and myths about them, for most of my life. I’ve had minor success publishing picture book retellings of the stories I’ve collected. I get occasional storytelling gigs, too. More than occasional, really. It still surprises me that I can call myself a professional storyteller. My late husband called me his fabulous fabulist.

So, yes, I arrived on the tail of the hurricane. I blew in to see what else had washed ashore. And I did cling to my assumptions because that’s how assumptions work. If I go to the trouble of making them, I figure I might as well believe in them. That’s why I thought I could be clever and careful enough to comb the deserted beaches for shells and not get into trouble. And it’s why I believed that my other reason for making the trip to the picturesque town at the southern tip of Ocracoke Island wasn’t totally mad, either.

“How can you study animals that live in the water and still be so uncomfortable around boats?” Patricia asked by way of unnecessary chat after sideswiping a particularly angry-looking wave the color of gunmetal. Or a hungry shark.

“Wading,” I answered succinctly. “Small streams and rivers. Is that a fin over there?”

“Where?”

I didn’t point because I didn’t want her taking her eyes off our briny, white-capped “road.” I would have been happier with my own eyes closed, but two of us watching for whatever might lurch out of the sea at us was a higher priority. “And I’m not uncomfortable around all boats. Only boats that might founder. Near sharks.”

We didn’t founder, but it was a slow, rough, and rolling ride from Hatteras to the ferry landing at the north end of Ocracoke. Patricia knows her boat, though, and she knows the waters of the inlets between the Outer Banks islands as well as anyone can with the constantly shifting shoals of sand in the channels. The landing was as far as we’d go. No point in courting trouble by continuing south to the village docks by water. Besides, Patricia keeps her park service truck at the ferry landing when she’s off-island.

After we tied up, we transferred my backpack and duffel to the back of the truck. We took Highway 12—the only way—down the center of the island, watching for the inevitable post-hurricane drifts of sand on this road, just as we’d watched for them in the water. The island is so narrow in places that you can easily see the ocean to your left and Pamlico Sound to your right as you head south. It’s a wonder the storm surge from Electra hadn’t cut right through the island, creating a new inlet, as happened on Hatteras Island after hurricanes Irene in 2011 and Isabel in 2003. But there’s something about fragile Ocracoke that’s kept it in one piece. There’s something about the families who’ve lived there for generations, too. They aren’t fragile at all. Many of them stay put when hurricanes come howling, riding out the wind and the flooding, then resolutely cleaning up and getting back to business after the hurricanes move on. I, who travel white-knuckled in stout Park Service boats, am not sure I’d ever have the nerve to ride out a hurricane.

Patricia was kind and took me all the way south to Ocracoke Village, driving several miles past the entrance to the campground. I asked her to put me down at the edge of the village, though, so I could walk the rest of the way.

“The wind’s kicking up again,” Patricia said, “and we’re probably in for more rain. You know where you’re going?”

“And I know who’s going with me.”

“What?”

“Sorry. A line from a song and an old movie reference. One of Jeff’s favorites.” She looked at me. I looked away. It’s been a year and change, but I can’t get used to the pain, sorrow, or pity in people’s eyes when I mention my late husband. I haven’t gotten used to him being gone, either.

“You were kind of quiet the last half of the trip,” Patricia said. “Were you terrified?”

“Oh, gosh no.” I’m not often accused of being too quiet. I smiled to show there were no hard feelings for a trip that fell just short of terrifying.

“I didn’t even get a corny joke out of you. I think I shouldn’t have brought you. That trip scared the giggle out of you.” Concern put a crease between her steady brown eyes.

“No joke? Is that what’s bothering you?” She knows I collect jokes and folklore about any kind of shell and the seven seas in general. “Okay, here’s one, and let it not be said that I don’t have the perfect joke or story for any occasion. What lies at the bottom of the ocean and twitches?”

“Not a clue,” she said.

“A nervous wreck.”

She laughed and started the truck. “Stay safe,” she called with a wave.

Stay safe. Easy for the ranger in the vehicle with rubber tires to say. I stood in the middle of the two-lane highway and watched that vehicle getting smaller and smaller. The rain started again as I walked the familiar mile or so into town. And then the lightning.

“Is it safe to touch her?” an anxious voice asked.

“Perfectly,” another voice said. “I turned the generator off as soon as I saw the lamp cord and the water on the floor. But I can’t find a pulse.” A woman’s voice? Cool and calm, like Patricia. But not Patricia. And too cool and calm for someone who wasn’t feeling a pulse. Why wasn’t she upset? I knew I would be. Most people would be, right? A hard pulse is a good thing to find.

“Let me try.” The anxious voice again. It sounded like a creaky old man, and I realized that a cooler hand had taken my wrist. Wait a second. My wrist?

“Anything?” the woman’s voice asked, not sounding urgent enough.

“Hmm,” the creaky voice said. Creaky’s cool fingertips moved over my wrist, searching, pressing. “Could be a flutter. Might not be anything—”

“Try harder,” I shouted, trying to show these two how to panic properly. Or thought I shouted. I couldn’t tell. Didn’t know if I’d said anything at all because I couldn’t hear myself over that loopy person mumbling about seashells. Selling seashells by the seashore.

“Ah, there we go,” Creaky said. “Pulse and poetics. She’s back in the land of the living.” He kept hold of my hand. “And there’s both mysteries solved, too. Who she is, and why she’s in Allen’s shop. She’s the one he was expecting.”

“Do you think so?” Cool Woman asked, turning into Skeptical Woman faster than I seemed to be processing things. “If she’s here for Allen, then where is he? And when did she get here? And how?”

“You’re asking too many questions, Glady, and not the right ones,” Creaky said. “Of immediate importance is, Will she be okay? What do you think?”

“That we should call Dr. Allred.”

“Allred evacuated with the tourists. Where’s his sense of community? What kind of a doctor defects because of a downpour?”

“He isn’t an O’cocker,” Glady said. “He’s only lived here nine or ten years.”

“Five.”

“Are you sure? It seems like he’s been telling me he knows more about living on the island than I do for decades.”

“Glady, you were a nurse.”

“A long time ago in a galaxy far away. Say, do you remember that ’72 Galaxy I used to drive?”

“Glady, focus. Will she be okay?”

“I loved the color of that car, and you’re the one who needs to focus, you old fool. I was a nurse for six months fifty years ago, and if you remember, I’m the one who couldn’t find her pulse. The car was the green of a mermaid’s tail.”

I tried to tell them I’d be fine as soon as I could open my eyes and get up off the floor. That I didn’t need a doctor, no matter where he was, how long he’d lived here, or what he drove. As for fishy mermaid tails . . . I’d seen something in the water, but . . . Maybe these two knew about it and I should raise my hand to ask. But they kept talking over me, as though I wasn’t there. Or wasn’t all there. This whole situation was confusing. I tried to lie quietly and think.

“Gladys.” Anxiety had crept back into Creaky’s voice.

“It’s all right, Burt,” Glady said. “I’m not ignoring you or disagreeing with you. I’m giving her time to come around naturally, which she seems to be doing. She’s breathing evenly, and she’s stopped babbling. But if you really want to know what I think, I think she looks like a drowned rat.”

She called me a drowned rat. That wasn’t nice. But it sounded funny if you said it over and over. Drowned rat, drownedrat, drowned, drowning. Drowning. I did show them how to panic, then, and struggled against the cool hand holding my wrist, fought to the surface of—what? Waves? Where was I? I coughed and sputtered and tried to breathe.

“She wants to sit up,” Creaky . . . Anxious Voice—Burt—said. “Help her, Glady. You can get down there. My back and knees won’t let me.”

I felt an arm move behind my shoulders. I gulped for air as though I’d surfaced in the ocean, and I grabbed at that arm as though I might slip beneath the waves again. The arm held me closer, pulling me into an embrace with damp wool.

“Shh, now, shh,” Glady said. “The wind’s dying. Rain, too. Shh. We saw the light on over here and thought Allen had come home.”

Kind voices, even if they didn’t like the doctor. The damp wool didn’t matter. Eyes still shut, I wanted to drift off on this damp woolly life raft smelling of lanolin and ozone. I was warm and dry and—ozone? I remembered a flash, a jolt—lightning? My eyes popped open.

A nut-brown man leaned toward me, peering into my face. Old as a wrinkled walnut. A bearded walnut. With an effort and a grimace, he straightened, then smiled.

“Welcome back,” he said. The creaky voice I’d heard was his.

“Back?” I sounded like a croaker myself. I pulled away from the arm and the comforting wool. Sat up straighter and looked around. Table legs, cupboard doors. A table lamp, its shade awry and cracked, tipped onto the floor not far from my bare feet. When had I ended up on the floor? In a shop? And where were my shoes and socks? A battery lantern stood on the table near the door, where the lamp had been when—

“Welcome back and welcome home,” the woman’s voice cut into my confused inventory of my surroundings. “We’re the Weavers. I’m Glady. Sometimes Gladys. Always glad to meet a friend of Allen’s.”

Gladys, Glady, owner of the woman’s voice, also belonged to the supportive arm and the damp wool. The one who hadn’t sounded worried about feeling no pulse in my wrist. Gladys sounded like a name from my grandmother’s generation. This one looked more like halfway between my mother and me. Late sixties, tops. She held her hand out, and I shook it.

“Maureen,” I croaked. “Maureen Nash.”

“Pleased to meet you. Any idea what happened?” Glady asked. She didn’t wait for an answer. “Allen’s been expecting you, and look who else has.”

I looked around for the third voice I’d heard. Third voice? When had I heard that? Heard him. Definitely a man. Allen? I knew that name. Allen Withrow. I didn’t see anyone but a brindled tabby checking me out with sleepy eyes. I blinked my eyes slowly, and it came over and headbutted my hand.

“This is Bonny,” Glady said. “Named after Anne Bonny, pirate queen.”

“Hi, Bonny.” I rubbed her between the ears. “Is Allen here?”

“Did you see him?” Burt asked.

“I don’t know. Does he have an accent?”

“Not a real Ocracoke brogue,” Burt said.

“He lived off-island for too long,” Glady said. “Left his ‘hoi toide’ accent there when he came back.”

“Where you left yours?” Burt sniped.

Glady might have left her Ocracoke accent somewhere, but the sniff she gave Burt hadn’t lost a single grace note of derision.

“He doesn’t have a British accent?” I asked.

“Who?” Burt asked. “Allen? What gave you that idea?”

Hearing him, I thought. Hearing someone, anyway. But not Allen? So someone else. Someone younger than Burt. Maybe that guy standing in the doorway. Humming that song about what you do with a drunken sailor. Except—I blinked a few times to clear my befuddled brains and eyes, and there was no one standing in the doorway. But the humming . . . It definitely came from somewhere near the open door.

“None of this seems normal,” Burt said.

No kidding, I thought. He sounded anxious again. I felt more than anxious. Not sharks and foundering-boat anxious, but what was going on? What the heck had happened? But did I want to drag myself to my feet and go peering into dark corners for the drunken sailor hummer? No, I did not. I wanted to stay snuggled up to Glady’s damp sweater. Wake up somewhere warm and dry and familiar.

“Glady,” Burt said. “Stop petting her head like you’ve found a stray kitten. She didn’t answer my question. She’s stopped talking. What if she’s going into shock? Shock will drop someone as big as an ox, and she’s no bigger than . . . no bigger than you were before you let yourself go.”

Glady and her bosom bristled. “It takes one to know one, Burt. And I haven’t let myself go. I let myself grow.”

“The point is,” Burt said, “shock kills. We can’t afford to have her drop dead on us.”

“Dead.” That word came out of me. More forcefully than I meant it to. Possibly with more certainty. It got their attention. “I saw him. Dead.”

Glady clutched me to her wool bosom as though I were a string of pearls. “Who’s dead?”

Who was dead and how did I know? I remembered getting out of Patricia’s truck. Grabbing my stuff out of the back. I’d put the backpack on. Slung the duffel and life jacket over opposite shoulders. Waved goodbye. Jogged into town, the backpack bumping my spine. I’d felt like a military recruit doing a fully loaded training exercise. My hopes? That the duffel was waterproof as advertised and that I wouldn’t need the life jacket anytime soon—like in the next puddle.

The place I’d rented would be down the next road to the left and around a few bends, not far from the Ocracoke Light—a charming lighthouse that’s photogenic in any weather. I hadn’t stopped to take a picture. The rain slashed as I rounded the corner. At the crash-bash of thunder, I gritted my teeth. At the honk from a vehicle that had come up behind me, I jumped sideways into a puddle. Up to my ankles. What a friendly place, I thought, after swearing. I waved a hand over my shoulder and kept jogging. The vehicle came alongside and slowed. I wiped the swear-snarl from my face, took my eyes off the puddles, and glanced over. Patricia.

She lowered her window. “Get in. You’ve proved your point. You’re invincible.”

“I’m not—”

“I’m getting wet. You’re getting in.” The window rose.

The truck’s bed now sloshed with a shallow pond, so I crowded duffel, backpack, life jacket, and myself into the passenger seat. “You’re bossy,” I said by way of thanking Patricia.

“I’m a leader,” she said. “Where are you staying?”

I told her. She nodded and said she knew the place. “Cute. About big enough to swing all that crap you’re hauling.”

“It isn’t that much stuff.”

“Exactly.”

We followed the road, turned another corner, then pulled into the short drive of a squat, square house. As if on cue, the rain stopped. The clouds didn’t part to let a shaft of sunlight bathe the house, but a crow settled on the roof over the front door and polished its bill on the edge of the gutter. I like crows, so I took that as a good sign.

“If a crow is on the thatch, death soon lifts the latch,” Patricia said.

“Is that your way of saying have a nice vacation?”

“Sharing information about local wildlife.”

I eyed the crow as it drank from the gutter, then hopped in for a bath. “So is death and thatch a local superstition?”

“Nope. No thatch for roofs around here. No need to worry, either. That’s not your door. You’re in the yard.” She pointed to a smaller square building not big enough to be called a house but with more flair and possibly more room than a garden shed. “See? Cute as a bug’s ear and about as big.”

“I love it already, and the crow can visit anytime it wants.”

“That’s the spirit,” Patricia said. “Unlike that malarky about death lifting a latch, if you feed a crow from your front door, it’s good luck. You can trust me on that because I’m a park ranger.”

“Almost as wise as Smokey Bear.”

“Wiser. See ya.”

I’d schlepped my things down a gravel path lined with bleached clamshells and up a step to the front porch. If the house wasn’t much bigger than a garden shed, the porch wasn’t much smaller than a bathmat. The door unlocked to the entry code I’d been sent. I turned to wave to Patricia. Too late. Rather than turn around and go back, the pickup’s taillights disappeared as they continued down the road.

Shouldering the door open, I’d surveyed a compact, shipshape space. Like a jigsaw puzzle, all the basics and a few extras had been shimmied into place. Tiny complete kitchen to my right with two windows, like square portholes, one over the sink on the back wall, one over a two-person table on the front. A fence post topped with a small platform strewn with birdseed stood outside the window over the sink. To my left, the living room with a love seat, bookcase, flat-screen TV, photographs of seashells on the walls, and two more square windows, one of these on the back wall and the other on the side wall. Clean and homey, my temporary quarters smelled of lavender.

Directly in front of me, in the middle of all this and making an eccentric room divider, ladderlike stairs rose to a loft over the living room. I shucked my baggage and climbed up to the bedroom—a somewhat dangerous bedroom without much headroom under the slanting ceiling. I’d have to literally crawl into the bed, which was a mattress on the floor made up with white linens and a flowery garden of a patchwork quilt. A low bureau stood against one knee-high wall. At the foot of the bed, there was enough. . .