Not What She Seems: A Novel

The road to hell is paved with good intentions. —Unknown

PROLOGUE

Montavious Brodie Sr. clicked send on his Dell computer, the desktop over five years old that his eldest granddaughter had been begging him to let her upgrade to one of those Macs. He didn’t need something skinny, fast, and flashy. He liked his clunky, heavy computer because it had just what he needed—the World Wide Web, where he could connect to his fellow Armchair Detectives, or Armchairs for short, on the latest unsolved crime they were working to crack.

He loved solving puzzles, or being what the young ones these days called an armchair detective. He didn’t care. He had been a South Carolinian detective and investigator (depending on the agency) in his heyday before he’d retired and left the policing to his son.

Now, something new, something he’d heard when he probably shouldn’t have, had put a bee in his bonnet. Colleton. The name jiggled something in the recesses of his mind. Something from decades ago, but he couldn’t quite shake it loose. Colleton. This was an old one. He could spend his time trying to track the name down to answer the question that was beginning to light a fire in his gut. But honestly, he hated the World Wide Web. There were too many searches. Too much bullshit clouding the truth. He left that kind of work to the younger Armchairs. They found some information, and he combed through it, teasing out the clues and the obscure bits of fact that the novices tended to gloss over. It was a good work model for the group. Everyone knew their lane. People from all points of the world came together in the name of helping to bring justice for victims and closure for families.

Montavious used his two pointer fingers to peck out the letters into his group forums—where he usually went to find new cold cases—to see if someone might recognize the name. Then, satisfied his message had gone through, he logged out and picked up his weathered iPhone. It ran so slow these days because the damn Apple people didn’t send any more updates. Plus, he’d heard on the CNN that consumers were suing the company for forcing customers to upgrade to new phones by not sending updates for the old ones. Well, no damn Apple was gonna make him buy a new phone. He’d ride this one until the wheels fell off.

He looked over his half-moon-shaped readers. He only wore them to read the bright screens of his phone and computer. Maybe the newspaper, too, since the damn print seemed to be getting smaller these days.

He pulled up his recent-calls list, bypassing the first few: Chief Linwood’s office (same office his boy used to head); the post office; Mrs. Barbara Harris (Barb let him take her out a time or two), who volunteered at the hospital and worked part time at the Manor overseeing the renovations with Ms. Arden; and his youngest granddaughter, Pen. He scrolled until his slightly crooked finger landed on the name of his favorite partner in crime, the one who humored his critical, never-trusting eye. Jac, the older grand who’d lost her way, and for years, he had prayed to the man upstairs that he’d be able to get her back home. Somehow. Whatever had happened out there on the bluff, Montavious knew the truth wasn’t gonna be found in the town’s gossip . . . or even in what she believed. What had driven Jac away from home.

Maybe this time she’d pick up the call instead of replying to his voicemail messages days later. Maybe this time she missed her old granddad enough to call back, and he could hear her voice one last time before the night was up.

Probably out with her college folks, he concluded as the automated message told him his granddaughter was unavailable. As usual—though the robot lady didn’t say that part.

“Hey, JD.” His knobby fingers rubbed absentmindedly at the area where his pacemaker was situated beneath his skin.

Junior Dick. The nickname between the two of them. One his daughter-in-law, Angela, hated with a passion, which made her daughter love it even more. Her junior dick to his senior. Partners in crime. Partners in this thing called life.

“’Member how I said way back then you can never run from your past?” He hesitated. Was this really how he wanted to begin? Did he really want to piss her off before he’d even gotten his message out? “Or rather, the past comes and finds you no matter what?”

Maybe this time he’d been asking for the past to find him. He’d willed and hoped that someday the one that got away would come knocking. And they had.

“Junior, this ole man might have played his hand a little too soon. I think . . . think I screwed up real bad.” He swallowed nothing down his dry throat. “It’ll make sense when I can show you. It’s been years.” He couldn’t believe it. After all this time. To have another chance at this again. “Who would have thought?”

He was breathless, looking up to find he was facing his large whiteboard stand and staring at the word he’d just typed to the Armchairs. Colleton. It was as if the name had beckoned him to it, and he’d come running, twisting his chair around instinctively to face the past. The name had just been mentioned in passing. Probably didn’t realize it had even been said. But a reckoning came with that name, Colleton. As in, Colleton Girls. He scribbled it on his whiteboard.

He was in his cabin in the woods, away from the house, where he could get his thoughts together without the constant distracting chatter from Pen and her mom, Angela. Back at the house with them, it was easy to get caught up in Angela’s helicopter mothering and Pen’s incessant doctoring, like he was some kind of invalid. It was just a little thing with his heart.

He cleared his throat and chased away the case of jitters that had suddenly sprouted. “Call me back this time, will ya—”

The snap of brittle branches crushed beneath weight stopped him cold. He ended the call.

Out here, the woods were always alive with sounds, but he knew them all, and they soon became background noise he barely said “boo” to. This wasn’t a raccoon or a coyote, however. Not a bear (hadn’t seen one in decades) or a gator (too far from the lakes and swamps). A tree limb falling? No. Heavy enough to be a deer, though.

The old man’s heart was terrible. Eyesight wasn’t like it used to be, but he thought it was better than that of most folks his age. But his hearing was damn near perfect and could suss out a racoon digging in the trash bins or a wandering deer out there. This was not either. There was no more noise after the snap, as if the trespasser had halted, worried the old man had heard them. Well, he had. And if they were worried about being heard, then that meant they weren’t supposed to be there. He ignored the protesting creaks from his bones as he eased out of his worn, wooden swivel chair, pulling his half-moon glasses from his face before setting them upside down on the oak desk he’d built from scratch. He cocked his ear, honing his hearing and waiting for more noise so he could determine its cause.

Snap. As sharp as a crack of thunder. So loud. So deliberate.

Not an animal or falling wood. Was closer this time.

His cabin—the home he, his dearly departed Mae, and their two sons had owned for over half a century—was made up of five small rooms. Two square bedrooms on opposite ends, with the living room in the middle and their kitchen at the top of it with a tiny bathroom beside it. A small half hall to the left of the kitchen ended at a single side door. If he went out that door, he’d be deposited into the dense woods and marshes surrounding his home. His land stretched out until it bumped into the sprawling Moor property that was made up of a good portion of these woods. The Manor, the winding trails that dumped into the clearing before eventually hitting the cliffs at the back of the mansion—all of that was Moor property.

Stacks of old papers, piles of books, corkboards stuck with pushpins where Montavious had mapped the cases that he and his folks followed with the stereotypical red yarn, all cluttered his living room. No one used the yarn anymore, but he liked it just the same, a nostalgic reminder of back in the day when a cop had to pound serious pavement to figure out the connection. It wasn’t just practically at the tips of your fingers on the computer like it seemed to be these days. Maybe that was a good thing. Maybe not. He hadn’t decided yet.

He thought of going to his bedroom and double-checking his hidden safe, which held two things. A case he’d die for. And a case he’d kill to solve. He’d been keeping watch on the first for nearly thirty years. It was the only case he never wanted solved.

Lord forgive him.

The half hall and the side door were where the noise came from. He moved toward them, pulling his handgun from the top bookshelf, where he kept it locked and loaded. If he was anyone else, Montavious would have given the unannounced visitor a second thought before opening the door. But this was his home, his property, his neck of the woods.

Hell, in his career, Detective Brodie had gone up against the likes of murderers, bank robbers, abusers, organized crime syndicates (yes, even in the good ole South), traffickers, and even a serial killer or two.

Not to mention that, as modern and accepting as people claimed to be now, this was still the South. He was still a Black man living in a small house, alone, deep in the woods. He was not far removed—not removed at all—from those times of his life when his advancement in the military, then in the police academy, then through the ranks to detective, then to a job as an agent at SLED, South Carolina’s State Law Enforcement Division, was hindered and nearly made nonexistent because of the color of his skin.

That kind of hell would never be forgotten, no matter how much he and his family were known and respected throughout South Carolina, especially in the Lowcountry, by both Black and white folks. He’d seen the worst of society because of skin color. He’d seen the worst of humanity because of what Cain did to Abel way back when. Murder.

He’d seen plenty of terrifying things. Yet, alone in the pitch black with nothing but the spotlights surrounding his property to stave off the night, and despite his aged body and slowed reflexes, Montavious Brodie Sr. refused to ever be scared. Despite what he’d endured in his lifetime, some clown in the woods wasn’t about to make Montavious Brodie Sr. lose his religion. Not then. Not now.

Still, his mama didn’t raise no fool, either, and the old man could never be too careful. He had his gun. When he opened the door to the warm autumn night, the leaves rustling in the wind, he saw nothing but dark. The light of the cabin shone behind him, making it harder for his eyes to adjust. He should have remembered his police training instead of assuming nothing could touch him here. He should have cut the lights in the house so he could have made out the figure coming close in the dark. Montavious should have done a lot of things differently. But he didn’t.

Recognition washed over him as his visitor approached, and his once-defensive stance with gun at the ready relaxed. Shouldn’t have done that either.

“Well now,” he said. “It’s damn late to be calling.” Surprise, annoyance, and a tiny bit of curiosity overpowered what should have been suspicion and mistrust. “Had time to think it through?”

The Taser lashed out quicker than his numbed reflexes could react. Montavious stumbled back from the impact, surprised at the force with which the contraption was shoved into his chest, right on top of the area where the pacemaker kept his rhythm in check. His gun clattered to the ground, going off in a sharp crack that rendered one ear useless. But the suddenly muted sounds didn’t faze him.

It was the electricity. The volts surging through his body over and over. Paralyzing him. Making his teeth come down hard on his tongue. His mouth flooded with the warm gush filling his throat, spilling through his bared teeth as he ground in. His hands clawed and couldn’t help to break his fall. The Taser was one thing. He’d been hit with one before, though not over and over.

It was his heart. The volts seized the muscle, making it beat faster and faster—too fast. Frighteningly fast. Until it stopped entirely.

As his body lay half in, half out of the tiny cabin where he’d lived with the love of his life (now gone), where he’d raised his two boys (both gone too), where his granddaughters had played, his last thoughts settled in his mind. This had been a happy home. He was glad to die here.

His last thoughts—before the blood from his heart stopped pumping to his brain, until the room went hot and bright and then his sight began to dim—were that now his partner in crime, his JD, would be able to find her way back home to Brook Haven. He was finally bringing her home.