Tinkie took the card and we found ourselves on the sidewalk. We still had a lot of ground to cover.
We arrived back at the Bissonnette House at two-thirty to find Darla wasn’t at home. I remembered the note in the journal. Darla had an assignation at three with a mystery man. Whoever it was didn’t impact our case, and Tinkie and I had only a couple of hours before the parade was due to take off. Coleman and the men had asked us to meet at the tourism center, where the parade was to begin. The house was Tennessee Williams’s birthplace. If I had time in the morning before we left Columbus, I wanted to take a quick look around.
“Where’s Darla?” Tinkie asked when she realized the house was empty.
I explained about the note I’d found in her journal.
“Intriguing. I wonder where the location of the rendezvous might be.”
“We can’t solve our own case. We don’t have time to spy on Darla.”
“I’d kind of hoped she and Harold would hit it off,” Tinkie said. “What did the note say?”
“Just something about the pull of the moon and the flow of the tides, and something about Artemis.”
“Sounds like the beach,” Tinkie said.
There was a knock on the front door and I went to open it, feeling only a bit awkward. The young couple standing on the porch—with five pieces of luggage—looked a little shell-shocked. “We need to register.”
I knew that the Zinnia gang had taken every single room in the inn. And we had one more night before we were due to check out. Clearly this young couple had made a mistake, but Darla was going to have to sort that.
“Come in. You can put your bags in the parlor,” I said. “Tinkie, stir up the fire, please. Darla has guests.”
Tinkie peeked around the corner. “To stay here?”
“Uh-huh,” I said. I walked over to her. “Darla will have to handle this. We need to find her.”
“Pronto. These guys will need to find another accommodation tonight, and that may not be easy to do with Christmas and so many people traveling. The sooner we find Darla, the better.”
Tinkie and I scampered out before any more questions were thrown at us. “Where do you think Darla is?”
I pulled out my phone. “Simple enough.” But when I called Darla, I got a message that her mailbox was full and to call back later. “That’s really strange.”
“Maybe we can find her. She couldn’t be far.”
“She was meeting someone at three.” My watch showed three o’clock on the dot. “And since there’s no beach here, maybe at the river?”
“Good idea. Her car is still in the garage.” Tinkie pointed. “She must have gone on foot.”
The obvious place to look was at the edge of the Bissonnette House property, where the zigzagging staircase that clung to the river’s bluff led down to the river. When we got to the edge of the lawn, I looked down, feeling only a little of the vertigo that came along with fear of heights. Tinkie grasped the handrail and started down. When I didn’t follow, she looked back at me. “Are you coming?”
“Maybe.” The whole wooden structure looked pretty rickety to me. When we’d boarded the boat for the flotilla, we’d driven down to the dock. My gut clenched with apprehension at the idea of descending those steps.
“Come on, Sarah Booth. There’s someone down on the shore.”
Indeed, someone was on the dock where the Tenn-Tom Queen was tied up, waiting for someone to repair her propellers. A solitary person paced, as if anxious. I couldn’t tell if it was Darla because the person wore a parka with a hoodie obscuring the face, but I was relatively certain it was a woman. Likely Darla. “If I make it down these stairs, I’m never going back up them.”
Tinkie only laughed. “You need therapy to get over this fear of heights.”
I had a snappy retort about fear of cooking, but I didn’t deliver it because I was grasping the handrail in a death grip and forcing my feet to move one at a time onto the stairs. It took all of my concentration to inch forward step by step, slowly going down toward the shore.
When we were nearly to the bottom, I realized that the woman had disappeared from the dock. She’d either entered the boat or taken the road that wound past several other houses with river docks.
“Did you see where she went?” I asked Tinkie when my feet were on solid ground.
“No, she was right there and then she was gone.”
“Let’s check the boat.” I started on deck. “Darla! Darla!” She had to be nearby.
Tinkie started around the wheelhouse to the front of the boat and I was close on her heels. Before I could even say a word, someone barreled around the wheelhouse and straight into Tinkie, knocking my partner into the railing.
“Hey!” I shouted as the person pushed past me, almost knocking me on top of Tinkie. The assailant rushed off the boat and ran down the dock.
“Who the hell was that?” Tinkie asked.
“I don’t know. It wasn’t Darla.”
“Do you think it was someone tampering with the boat?” Tinkie asked. She’d recovered her cool a lot quicker than I would have.
“I think it was someone up to no good. Let’s check the boat to be sure Darla isn’t injured inside.”
We moved forward with caution, and for good reason. When we got into the cabin, it was clear someone had been living on the boat. The bed was rumpled and dirty dishes were stacked on the floor beside the bed. I found a receipt from the Marine Repair Center with an estimate to replace the propellers. It was clear the boat had hit something.
Tinkie came out of the bathroom holding a brush. “Look at this.”
The brush was tangled with long red hairs. We looked at each other. For
