Free Murder on Edisto (The Edisto Island Mysteries) by C. Hope Clark

the opening bars of Cracklin’ Rosie , she flopped into a deeply cushioned Adirondack chair out on the porch and laid her head back, singing the words softly to herself, waggling her right foot to the beat.
    Beverly should have named her Rosie, considering the million times she’d played this song. It hit the music stores a few years before Callie was born. She knew when most of Diamond’s songs came out, having listened to her mother prattle on about the genius of the music. Each song sank Callie deeper into the cushion.
    At the end of each album, she emerged to refill her glass.
    As a jogger passed her home, she remembered she hadn’t run. She’d force herself back to that routine in the morning. She wasn’t old enough to go soft yet.
    She sipped her drink, light-headed.
    Callie hadn’t come here to solve cases, but the taste of the island’s crime spree had whetted her appetite. But she didn’t do that anymore. So, what the hell was she supposed to do?
    A question she hadn’t wanted to face.
    Her deep exhale barreled out from an imprisoned frustration she couldn’t pin a label to, and she was grateful to have no one around to question why she seemed down. Just birdsong and distant murmuring waves. Low tide from the sound of it.
    The turntable’s arm lifted, whirred, and clicked off. That final click comforted her in an odd way. Silence pervaded the night, her porch, her thoughts. Just me alone in this place. Just like it’ll be in the fall.
    Her unsteady gaze settled on the knickknacks of coral and aqua hanging around the screened porch. Faded yellows and baby blues accented decorative buoys hung on white rope; a miniature sailboat floated on a rattan end table next to coasters made of shells and glued sand.
    The first place of her own. Residing the past year in her mother’s Middleton shadow had stunk, often yanking her back into an old attitude she thought she’d outgrown. Two weeks after her graduation from the University of South Carolina criminal justice school, she’d moved out of her parents’ home and hadn’t told them where she was headed until she packed her car. Beverly assumed her dramatic I’m-so-hurt role, her father puffing up all protective of his wife, as if Callie had betrayed them. Maybe she had, but years later, nothing seemed to have changed.
    An ice cube slid into her mouth, and she crunched it after sucking the alcohol off.
    So why the hell had she run home this time, knowing exactly how the age-old scenario would play out? Was it the logistics of the Southern family? A culture she couldn’t escape? Had Beverly trained her as a child to think of home as the ultimate sanctuary, the only proper place to go when life turned to shit? How ironic. She only felt like shit when she came home.
    Her ears rang. She would get up and put on another album, but her legs weighed heavy and cumbersome. The instant she used them, the room would spin, and she wasn’t sure she’d make it inside, much less aim her mother’s precious record player needle on one of her oh-so-priceless albums. Besides, the music still played in her head.
    “I’m home, Mom.” Abruptly she sat up. She’d never realized how much Jeb sounded like John.
    His feet slapped the floor in his flip-flops. Finally, he poked his head out the door. “Mom?”
    She held up her empty glass. “Right here, pretty boy.”
    He stepped out holding an empty gin bottle and regarded her with a mixture of surprise and disappointment. “How long have you been out here?”
    “Have no clue. How long you been gone?” she slurred, then winked.
    “Ms. Morgan?” Officer Seabrook walked out of the darkness behind Jeb. “Er . . . I came to show you the coin.”
    “Damn,” Callie whispered, and then giggled. “Busted!”
    “Geez, Mom.” Jeb squatted in front of her. “How many did you have?”
    Callie threw her head back and closed her eyes. She held out her arms, still holding the glass. “Here I am, drinking at home. I’m not