TURTLE DOVE (Alton Rhode Mysteries Book 7) Read Free

had been shining brightly, was now covered by clouds. Vole went into his cabin and turned on his weather radar. There was a squall just to his north. He headed for it and soon She Got the House was engulfed in a driving rain. It was a rough ride, with water sloshing over the gunwales fore and aft, but Vole loved it. He was too good a seaman to be worried about a passing squall, and the rain and seawater was cleaning the boat even better than he could!
    It took him almost an hour to reach his berth. After tying up his boat and checking for anything incriminating, Vole climbed into one of the golf carts owned by the woman he had recently dismembered and headed back to her house.
    Just under 15 minutes later, he stripped off his sodden clothes in the room he was using, threw them in the washer and took a shower. Then, wearing only a towel, he padded into his lover’s room. She was already lying in bed, naked. The woman knew his blood was up, and he wanted his reward. He dropped the towel. She laughed and reached out and grabbed him by his already erect member.
    “Any problems?” she asked, drawing him onto the bed.
    “No.” Leonard Vole’s voice was husky with lust. “She’s sleeping with Bin Laden.”
    It was a good line, and the woman laughed. A moment later they were thrashing in bed, not knowing, or caring, that they had just committed only the second murder in Bald Head Island’s history.
    The first had occurred almost 500 years earlier, in 1526, when a Spanish sailor washed ashore after the ship captained by the Spanish explorer Lucas Vázquez de Ayllón ran into the treacherous shoals surrounding the island and sank. The sailor, whose name was lost to history, was found, sprawled barely conscious in the sand, by some of the Native Americans who frequented Bald Head’s shores and estuaries to collect the abundance of shellfish available.
    Unfortunately for the sailor, the savages who revived him were sick of eating clams and shrimp, and decided to augment their diet.
    They killed him, and ate the evidence. 

CHAPTER 1 - DESTINATION WEDDING
     
    Five Months Later
     
    Somewhere In North Carolina
     
    I wondered if there was a law against shooting your GPS system and putting it out of its misery.
    I didn’t think that was likely, but I was in North Carolina, so who knew? There are lots of strange laws south of the Mason-Dixon Line.
    It was Thursday afternoon, and over the past half hour “Gladys”, which is what I call my portable GPS unit, had bombarded me with an endless stream  of “when possible, make a legal U-turn” and “re-calculating route” invectives as I meandered through the maze that is coastal North Carolina near its border with South Carolina. Gladys was confused by the new highways that had apparently replaced older rural roads.  The trouble started on I-95 when she told me to get off at Exit 14.
    There was no Exit 14.
    There was an Exit 13 A and an Exit 13 B, but by the time I realized I should have taken one of them, I passed both and was on my way to Savannah.
    Savannah is one of my favorite cities, and there was no traffic, but I was trying to get to Southport, NC, where I hoped to catch a ferry to Bald Head Island. I was scheduled to give away the bride at a “destination wedding” on Bald Head.
    Hard to do when you can’t find the blasted destination.
    Bald Head Island was one of those places where the choice between flying and driving was not so simple. The nearest major airport that serves the area apparently has not been built yet. Raleigh, Charlotte and Fayetteville were still hours away by auto on roads that, as I discovered, could confuse satellites. To endure the inevitable airport delays, first in New York, and then at one of those airports, only to face a four-hour drive, was not appealing. I estimated that I could drive the whole way in approximately the same time. I also suspected that had a modern-day Sherman been forced to plunder the South by air, the Confederacy