Beyond the Shadows: A Savannah Sleuthing Mystery by Veronica Mixon

Author:Veronica Mixon [Mixon, Veronica]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Sapelo Publishing
Published: 2025-06-02T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

THE ONES WHO WATCH

Friday p.m.

Margaret made tea the way some people prepare for surgery—deliberate, focused, precise. She didn’t ask what kind I wanted or how I took it. She didn’t need to. She knew. She always knew. Knew the exact water temperature I liked, knew how long to let it steep without turning it into something bitter and existential. She poured it into the same faded blue mug I’d used on every visit for thirty years.

“This one keeps it hotter than my mother’s bone china,” she said, just like a hundred times before. “Not that Mother’s china ever saw real use—unless you count chamomile and dramatic sighs from her fainting couch,” she added, moving to the fainting couch under the window. With one swift motion, she yanked the living room curtains shut like she was cutting off a scandalous conversation. The outside world disappeared with a whisper of fabric.

Margaret stood at the window a beat longer, hand still on the curtain as if waiting for the rain to confess something. Then she turned to me.

“Well,” she said, calm as Sunday. “That settles it. They’re not just circling anymore. They’re landing.”

I sat on the edge of her couch, hair damp and stuck to my neck like a clingy ex. Rain had soaked into the cuffs of my sleeves, the hem of my jeans, and—somehow—the inside of my left sock. But the tea warmed my hands. Bergamot and something faintly floral filled my lungs and made it slightly easier to believe I hadn’t lost my mind.

“It wasn’t subtle,” I said, fingers curled around the mug like it was the last biscuit at a church potluck. “Not anymore. This was deliberate.”

She nodded, moved to the sideboard, and retrieved her spiral notebook—the one with more tabs than a Southern family reunion has casseroles. She flipped it open to a page already blooming with names and arrows. A pen appeared from behind her ear like magic, or possibly muscle memory.

Graham arrived ten minutes later, the storm still clinging to his boots and eyebrows. He smelled faintly of sawdust, motor oil, and fresh pine—basically a Yankee candle marketed as “Handyman with Secrets.” Whatever project he’d been in the middle of when Margaret called, it had clearly been dramatic.

He didn’t waste time.

One glance at me. One at Margaret. Then back to me. His eyes settled on mine like a level finding center.

“You see him?” he asked, voice low and serious enough to require subtitles.

I nodded. “Twice. Same build. Same jacket. Baseball cap pulled low. Followed me through Pulaski, lingered across from the Paris Market. No hat. And no umbrella the last time I spotted him. I think he left it in a doorway. My point is that he made no attempt to blend in. Honestly, if subtlety were a sport, he’d be riding the bench.”

Graham exhaled through his nose and dropped into Margaret’s wingback chair. “They’re done pretending,” he said. “No more polite distance.”

“Were they ever polite?” Margaret muttered, scribbling something in her notebook.

We sat there

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