“No apologies necessary. And I only have a few bags.” Just the ones under my eyes, one from Bling, and, oh yes, the one holding the bottle of Pinot Grigio on the passenger seat of my car.
“Please let me know if you need anything,” he told her. “We have breakfast starting at seven, though we can make arrangements for coffee and muffins earlier, if you like.” He smiled. “A lot of people come for the fishing and they like to get an early start.”
“No fishing for me,” she promised, “and hopefully no early start.”
She turned toward the door and noticed the portrait hanging over the fireplace. Following her gaze, the clerk told her, “That’s the late Mrs. Sinclair. Pretty lady, wasn’t she?”
“Mr. Sinclair’s wife?”
“Yes.”
“What happened to her?”
“She drowned four years ago.”
“What a tragedy,” Mia said.
“It really was. She was really nice.” He lowered his voice. “A little on the bossy side, but we all liked her anyway.”
“How did she drown?” Mia would have expected someone who lived on the water to be a strong swimmer.
“Boat overturned. She took one of the small out-boards to do a little crabbing and stayed out too long. Who knows how that happened. Storm came up real fast and she couldn’t get back in. Mr. Sinclair took it real hard. He’s been raising the kids-Danny and Delia-on his own. Doing a good job, too. They’re nice kids.”
The desk phone rang and he excused himself to answer it. Mia thanked him for the key and went through the lobby to the front porch. After parking her car in the lot, she walked around the back of the inn and followed a cobbled path to the last cabin.
There were lights on, both inside and over the front door. For a moment, she wasn’t sure she was at the right place. But it was definitely the last cabin. She slipped the metal key into the door and pushed it open.
Her cabin was almost identical to the one in which Holly Sheridan had stayed at the opposite end of the row of similar structures. The small front room contained a white wicker sofa, a matching chair, and an end table that held a tall ceramic lamp, the base of which was a seagull with its wings half opened. A basket of fruit, cheese, and crackers was on a tiled tray had been placed upon the coffee table. A fairly new television sat on a stand in the corner and a neat pile of current magazines was stacked on the end table.
Next to the tray something lay folded inside white tissue paper. She slipped a finger through the tape and pushed aside the paper to find a navy blue T-shirt with a silk-screened image of the inn. A note on the tray from Daniel Sinclair welcomed her to the inn and apologized that the only shirt they had was an extra large. “We give them out to all our guests,” the note informed her, “but last week we had a sorority reunion and went through all the smalls and mediums.”
Mia held up the shirt in front of her. It was indeed large, but it was a nice gesture. She refolded the shirt and took it into the bedroom and left it on the foot of the double bed, which had been turned down. She peeked into the bathroom and found fresh towels and two water glasses, along with the obligatory soaps, toothbrush, toothpaste, and mouthwash.
She went back into the sitting room and sat on the edge of one of the sofa cushions and picked through the basket of fruit. She immediately bit into a green apple. She’d missed dinner and was starving. A few pieces of cheese and several crackers later, and Mia felt herself begin to revive. She stuck the key in her pocket, took one of the glasses from the bathroom, grabbed the bag holding the wine and her handbag, and went outside into the dark.
When she arrived at her cabin, she’d noticed the chairs set to overlook the bay, and chose the one closest to the water. She took the corkscrew from her shoulder bag and opened the bottle, and poured herself a glass. Stretching herself out in the chair, she sipped her wine and watched small dark birds darting across the water.
She was on her second glass of wine when she realized the small birds were bats.
“Oh, swell,” she muttered, pulling herself into a ball and hunkering down in the chair. “Maybe they won’t see me.”
The moonlight was bright on the bay; except for the presence of the bats, it was a near-perfect night. It was quiet, except for the beating of the occasional wing overhead and the croaking of the bullfrogs from the marsh on the far side of the inn. She tried closing her eyes and willed herself to ignore the bats.
They’re eating insects, she reminded herself. That’s good, right? The more they eat, the fewer mosquitoes to bite me. They have no interest in me.
That’s what her big brother always told her.
The thought of her big brother brought a pain to her heart.
“Go away, Brendan,” she whispered to the night. “Crawl back into that little corner of hell where you’re going to spend your unhappily ever-after, and don’t come back…”
A sound behind her drew her attention and she looked over her shoulder. The shadow of a man stretched out across the lawn, growing larger as it drew closer.
When the figure was about twenty feet away, it demanded, “Want to tell me what that was all about?”
Beck. And he didn’t sound happy.
“What was what all about?”
“That little show you put on back there. What the hell were you thinking, taunting him like that? Were you trying to get him to come after you?”
She pulled her gun from her bag. “Better me than someone else.”
“Yeah, sure. If he comes at the place and time you want him to.”
Beck stood five feet away, looking down at her. From the chair, he appeared to be about twelve feet tall and most foreboding.
“The problem, as I see it, is that he’s going to be doing the choosing, Mia.”
“Maybe so.” She put the gun back, then sat up and grabbed the bottle by its neck. “Would you like some wine? There’s another glass in my cabin. I could-”
“I don’t drink.”
“I didn’t used to.” She set the bottle back on the ground and took a sip from her glass.
“What happened?”
“Shit.” She told him matter-of-factly. “Shit happened.”
He picked up the bottle and appeared to be looking at the label.
“How’d you get here?” she asked.
“Borrowed the car from Hal.” He tilted the bottle in her direction. “How long have you been doing this?”
“Oh, roughly a half hour.”
“I meant-”
“I know what you meant.” She waved a hand dismissively. “That was my weak attempt at humor.”
He replaced the bottle on the ground near the chair.
“None of my business, I know, but I’m curious. You don’t have to answer.”
“Since I got back from Indiana.” She leaned her head back and looked skyward to avoid his eyes.
“What happened in Indiana?”
“We had this case…twenty-two-year-old guy killed his whole family. Mother. Father. His sisters. Their husbands and children.” Her voice dropped with each word until Beck was almost leaning into the chair to hear her. “Eleven people in all. He killed every one.”
“I guess there’s no point in asking why.”
“Oh, there was a why. His father wouldn’t cosign a loan for him to get a new car, so he shot him and his mother. Went to the first sister’s, asked the brother-in-law, who also declined, since the guy with the gun was unemployed. Shot him, too. Then I guess he figured, aw, fuck it, and he went house to house and just blew them all away.”
She cleared her throat.
“And after that, there were these three little boys in Virginia…”
They sat in silence until Beck broke it by saying, “You mentioned once that your brother-”
“Yeah, yeah. Doesn’t take a genius to draw a line between the guy with the gun in Indiana and the guy with the gun in my family.” She waved her glass in his direction.
“Want to tell me about it? What happened with him?”
“I’m sure you read all about it. It was a really big story about two years ago. FBI agent behind a child-smuggling ring, runs into his cousin while preparing to take a shipment of kids out of some small Central American country, later attempts to assassinate the cousin, kills the cousin’s brother by mistake. The networks, the newsmagazines, the papers, they just couldn’t get enough of it.”