“Makes sense. Katie Alden is perfect to be the director.” He touched Abigail’s shoulder. “You should get into those dry clothes.”
The combination of his tone and her surroundings-her fatigue, her raw emotions, the fog-had his words curling up her spine. She backed away from him, sliding in the grass. She finally kicked off her shoes, scooped them up and continued on barefoot, turning when she reached the bottom step of her porch. “Thank you for your help.”
“Anytime.”
“I’ll be more careful about my choice of shoes next time.”
She ran inside, not stopping until she reached her one bathroom upstairs. She grabbed a towel and started to dry off, but caught her reflection in the mirror.
Her forehead and cheeks were smeared with soot.
So much for playing the experienced, confident Boston homicide detective.
As she dried her face, she burst into laughter.
On his way back along the rocks from Abigail Browning’s house, Owen watched a seagull plunge into the fog and disappear, and he thought of his long-dead sister.
Doe had wanted to become an ornithologist.
“Don’t you love that word, Owen? Say it. Ornithologist.”
Although her given name was Dorothy, their grandmother-the inimitable Polly Garrison-had nicknamed her Doe because she was nimble and had hair the color of a deer’s coat.
And innocent eyes, Owen thought.
Such innocent eyes.
When she fell into the Atlantic, slipping on the wet cliffs through the woods on the other side of the Browning house, farther up the headland, her deer-colored hair had swirled in the waves like seaweed.
Owen had been about twenty yards behind her, and when he ran to the edge of the rock, the tide had pulled Doe farther out. Helpless to save her, Owen had tried to scream for his parents, anyone, but no sound came out. He’d had no whistle. Doe had run down from their summer house, crying, and he’d followed her, hoping to console her so that she’d pull herself together in time to go hiking with him after lunch.
Help had arrived in the form of the Brownings in their lobster boat. But they were too late. Everyone was too late.
Forcing himself to exhale, Owen pulled off his fleece. His skin was clammy, and the closeness of the fog was making him claustrophobic. It was his one weakness in the work he did-he didn’t like feeling closed in. He’d learned to control his reaction and focus on the job at hand.
That’s the problem, he thought. He didn’t have enough to do. His mind was free to go off on tangents.
And being around Abigail Browning always got to him.
He stood on a coarse granite slab above the water, above the narrow crevice where he had found Chris Browning on a cold, clear July dawn, the sky streaked with shades of lavender and pink.
Owen had found the shell casings first-up at the remains of his family’s original house. Even now, in the impenetrable fog, he could see the silhouette of its skeletal chimney, sunken and crumbled but, still, partially intact. The perfect spot for Chris’s shooter to hide.
Retreating back through the woods to the private drive would have been easy. A car concealed in the woods. A bicycle. A friend on the way. Who’d have noticed?
Chris was an FBI agent. He knew the island better than most.
For too long, no one had considered he might be in trouble.
His dark-eyed wife, a bump on her head, her legs unsteady, had been drawn to the spot of her husband’s murder as if by instinct, as if Chris, settled now in death, had called her there to end her uncertainty.
“I’m going to find out who killed my husband.”
Owen had never doubted Abigail’s words. Even as she’d dug her fingers into his arms, as he’d held her back from going to her husband, further contaminating the crime scene, he’d believed her determination and conviction were for real.
She wouldn’t stop. Not Abigail March Browning.
Now, she was back on the island.
He wasn’t fooled by her soot-smeared face and slippery shoes or her dunk in the ocean.
Abigail was a tight-jawed, hard-assed detective.
She wasn’t in Maine to fix up her house and dump ashes. She was there for the same reason she was always there-for the same reason she hadn’t sold her house in the past seven years and put Mt. Desert Island behind her altogether.
To find Chris’s killer.
Owen turned away from the water and walked up to the path that would take him back to his house. In the shifting fog, spruce branches and the old foundation above created eerie, unnatural shapes.
No wonder the Alden boys thought they’d seen a ghost out here.
Maine was full of ghosts. Owen just had no intention of letting them run him off.
CHAPTER 5
I can see his eyes as I pull the trigger.
I thought he’d be too far away, but I can see them. Wide open. Defiant.
Knowing.
He says his wife’s name, but only I am close enough to hear him above the waves and wind.
“Abigail.”
He calls her name because he loves her. Not because he believes she’s the one who has just shot him.
He knows it’s me.
That bothers me sometimes, still.
Other times, I’m glad.
Yes, it was me, you arrogant bastard.
As I pull the trigger a second time, I think only that finally I am free, finally I am safe, finally I have done what I needed to do.
I don’t think that his wife will hound me forever.
I don’t think by pulling the trigger I have sentenced myself to another kind of prison and torture.
Seven years.
Abigail will never quit. I could hear it in her voice the other night, on the phone. While she was having dinner alone on her wedding anniversary. Those solitary annual dinners are her tradition.
I picked that night to call on purpose.
I’m not a monster. I don’t kill indiscriminately.
I kill to solve problems that cannot be solved another way.
I kill because I’m left no other option.
I kill without pleasure.
But I also kill without remorse.
Abigail.
He loved her.
She loved him.
What did Chris know of love?
What does Abigail know?
She will know of love in the end.
That I promise.
CHAPTER 6
“Listen up, Linc. I’m giving you this one chance. That’s it.”
Linc Cooper looked through the tall spruces at the Atlantic Ocean below him, the sun chasing away the last of the fog on the bright, cool morning. He was on a vertical zigzag of stone steps that Edgar Garrison had carved into the granite hillside behind his summer house almost a hundred years ago. They used to lead to an old-fashioned teahouse. Now the steps led to the house the Garrisons had built after fire had destroyed their original “cottage” down on the waterfront.
The new house, with its blue-gray clapboards and black shutters, was supposedly smaller and more restrained, but Linc, who’d never even seen pictures of the Garrison’s original Maine home, had never liked it.
He had always loved playing on the steps as a little kid, if only because no one noticed him out there. His uncle Ellis considered the house his own, but, in reality, the deed belonged to Linc’s father, Jason Cooper.
Everything, Linc thought, was in his father’s name. His father was clever, responsible and ruthless. His younger half brother, Ellis, was passive by nature and gentle in temperament, not unambitious but more measured in his wants and needs.