Читать книгу The Harbor - Carla Neggers - Страница 12

Four

The bright sunrise over the Atlantic woke J.B. early. He had no trouble remembering where he was. Upstairs front bedroom of Olivia West’s house. Or why. Zoe West. Or acknowledging that he must have been out of his mind last night.

On the other hand, he liked waking up to the sound of the ocean.

He’d cracked his window and could hear the tide rolling in, the wind gusting, seagulls crying in the distance, the putter of lobster boats. The rain and fog had blown out, leaving behind a washed sky and clear, dry autumn air. His room looked straight out on the Atlantic Ocean, which sparkled in the morning sun.

He pulled on his pants and raked a hand through his hair. Probably a good idea to get moving before ex-detective Zoe decided to inspect her property. Funny she’d decided to inspect his first.

But instead of throwing his stuff together and clearing out, J.B. found himself wandering around the big, airy house. Three bedrooms and a bathroom upstairs. Downstairs were another bedroom, one and a half bathrooms, an eat-in kitchen, a side entry and a dining room and living room that stretched across the entire front of the house, with canvas-covered furniture and tall windows that looked out onto a porch and beyond to the Atlantic. The kitchen window faced the harbor. He’d heard that Olivia West had penned all her Jen Periwinkle novels at the kitchen table.

He put an old-fashioned copper kettle on to boil and wondered if it was the same table. Probably. The house still had a pre-World War II feel to it, and from what he’d experienced of the residents of Goose Harbor so far, J.B. took them as a frugal lot. Waste not, want not.

He retrieved a tea bag from a clear glass jar on the counter and duly noted the can of soy powder sitting beside it. He doubted it was the old lady’s. He pulled open the Reagan-era refrigerator and noted the routine condiments, pure maple syrup, natural peanut butter and a Ziploc bag labeled “flax seed.” There were cinnamon Toaster Strudels in the freezer and a bag of frozen blueberries, the little ones, which he knew meant they were wild.

When the water came to a boil, he filled a restaurant-style mug and dunked in his tea bag, then headed through the side entry and into the front room. He eased past the dining-room table, a light film of dust on its dark wood, and walked out onto the front porch. The air was brisk, the porch furniture a mix of Adirondack chairs and rockers. There was a porch swing. He pictured the West family gathering here on summer Sunday afternoons. Now only Christina and her burnt-out older sister were left.

J.B. sipped his tea, the mug warm against his hands. This place probably hadn’t changed much in a hundred years. He could almost see Olivia playing on the stretch of lawn above the rock bluff as a child, having friends over—having his grandmother over.

Posey Sutherland McGrath.

He walked down the steps to the lawn and out to the edge of the rocks, where he looked northeast and saw the southern tip of Sutherland Island. It was named for one of his ancestors. He’d taken his rented hulk of a lobster boat around the island and spotted the old foundation of what the locals said had been a Sutherland house. Before he left Goose Harbor, he wanted to explore the island, walk around. Bruce said there was an old family cemetery there. He might or might not be on the level. He was capable of making something up just because he didn’t believe J.B. had any ancestors from Goose Harbor.

It was unclear where Jesse McGrath was from. He’d turned up in Goose Harbor and swept Posey Sutherland off her feet. She was the wealthy, sheltered daughter of Lester Sutherland, who had no use for a drifter and forbade Posey to see Jesse. The Wests weren’t as well-off as the Sutherlands—without Olivia’s writing, they’d have had to give up the house on the water. But she agreed with her friend’s father that Jesse McGrath would bring her nothing but hardship and sorrow.

Posey ignored them both and eloped with Jesse, moving first to eastern Montana, then west to a beautiful alpine meadow outside of Bozeman. That was where she had her son, it was where Jesse became a lawman, and it was where she died of a fever when little Benjamin was only seven years old. Jesse was killed a few years later in a shoot-out when he interrupted a bank robbery.

Benjamin—J.B.’s father—went to live with a schoolteacher in Bozeman. Olivia West paid for anything he needed. She even offered to have him move to Maine where she would see to his upbringing in his mother’s hometown of Goose Harbor.

J.B. knew because he had the letter. He had all of Olivia West’s letters to the friend who’d run off and left her behind. He’d found them when he’d cleaned out his father’s cabin after he died over the winter. They were bundled together in a trunk that he didn’t know if Benjamin McGrath, western Montana hunting and fishing guide, had ever opened.

Oh, Posey, can you believe I sold a book? You’ll read it, I know. Please don’t take offense at my villain, Mr. Lester McGrath. I couldn’t resist.

Lester Sutherland moved to Boston not long after his daughter ran off. There were no Sutherlands left in Goose Harbor. Olivia hadn’t liked Posey’s father, and she hadn’t liked Jesse McGrath. She’d made that clear in her letters.

J.B. noticed his tea had gone cold.

He headed back inside for more tea and a closer inspection of the house where Olivia West was born, lived her entire life and died. What the hell, he was practically family.

* * *

Zoe had apple coffee cake with her sister at the café and then sat with a cup of coffee at a small table overlooking the harbor and tried to pretend her life was normal. It felt so normal, being back in Goose Harbor, watching the activity on the docks. As the sun came up and the morning wore on, there were more tourists and pleasure yachts. The lobster boats were out in deeper water where the catch was plentiful this time of year.

Christina was too busy behind her glass-front counter for chitchat. Her café was just what Zoe had expected. White tables and blue linens, milk-glass vases with yellow mums, watercolors by local artists on the walls, a constant flow of people. Christina and her waitstaff all wore black bottoms, white tops and blue aprons.

The food was wonderful. Zoe remembered how Chris would get up early even as a teenager to make wild blueberry pancakes and set the table with their mother’s white bone china.

Finally, Zoe gave up her table and headed back outside, welcoming the cool breeze blowing in off the water. She debated checking with the local police about the break-in yesterday, but she knew better. They wouldn’t have anything.

She wondered where Agent McGrath was. The lobster boat he’d rented from Bruce was tied up at the dock. Christina wanted her to talk to him and find out what he was doing in Goose Harbor—cop to cop, she said, as if an FBI special agent would tell Zoe anything.

With any luck, he’d decided to continue his vacation elsewhere.

Then she noticed a Jeep with D.C. license plates parked in the town lot and gritted her teeth. No. Special Agent McGrath was still in Goose Harbor.

She got into her car and drove out along Ocean Drive, her stomach constricted, the apple coffee cake churning, her fingers in a death grip on the wheel as the road edged along the water. She could see it was choppy out on the ocean. She rolled down her windows and heard the waves and the wind, smelled the salt and tried not to cry.

Until she was in her late nineties, Olivia would walk from her house to the docks almost every morning. She said walking helped her think, helped a story to simmer. There was a famous picture of her leaning on her cane above the rocks on Ocean Drive. It had run in papers all over the country on her ninetieth birthday.

She hadn’t died in peace. She’d died thinking she knew who’d murdered her nephew. Tortured because she couldn’t produce the name.

Zoe blinked back tears and turned up her aunt’s paved driveway. She hadn’t expected to inherit the house. Olivia was meticulous in putting her affairs in order, but circumspect—Zoe hadn’t known she would inherit the house and the rights to Jen Periwinkle, Christina a trust fund for Christina. They split the modest trust fund meant for their father. Olivia had willed the bulk of her estate to the nature preserve and her other favorite charities. She’d lived frugally and had a decent portfolio, but she’d given away money all through her life and was never enormously wealthy.

The brown-shingled 1890s house stood on the rockbound point as it always had. All that was missing were the pots of mums Olivia put out every year. And Olivia herself. Zoe parked in the driveway and climbed out, still not used to the reality that the house was hers now. She could sell it for a fortune. It’d buy her more time before she had to get a job, but that seemed like the classic long-term solution to a short-term problem. She had to get her life in order first. Then she could decide what to do with her aunt’s house.

Using the key on her key chain, she unlocked the side door and walked into the small entry between the kitchen and the front room.

Someone was here.

She stepped into the kitchen and noted the used tea bag on the counter, felt the still-warm kettle on the stove. Whoever it was could have their own key or have come in through the porch door, which didn’t have a lock. Getting one had been on Zoe’s to-do list for a year. But the door was seldom used, and not having a lock for it hadn’t been a problem in a hundred years.

Had Christina let someone stay here and forgotten to mention it in the excitement over the break-in at her house?

“Hello? Anyone home?”

Zoe checked the front room, but there was no sign of anyone. The porch door was shut tight. Maybe Christina had let Bruce loan a room to someone. Maybe Betsy O’Keefe had moved off Luke Castellane’s yacht and needed a place to stay. Zoe doubted a burglar would have fixed himself a cup of tea, but stranger things had happened.

She started up the steep stairs to the second floor. There was no sound of the shower running. No snoring. Nothing unusual.

She called again, keeping her voice cheerful. It had to be someone she knew. “Hello, anyone home? It’s me, Mama Bear. Someone’s been eating in my kitchen....”

At the top of the stairs, the door to the biggest bedroom across the hall was open, and she saw the unmade bed. “Someone’s been sleeping in my bed, too,” she muttered, not so loud, and stood in the doorway.

It wasn’t anyone she knew.

Heaped on the floor was the opened, soft black suitcase she recognized from her tour of Special Agent McGrath’s room at the inn last night.

Just what she needed.

She wouldn’t put it past Lottie Martin to toss him out for the spilled tea. Hell of a nerve, though, to help himself to a room here. Bruce could have given him the go-ahead, but still.

Zoe returned to the hall. She supposed she had no business talking about nerve since she was the one who’d spilled the tea in the first place. She’d have to find him, figure out what was going on and take it from there.

What if McGrath was the one who’d broken into Christina’s house yesterday?

At this point, Zoe was willing to entertain any and all possibilities. Barely twelve hours back in Goose Harbor and things were already a mess.

She started for the stairs but noticed that the door to the attic was cracked and stopped still. A jolt of adrenaline shot through her. Oh, no.

It had to be the wind. McGrath couldn’t be in the attic. Anywhere else, but not there.

She tore open the door and ran upstairs, and only when she got to the top did she think—did she really want to confront a nosy FBI agent? What if he was a phony?

The stairs ended in the middle of the attic, with no rail or wall around the stairwell. There was a window at each end of the huge open space. It was filled with boxes, trunks, old furniture—what anyone would expect to find in an attic. Except for the space by the south window.

Zoe snatched up an old drapery rod. She made herself breathe as she picked her way through the attic junk, unable to see if anyone was in the little nook she’d made for herself during the first weeks after her father and great-aunt had died, when she’d been overwhelmed with grief, shock, anger, insanity. She’d used two old bureaus to create false walls and added a chenille rug and a dozen pillows in varying sizes, shapes and colors, anything that didn’t scream “cop,” that didn’t remind her of touching her father’s dead body...of hearing her aunt say, “I know who did it....”

The only solace she’d found in those weeks was in spending time up here. She bought yellow pads and pencils, a pencil sharpener, ten different kinds of pens, and she sat on her rug amid her pillows, staring out her window at the harbor and scribbling.

She should have dismantled her secret retreat before she left for Connecticut. Set fire to everything.

Pushing back her sense of embarrassment and violation at the idea anyone had pawed through her private space, she came around the two tall bureaus that marked one of her walls.

A lean, black-haired man had his legs stretched out and one of her yellow pads on his lap, and when he looked up at her, it was all Zoe could do to hang on to her drapery rod. He might have crawled off a Winslow Homer seascape with his blue eyes and weathered appearance, more the New England seaman than a Montana FBI agent.

He smiled at her. “You must be Mama Bear.”

“And you must be Special Agent McGrath.”

“Zoe West?”

She nodded. She didn’t know what else to say. Ex-detective West? Almost Special Agent West? She cleared her throat. “I understand you’ve met my sister, Christina.”

“I have.”

She felt ridiculous carrying a drapery rod and self-conscious seeing the yellow pad with Chapter One scrawled in her handwriting across the top in his lap. It was as if there was nothing left in her of the veteran Maine State Police detective or even the somewhat eccentric sole detective of Bluefield, Connecticut.

McGrath got to his feet. He was tall and obviously very fit. Zoe used to be more fit before she took up residence with Charlie and Bea Jericho and started knitting and canning and milking goats, trying to put her life back together after her year of self-imposed exile. She didn’t run, not since she’d found her father’s body.

She watched McGrath take in her outfit of slim black pants, little fuchsia top, black flats and silver ankle bracelet and put that together with the image he, like the rest of Goose Harbor, must have formed of her. At least he couldn’t see her rose tattoo.

He gave her a slight nod. “You want to call the police or just hit me over the head with that curtain rod?”

“It’s a drapery rod. You can tell because of the hooks and the little pulley thing.”

“Ah.”

He tossed her pad onto a rose-flowered pillow. He moved with the kind of restrained control that reminded Zoe she was out of practice with her hand-to-hand combat skills. He wasn’t wearing a weapon. He had on jeans, a thick black sweater and scuffed boat shoes.

She tried not to glance at the pad. She’d written in longhand, page after page of nothing anyone else was supposed to see. Ever. “Did you read—” She took a breath and decided she didn’t want to know. “Never mind. Did Bruce give you permission to stay here? He has no right—”

“Bruce doesn’t know I’m here. It was my idea to stay here.”

His tone was unapologetic. He was simply stating the facts and letting her decide what she thought of them. His voice was deep and slightly raspy, as if it’d been dragged over sharp rocks a few times.

“Why?” she asked.

“Because you got me thrown out of my inn.”

“What? I did no—” She stopped herself. Why make a denial? Why lie? He hadn’t asked a question or demanded an explanation. No point in painting herself into a corner. “I’ll see you downstairs in the kitchen.”

“As you wish.”

Right. As if she had any control over the situation. She took her drapery rod with her, about-faced and headed back to the stairs, just missing falling into the stairwell and ending her return to Goose Harbor with a broken neck—which would have served her right.