The Cottage on Nantucket

by Jessie Newton

  “I didn’t have a chance to explain everything,” Riggs said, his voice low. “Just agree with her, Tessa? Okay?” His expression blazed with urgency, and he didn’t back away when Tessa remained silent.

  The light knocking happened again, and Riggs barked, “Tessa.”

  “Okay,” she said. “I’ll agree with everything she says.”

  Chapter Fifty

  “Janey?” she whispered, her back to Riggs as he walked away from her. Every cell in her body screamed at her to turn around. “Can you hear me?”

  “Yes,” her sister said. “What’s going on?”

  “Too much to explain,” Tessa said. “I’m going to leave the call going. Can you record it?”

  “I’ll figure it out.”

  The door behind her opened, and Tessa said, “Gotta go,” and slipped the phone back in her pocket as she turned toward Bobbie Friedman as she entered the cottage.

  Tessa wanted to put a smile on her face, but found she couldn’t. Bobbie did though, and she came toward Tessa as if they were simply old friends who hadn’t spoken for a while.

  “I meant to call you back,” Tessa said, taking a few steps to meet Bobbie at the cusp of the kitchen. “I’ve been so busy, and I have this massive headache.” She stopped talking there. She had been busy, so that wasn’t a lie. She found it so much easier to keep her voice in the normal range when she didn’t lie.

  “Have you eaten?” Bobbie asked as she hugged Tessa. She drew back but kept her hands on Tessa’s shoulders, as if she needed to be touching her to assess how she really felt. “You look a little gray.”

  “I haven’t eaten,” Tessa said with a weak smile. “I got really engrossed in this article Ryan sent me, and I went to Boston for some shopping today, and I’m not even sure what we have in the house.”

  Bobbie’s blue eyes missed nothing, and Tessa noticed the sharpness in them in a whole new way.

  “What are you and Riggs up to tonight?”

  “Oh, nothing,” Bobbie said. “I made fish stew. You should come next door and eat, Tessa. You don’t look good.” She finally stepped back, and Tessa couldn’t see this woman being anything but a bit eccentric in her hairstyles and the perfect grandmother.

  She cooked, she cleaned, she let her husband go fishing whenever he wanted. Tessa darted a look toward Riggs, who’d come back into the house but not very far. He wore a mask as an expression, and she couldn’t tell what was happening in his mind.

  Agree with everything she says.

  “I’m really tired,” she said, swallowing. Another weak smile. “We stayed downtown last night, and the bed was terrible.”

  “The beds here can’t be that great,” Bobbie said, her soft expression hardening considerably.

  “They’re not bad, actually.” Tessa turned back to the kitchen and opened the fridge, pretending to look for something inside it. “I’m sure I can find something here.” Every fighting instinct inside her screamed at her. Don’t go with Bobbie. Do not go next door.

  She had no idea what she’d find there, though she’d eaten dinner with Bobbie and Riggs at their cottage several times in the past. She and Janey had been there only a week or so ago.

  “No,” Bobbie said, and the next thing Tessa knew, the fridge door came flying toward her. It hit her in the calf, and then her hip, and she yelped as pain exploded through her leg from where the corner of the door had hit her.

  The fridge slammed shut with a terrible rubber thwapping sound, and Tessa looked at Bobbie even as she reached to rub her leg. “What are you doing?”

  Bobbie wore a look on her face Tessa had never seen before. “You don’t have anything to eat here,” she said, her bright blue eyes sparking with dangerous, hot flames. “You need to come next door to our place, and we’ll feed you right up.”

  Like Hansel and Gretel, Tessa thought, still searching Bobbie’s face for any sign of the woman she’d known for decades.

  She didn’t seem to live inside the petite blonde woman, and Tessa stepped backward. Her heartbeat crashed like cymbals in her ears, and her adrenaline flowed through her body with the power of river rapids.

  Could she get a knife? Could she even cut another person if she did?

  “Don’t make a scene,” Bobbie said. “I’d hate for something to happen to your brand-new floors.” She smiled in the creepiest way possible, her light red lips curving up and out far too much to be comfortable—or normal.

  “Come on,” Riggs said roughly, opening the door behind him. “We have a lot to talk about tonight.”

  Bobbie rolled her eyes and turned her head to the side. She didn’t try to look at Riggs at all. “No, we don’t,” she said. “We have nothing to talk about tonight.” She returned her attention to Tessa.

  Her instincts told her to get away from this woman, and fast. It was incredible how different she seemed tonight compared to every other time Tessa had seen her. “If we have nothing to talk about, I really can find something to eat here,” she said. “Or I’ll order from that soup shack.”

  “Soup in the summer?” Bobbie trilled out a high-pitched laugh. “Don’t be ridiculous.”

  “But you made fish stew,” Tessa said, her voice sliding into a whisper by the end of the sentence. Bobbie’s smile slid right off her face. In that moment, she knew Bobbie had, in fact, not made fish stew for dinner.

  Maybe you’re the fish, she thought, a new brand of terror moving through her and wrapping her heart in tight, icy fingers. It struggled to beat, each one coming closer and closer to the one in front of it as they all tried to sprint through her veins simultaneously.

  “And it’s delicious,” Bobbie sang out. She reached out, but Tessa sidestepped her hand. Anger flashed in the blue depths of her eyes. “You need to come with us.”

  “Why?” Tessa asked, her eyes darting to Riggs. “Tell me what’s going on.”

  Bobbie settled her weight on one foot and folded her arms. Tessa didn’t dare look away from her again. “It’s really very simple, Tessa. You have something we want. We want to make sure the Martins don’t get it, so we’ll need your help with that. And then, you’ll be giving us what we want.”

  “There’s nothing to give you,” she said. “I already told Riggs that.”

  Bobbie swung around to face her husband. “What have you been telling her?”

  “Nothing,” he said, holding up one hand. “I haven’t told her anything.”

  There’s millions in Lydia’s estate, he’d said, and Tessa wondered where.

  Bobbie shook her head in what could only be a show of disgust. “You better not have.” The blonde woman turned back to Tessa. “Come on.”

  “I’m not hungry,” Tessa blurted out as Bobbie started to twist back to the front door of the cottage. “I’m just going to take some painkillers and go to bed.”

  Bobbie changed direction fluidly, and she came at Tessa with the speed and precision of a rattlesnake. Her arm lifted, and Tessa had enough peripheral vision to see the syringe in her hand.

  Go! she thought. Move!

  She could do neither as Bobbie’s left hand latched onto her forearm and the right one plunged that syringe straight into Tessa’s neck.

  The pinch there was more like the pain of someone slamming a toothpick into her jugular, and she cried out. “Stop it,” she said. “Stop!”

  She batted at Bobbie’s hand in the space between her shoulder and her face. “What was that?” Something cold spread through her body, which was very, very strange, as the point of origin of the needle pulsed with white-hot pain.

  “Help,” she said, her mind clinging to only one thing. “Janey.” The name came out weakly.

  “We’ll find her too,” Bobbie said, her voice oh-so-chipper. “Don’t worry, dear. You’re going to feel better when you wake up. You just rest now, and I’ll take care of everything.”

  Tessa took a step toward the countertop, reaching out to steady herself and missing it completely. She wasn’t anywhere near close enough to it, which
was so, so odd, because it looked so close.

  “Janey,” she wheezed again as her throat started to close. “I’m going to need help.” She fought against the blackness crowding into her vision, and she flailed to find something she could hold onto. Anything.

  Otherwise, a fall was in her very near future.

  “Help,” Tessa said one more time. “I don’t want to go next door with them.”

  “I’m so sorry,” Bobbie said with plenty of falseness in her tone. “But you simply have to.” She turned away from Tessa and barked at Riggs. “Get her before she hits her head.”

  Riggs strode toward Tessa, catching her just as she started to topple. They both went to the ground, where he knelt and cradled her against his thighs. “Bobbie, what was that stuff?” He shook Tessa a little bit, but her eyes had drifted closed, and she floated now, on a cold and hot sea filled with foam, lily pads, and the cheerful cadence of amphibians.

  “You can’t just be injecting people with things all the time,” he said, his voice warbling in and out of Tessa’s ears.

  “She’ll be fine,” Bobbie said. “We needed some time, and she wasn’t going to come.”

  Help, Tessa thought, hoping her sisterly connection with Janey hadn’t been severed because she’d snapped at her sister yesterday.

  “Now,” Bobbie said. “Let’s get her next door, and I’ll keep my eye on her while you come back here and start looking for that trunk. It has to be here; it wasn’t anywhere else.”

  “I really don’t think Lydia kept stacks of hundreds in a trunk here at the cottage,” Riggs said, and Tessa groaned inwardly as he picked her up in his arms. The movement made everything swim, swim, swim in her head, all of her thoughts floating by like cotton blowing in the wind.

  “You don’t know anything,” Bobbie said. “She won’t be out forever—at least with that. We’ll tear this place apart board by board if we have to. I know there’s cash in this cottage. We just have to find it.”

  The world moved, and Tessa begged for a release of the kaleidoscope of colors streaming along the backs of her eyelids. Her stomach swooped, and she retched.

  At least she thought she did. She honestly wasn’t sure what was going on, and thankfully, there had to be a God in heaven, because He stole her consciousness from her, and Tessa didn’t have to fight against the tide any longer.

  She sank into blissful oblivion, her last thought the hope that Janey would have the good sense to end their phone call before Bobbie realized it had been connected.

  Chapter Fifty-One

  Janey hung up, her mind racing. “Call Sean,” she barked at herself, abandoning the work on her desk. When Tessa, her sister, had called about fifteen minutes ago, Janey almost hadn’t answered.

  Now her sister had been injected with something, five hundred miles away, and there was nothing Janey could do about it.

  Except call Sean.

  She jabbed at the screen to get to his name, her fingers shaking. She needed an airplane ticket to Nantucket. She needed to pack. She needed to call her daughter and make sure the cats got fed.

  Thoughts streamed from one side of her mind to the other as Sean’s line rang. “Janey,” he said. “What—”

  “They have Tessa,” she practically yelled. “Bobbie and Riggs Friedman. She called me, and I was listening to the whole call, and Bobbie injected her with something.”

  “Whoa, what?” Sean said. “Slow down. Start at the beginning.”

  “There’s no time to start at the beginning,” Janey said. “You need to call the cops and get to the cottage. Bobbie and Riggs took Tessa!”

  “Took her where, Janey?”

  She paced in her office, trying to find the memories. She had such a good memory. Why couldn’t she think?

  You can’t just be injecting people with things.

  “Riggs told Bobbie she couldn’t inject people with things,” Janey said. “Tessa’s speech was slurred at the end. She gave her something to make her pass out.” She walked toward the window, forcing herself to go slow. To think.

  “She told Riggs to ‘get her next door.’ They must be taking her to their house.”

  “That doesn’t seem smart,” Sean said.

  “They know I’m not there.” Janey stared out the window, regret and guilt cutting through her that she’d left Tessa on Nantucket alone. Nothing bad was ever supposed to happen on Nantucket. It was a place of sunshine and tea parties. The best beaches in the world, and the Christmas Stroll, and pristine restaurants and high-end boutiques.

  It was quaint and charming. Lovely and scented with flowers.

  Janey had enjoyed her time there as a child, and then as an adult. No one enjoyed anything in their teen years, did they? She hadn’t, and Janey tried very hard not to reflect on that time of her life.

  “I’ll call the police,” Sean said. “How do you know all of this?”

  “She called me, and I heard everything. I recorded the conversation.”

  “I’ll get help out there.”

  “I’m getting a direct flight,” Janey said, hurrying back to her desk and her laptop. “I’ll text you the information.”

  “Okay.”

  They both paused, and Janey looked up from her screen. “Sean,” she said. “Thank you.”

  “Of course,” he said.

  “Don’t go there,” she said suddenly. “I know I just said you needed to get there, but the Friedmans are obviously dangerous.”

  “What was Tessa doing?” he asked.

  “Call the police first,” Janey said. “I’ll call you back.”

  “I have them on the other line,” he said. “My secretary called. Give me a second.” His end of the line went silent, and Janey started clicking on her laptop. Three minutes later, she’d found the earliest flight from New Jersey to Nantucket, and she had two hours to get to the airport and be at her gate.

  She put the phone on speaker and picked up the carryon she hadn’t fully unpacked yet.

  “They’re on their way,” Sean said, and Janey gave an audible sigh of relief.

  “Thank you,” she said. “My flight is in two hours. I’ll be on the island in three.”

  “I’m on my way out to the Point,” he said. “I’ll keep in touch.”

  “Text or call me with everything,” she said. “Please, Sean.”

  “I will,” he promised, and the call ended.

  Janey sighed, because she hadn’t left Nantucket on the best of terms. Not with Tessa. Not with Sean.

  She didn’t want her last words to her sister to be “I’ll figure it out.”

  Tessa had said, “I don’t want to go next door with them.” She’d asked for help.

  That couldn’t be the end.

  Janey was going to help her, and she took a moment to press her eyes closed and pray. Please protect her until help arrives. Please.

  Bobbie had done something to make Tessa cry out in pain. She’d threatened her by saying she didn’t want anything to happen to the brand-new floors in the cottage. Bobbie had said Tessa had something she wanted.

  “What is it?” Janey asked, tossing in a pair of shorts without even looking at them. She added socks, a pair of sandals, and dashed into her bathroom to get a stick of deodorant.

  She seized in front of the mirror. “A trunk. Bobbie had said she would sit with Tessa next door while Riggs returned to the cottage to look for the trunk.”

  She blinked rapidly, her own dark eyes looking back at her. “And he said…”

  He’d said he didn’t think Lydia would keep stacks of hundreds in the trunk at the cottage.

  If not, then where?

  “Did we come across a trunk?” she asked herself. There had been a cedar chest, but they’d donated that to Good Will. There hadn’t been any money in it.

  “No time,” she whispered, and she hurried back into the bedroom. Tossing in the deodorant, she told herself she could buy anything else she needed on the island, and she zipped up the suitcase.

  She t
apped on her app to call a car, and then she texted Rachel that there was a major emergency on Nantucket, and she needed to return immediately.

  Her daughter called as Janey went out onto the front porch. “Mom, what’s going on?”

  “Aunt Tessa is in trouble,” Janey said, looking up and down the street for her cab. “I have to go back, and I know you’re off this weekend, and I’m so sorry.” She and Travis had gone to Atlantic City for the weekend to visit Cole and McKenna.

  “It’s fine,” Rachel said. “I’ll call Sydney. She’ll come take care of the cats.”

  “Thank you,” Janey said as a dark blue car rounded the corner. “I’m headed to the airport now, and I’ll keep you updated.”

  “Is she okay?” Rachel asked, her voice wavering. “Like, is she in the hospital? Was there an accident?”

  “I don’t know all the details yet,” Janey said. “I got a weird phone call where she said she needed help. Don’t worry, baby. I’ve got the police on their way, and I’m going right now.”

  “Okay,” Rachel said. “I’ll tell Cole. Should we call Uncle Ron?”

  “I will,” Janey said, towing her suitcase down the steps as the car came to a stop in front of the house. The driver got out, and Janey said, “I need to go. I love you so much. Tell Cole I love him.”

  “We love you too, Mom,” Rachel said. “You’re scaring me.”

  “I’m okay,” Janey said, though she wasn’t sure if she really was or not. She had no idea what the cottage on Nantucket held for her. What she’d find there scared her too. “I love you guys.”

  “Call me as soon as you know anything else,” Rachel said, and Janey let the driver take her suitcase. Her daughter was so good and so kind, with a big heart. She was simply afraid of becoming an adult, and she had no idea what she wanted to do with her life. Janey could relate, and she loved living with her daughter despite Rachel’s graduation from high school a couple of years ago.

  She slid into the back seat of the car and said, “I need to make a flight in less than a couple of hours. Can you hurry, please?”