A Madness of Sunshine

by Singh, Nalini

  “Thanks, Hamish.” Before hanging up, Will found himself saying, “You should come to Golden Cove this summer. I’ll borrow a boat and we’ll go fishing and have that beer.”

  “You’re on,” was the enthusiastic response. “I should probably mention that I hate fish. You’ll have to eat them all.”

  Hanging up afterward, Will stared at the windows awash with rain. He’d made an effort to sound normal for Hamish, but the man who’d once grabbed an ­after-­work beer with the lawyer was long gone. This ­Will… This Will wasn’t so sure who he was anymore. But he knew how to do his job.

  He turned back to his desk, and ran a deeper search on all the tourists whose names Glenda had forwarded. All came back clean. Most had been international visitors who’d long ago returned to their countries of origin; the small group of New Zealanders had no criminal records among them.

  He then began to make his way through the stack of memory cards he’d taken from the café.

  It was only when he looked up after going through all of them that he realized it was dark outside. Going to the doorway, he pulled it open and looked over to the fire station, the rain hitting his face as it slanted in under the eaves.

  No lights. No vehicles parked out front.

  Hardly a ­surprise—­the rain was crashing down. He took care of a few other matters, then made sure his phone was fully charged and shrugged back into his ­high-­viz jacket for the drive to Anahera’s.

  This rain was made to cause emergencies and he needed to be ready to respond. Most Golden Cove residents would call him rather than the official emergency line. At the last minute, he went back and picked up the watch and tin. The station did have a safe, but he wasn’t comfortable leaving the items here before he’d had a chance to examine them.

  He put the memory cards not in the main safe but in the hidden gun safe; there was nothing suspicious on them, but it was Miriama’s work and deserved to be protected.

  Once in his car, his hair damp again and his jacket gleaming with transparent droplets, he drove past the clinic to make sure Dominic de Souza wasn’t still just sitting inside, shocked and lost. Seeing the place was dark, he swung by the ­two-­bedroom house the doctor rented from Daniel May. It wasn’t far from the surgery.

  The single light in the kitchen showcased Dominic at the table, head slumped on his arms. Will frowned. The other man didn’t look in good shape. He was about to get out and knock on the door, make sure depression wasn’t getting the best of Dominic, when another person moved into the frame.

  It was the pastor. The ­gray-­haired man was holding a mug of something, and a plate of what looked like toast. He put both in front of Domi­nic, then placed his wrinkled hand on the doctor’s shoulder and squeezed. When Dominic raised his head at last, the older man sat down next to him, seemed to be talking intently. After a while, the doctor nodded and picked up a piece of toast to take a small bite.

  Satisfied Dominic was under careful watch, Will turned his vehicle toward Anahera’s place. He thought about picking up something for dinner and taking it along with him, but it looked like everyone had shut up shop early because of the weather. Well, he had half a loaf of bread in his fridge at home. He and Dominic would be having the same meal tonight.

  As he drove through the dark and deserted streets, he could see the May estate in the ­distance—­lit up against the night. He wondered if Daniel had returned home from his meetings or if it was Keira up there alone. Just then, he glimpsed red taillights through the trees, as if a car was climbing up toward the estate. Someone from Golden Cove? Or had Daniel come into town to attend the gathering at the fire station, and was now driving home to his wife?

  No way to tell from here, the rain diminishing even the limited visibility he normally had of the road up to the estate.

  The tourism center, he was happy to see, was also shut up. Glenda lived literally behind it, but he swung around anyway to make sure she was safe. She came to the window and waved when his headlights cut across her front window, well used to his patrols by now. Will flashed his headlights at her in a silent response, carried on. He had to check up on a number of others, elderly and vulnerable individuals who might’ve been forgotten in the tidal wave of worry over Miriama.

  All of them proved to be snug inside their homes.

  As he drove on, he tried not to think of Miriama out in the cold and wet. He was thinking he should go by Mrs. Keith’s, too, when he got a call. The signal was patchy, but he recognized Evelyn Triskell’s voice: “. . . ­Vincent… his car.”

  26

  “Evelyn, where are you?”

  It took him two minutes of conversation through crackling static to work out that Evelyn was somewhere on the road out of town. Telling her to stay put, he did a U-­turn and headed that way. A car went past him in the opposite direction around the halfway point, but they passed on the turn and he couldn’t see much of the make and model through the heavy rain. It had been small, though, not a truck or an SUV.

  It was another ten minutes later that he caught the blurred rear lights of a car on the side of the ­road—­and it wasn’t Evelyn’s old Mini. It was Vincent’s silver Mercedes, a car the other man usually only drove for short trips and never in this kind of weather.

  Bringing his vehicle to a stop beside the crippled sedan and turning on his hazard lights as well as the blue and red flashers atop the roof and in his front grille, Will got out. Vincent’s car had smashed into the ditch, the front crumpled in. Not enough to have crushed the driver, but enough that the car would need a tow. More worried about Vincent than the car, Will blinked the rain out of his eyes and wrenched open the driver’s-­side door.

  Vincent looked at him, a streak of blood down one side of his forehead and a faint smile on his lips. “This is the last thing you need, isn’t it, Will?”

  “Where’s Evelyn?” Will yelled to be heard over the pounding rain that thundered on his head and dripped in rivulets down his face. The extremely low visibility made it difficult to see any markings on the road right in front of him, much less farther down the road; Evelyn’s smaller vehicle could be lying broken ten meters up and he’d never spot it.

  “Evelyn?” Vincent stared blankly at him for a second before shaking his head. “I sent her home. She was driving back in after running one of the hunters home, and she saw I’d spun off the road. Insisted on stopping to call you.”

  Will knew the chairwoman of the Golden Cove Business Council; a bulldog had nothing on her. “How could you possibly have convinced Evelyn to go home?” At least that explained the car Will had seen heading into ­town—­it had been the size of Evelyn’s compact.

  “Wayne.”

  Will should’ve thought of that ­himself—­Evelyn’s husband was in a wheelchair as a result of a stroke, and while he had good mobility around the home, he still relied on Evelyn for a lot. He was older than her by fifteen years at least and far more frail.

  If Will had realized Evelyn wasn’t home, he’d have checked on Wayne during his patrol. The Triskells lived on his street and he often lent them a hand if they needed physical help with something. Half the time, the request was a thin excuse for Evelyn to attempt to pump Will for scandalous details about her fellow Covers.

  “How seriously are you hurt?” He’d automatically grabbed a flashlight as he left his vehicle, now focused it on Vincent’s head wound.

  Blue and red flickered against the night around them, the police lights incongruously like neon flashes in a bar.

  “It doesn’t look too bad from here.” Will could see a little blood along Vincent’s hairline, but there was no sign of a gash.

  “It’s fine.” Vincent raised his hand to his forehead. “I’ll probably have a headache tomorrow, but that’s about it.”

  “We still need to get you in front of a doctor,” Will began.

  “Dominic de Souza isn’t in any condition to help anyone.” Vincent’s tone was tight. “And I don’t think you’re going to be driving me o
ut of Golden Cove for treatment. We’ll be in more danger from the weather than I am from this shallow cut.”

  The other man was right. With Dr. de Souza crushed by Miriama’s disappearance, and the town cut off by the heavy rain and rising winds, Vincent would have to wait until tomorrow to get any medical care. That was, if the rain let up. “Come on,” Will said, “I’ll run you home. Grab your stuff.”

  Vincent didn’t seem to be in any hurry, but Will had things to do. And as far as he could tell from Vincent’s speech and general mental responsiveness, it wasn’t the head injury that was slowing him down; Vincent just seemed oddly unmotivated. When the other man made no move to get the sports bag he had in the backseat, a bag most likely filled with outdoor gear he’d used during the search, Will opened the back door and grabbed it himself.

  Returning to the sedan after dumping the bag in his SUV, he turned off the car’s lights, then took the keys out of the ignition before leaning down to look into the other man’s face. “Look,” he said, his patience at an end, “you want to sit out here all night, fine. But I can’t sit with you and I can’t leave you here. So get off your ass. There are a lot of other people who might need me tonight.”

  Vincent blinked, as if becoming aware of his situation for the first time. Swearing under his breath, he got out into the rain. “Will the car be safe here?” he asked, blinking water away from his eyes. “I mean for people on the road.”

  Will had been thinking the same thing himself; he had accident alert beacons with him, but they’d be washed or blown away in this weather. And calling Peter at the garage to tow this would just put another man at risk from the worsening weather. “How’s your back?”

  “I haven’t got whiplash, nothing like that. The car slid very gracefully into the ditch.” Vincent raised his fingers to the cut on his head. “This is from me leaving a metal ­business-­card case on the dash. It flew up during the slide.”

  Trusting the other man’s analysis of his own injuries since he gave every appearance of being fully lucid, Will handed the keys back. “Put the car into neutral. Let’s see if we can push it farther into the ditch so it’s not half hanging on the side of the road.”

  The heavens seemed to open up even more as the two of them attempted the maneuver. The one good thing was that the rain made the land slippery. Peter Jacobs’s younger and far more hotheaded brother would probably bitch about the work involved in towing the sedan back out of the ditch, but they got it safely off the road and into the depression. No one should hit it unless they themselves went off the road.

  Drenched to the skin and with fingers like ice, the two of them finally got into the police vehicle. Vincent reached into the backseat for his sports bag, pulled out a towel. He offered it to Will. “This is the least you deserve after coming out to get me.”

  “No, that’s fine. Dry your forehead so we can check that cut. Head wounds aren’t something to just shrug off.” His headlights cut fleetingly across the wreck of Vincent’s Mercedes as he did a U-­turn; the Baker property was situated relatively close to town, off a long drive. “What the hell were you doing out here anyway?” Vincent’s car had been pointed away from Golden Cove and his home.

  “Just driving.” Vincent’s words were muffled by the towel, came out sounding oddly thick. “Trying to get my head on straight. Trying to understand how something like this could happen in Golden Cove.”

  Will shot the other man a look, but Vincent’s head was conveniently covered by the towel. So he waited to ask his next ­question—­it took a while, as if Vincent was deliberately attempting to wait him out. But the other man couldn’t keep on rubbing his hair forever without it becoming a noticeable point on its own.

  When he did finally lower the towel to push back the ­rain-­dark strands of his golden hair, Will made him check his wound in the mirror on the back of the ­passenger-­seat sunshade. Only after Vincent confirmed it was shallow, with no sign of bruising, did he say, “Do you know Miriama well?”

  “She’s the kind of person everybody knows. You can’t miss Miri.”

  “That doesn’t answer the question.”

  The other man sighed. “I like her,” he said at last. “She makes me think about being young and hopeful and going after your dreams.” A wistfulness that made it pretty obvious Vincent harbored a crush on Miriama.

  “You ever say any of that to her?” He chanced a quick glance at Vincent, to see him staring out the window, his classically handsome profile shadowed by the darkness outside.

  “I’m just a foolish married man who likes talking to a pretty girl, Will.” Vincent’s voice wasn’t aggressive but sad. “She’s so beautiful and so full of life. The idea that I might never again walk into the café and see her smile is a nightmare.”

  Will had put his eyes back on the road a split second after his ­glance—­he couldn’t afford to be distracted in this kind of weather. It frustrated him not to be able to see Vincent’s face, gauge his reactions. “Be honest with me,” he said. “Lies won’t help Miriama.”

  “What do you want to know?”

  “Did it ever go beyond talk with you and her?”

  “No. I wouldn’t do that to my wife.” A long inhale followed by an even longer exhale. “I love my wife. But Miriama has something inside her that I lost a long time ago and it makes me happy to flirt with her a little and fantasize. I’d never shame my family by crossing that line.”

  Had anyone asked Will a week ago about Vincent Baker, he would’ve said that Vincent was one of the most straight-­up men in town, honest to a fault despite his political ambitions. He was no longer so sure of that belief. There’d been so much want in Vincent’s voice when he spoke of Miriama, so ­much… Greed wasn’t the right word. It was softer than that. A desire almost to cherish.

  But, as Vincent had pointed out, he was a married man with two young children. And Miriama wasn’t the right kind of woman to be the wife of a future prime ­minister—­she was too wild to accept the strictures of a political life, too much a free spirit. Still, that kind of thing had never stopped a wealthy man from making a ­less-­than-­honorable offer to a beautiful younger woman. Was it possible Vincent had approached Miriama, been rebuffed, and decided to take what she didn’t want to give?

  The only problem was that scenario didn’t fit with what Will knew of ­Vincent—­but he wasn’t about to rule out anyone or anything at this point. As soon as the weather cleared, he planned to go into Christchurch to talk to jewelers about Miriama’s watch. Someone had given it to ­her—­and maybe, just maybe, it hadn’t been an out-­of-­towner.

  Vincent had that kind of money. So did Daniel May.

  And Christchurch was where Miriama had traveled to meet her mystery lover. It was possible she’d had a hand in designing the watch.

  “I’m going to make a stop,” he said to Vincent. “I need to check on Mrs. Keith.” She was older, might be in bed if he waited till after he’d dropped Vincent off.

  The other man said nothing in response to Will’s statement.

  Pulling up beside the small ­white-­painted house minutes later, Will jumped out and ran up the steps. He couldn’t see any lights, but he knocked nonetheless. Then he waited. He knew how long it took Mrs. Keith to get to the door.

  A light finally came on several minutes later; the door cracked open two minutes after that. “I knew it would be you.” A smile that made her wrinkles fold in on themselves, her makeup yet in place. “I’m all fine and snug in my house. And if it hasn’t fallen down in the past forty years, it’s not going to fall down tonight, either.”

  “Do you have everything you need?” Will knew the people in Golden Cove were ­self-­reliant, but Mrs. Keith wasn’t in the best health. “Emergency supplies just in case?”

  “Why are you asking this old dog if she knows all the tricks?” It was a chiding question. “I’m fine, honey.” She patted at the bouffant perfection of her hair, the color a pure, impossible black. “You get yourself to your o
wn house before you catch a chill.”

  Will waited until Mrs. Keith had shut her door and locked it before he ran back down to the flashing red and blue of his vehicle.

  Not long afterward, he turned into the long drive that led up to the Baker homestead. The electronic gate was wide open despite the stormy darkness, probably because Vincent’s family was waiting for him to come home.

  Will glanced at Vincent halfway up the drive. “I don’t want you driving until you’ve got clearance from a doctor. Make sure you show me that clearance before you get behind the wheel.” Stopping the car before they reached the house, he pulled out a Breathalyzer he had in a small case behind his seat. “You know what to do.”

  Vincent didn’t argue.

  “Reading’s clean.” Will hadn’t really expected anything else. He’d never seen Vincent ­drunk—­the other man only ever had one beer when he came to the pub.

  “I just slid on the road,” Vincent repeated as Will drove the rest of the way up the drive. “Misjudged how slick it was.” It almost sounded like he was practicing what he was going to say to his wife.

  Pushing open the ­passenger-­side door once the SUV had come to a standstill, Vincent looked over at Will. “Thank you. For doing everything you can to find her. She deserves that.” He shut the door on those words and walked up to his front door, in which a lovely blonde woman stood silhouetted by golden light.

  27

  Will wished he could see clearly through the rain that crashed against his ­windscreen—­he’d be very curious to see the look on Jemima Baker’s face. Because if something had gone on between Miriama and Vincent at any point, the wife had to know. That was something Will had learned on one of his first cases as a ­detective—­the wife almost always knew.