She was right. Will’s home was in the middle of a neighborhood, complete with nosy Evelyn Triskell only three houses down. “You were attacked to send me a message.” He’d been rattling cages, asking questions, while Anahera was a local come home and should’ve been safe. It made more sense than a serial killer suddenly changing the way he stalked and attacked his victims.
Anahera closed her hand over the forearm he had across her chest. “I was attacked because this person is a coward. Don’t let them mess with your head, cop.”
Will forced himself to unclench his jaw. “I know the cabin meant a lot to you,” he said, “but did you lose anything else important?”
“Both my laptops and my passport,” she told him. “But I can get the passport replaced, and my work’s all backed up in the cloud so I’m fine there.” Her hand rose to her throat, to the pounamu carving he’d never seen her without. “This is safe.” Strong fingers curving around the greenstone, her body finally softening slightly into his. “I still have photos of my mother, all backed up in triplicate, including a set on Josie’s computer. That’s the most important thing.”
“Good.” Will wondered at his chances of getting a fire investigator out here. With no fatalities and the only casualty an old cabin with what would be considered suspect wiring, it was probably highly unlikely—but Will had been on the force a long time. He’d see if he could call in another favor.
“You were burned in a fire.” Anahera’s back stayed pressed against his chest, her eyes on the cabin. “This must remind you of it.”
Will’s instincts recoiled against the memories, but he shook his head. “No, because you weren’t inside.” He could’ve stopped at that, but he gave her the whole ugly truth. “The rapist husband killed his wife and child by setting their supposed safe house on fire.”
“You tried to save them.”
“The bastard had doused the entire place in kerosene. It went up like paper. Part of a wall fell on me.” Breaking nothing, just searing his skin and trapping him in place until smoke inhalation took him under.
He’d survived because the firefighters he’d called before going into the house had hauled him out. “The pathologist later confirmed both bodies were found in their beds. I like to imagine they never woke, were never afraid, that the smoke got them before the flames.” But he’d never know for sure.
Sometimes, he had nightmares where he imagined three-year-old Alfie screaming and screaming as his flesh melted off.
Anahera shifted to his side, then slipped her arm around his waist, hugging him tight. “Then,” she said, “using fire to get at you isn’t a coincidence, is it?”
Yes, it was cunning and vicious both. “I want to point the finger at Kyle. He’s vindictive enough to do something like this—but he isn’t the only person I’ve pissed off recently.” Just because Kyle Baker was a psychopath didn’t mean he was also a firestarter.
“What about Vincent?”
“He strikes me as too controlled.” Everything and everyone in its place, including his wife and his mistress. Both marionettes Vincent had manipulated to get them to dance to his tune.
“I suppose you’re right.” Anahera didn’t look away from the cabin, but her tone said she was thinking of something else. “It’s just… I remember, when we were teenagers, it was always Vincent who started the bonfires. He was just so good at it. We used to joke that he must have a Boy Scout badge for starting fires.”
The hairs prickled on the back of Will’s neck. “Did he ever start fires outside of the bonfires?”
“Not that I know of,” Anahera admitted. “We were all brought up to be very careful with fire, what with the risk of forest fires in summer. The only place we felt safe to have a bonfire was on the beach. And Nikau, Daniel, even me, we were all into it just as much as Vincent.”
Her fingers clenched on the back of his jacket. “Truth is, I don’t really have any reason to suspect Vincent. It’s just that I don’t like him much now that I’ve spoken to Jemima.”
People began to rustle behind them as the flames started to stutter and die one by one.
The spectacle was over.
“I get the feeling he went shopping for a wife,” Anahera added. “Jemima has the right pedigree, the right kind of beauty, even the right kind of personality—she’s never going to leave Vincent, no matter what he does.”
“Do you think she’d assist him if he decided to get rid of an inconvenient woman?” Because—and assuming the baby had been Vincent’s—that was what Miriama would’ve become in his eyes the instant she fell pregnant.
“I don’t know, but if he did it and Jemima knows, she won’t tell. She loves him too much to ever turn him in.”
“It could work the other way, too,” Will said softly. “Jemima getting rid of the competition.”
Sucking in a breath, Anahera said, “I get the feeling she’s too passive… but Jemima also loves Vincent. Desperately.”
Her words hung in a disturbing pocket of silence.
Up ahead, the firefighters were smothering the last embers. It helped that the cabin had been wet from the rain, and though it had blazed hotly for a short period, there hadn’t been enough fuel for it to keep going once the place was drenched with firefighting foam. Now it sat there, a crumbled ruin frothing with white.
57
Anahera didn’t sleep that night and, come dawn, she left Will’s bed without waking him. It had taken painstaking care, but he needed his sleep after the long drive the previous day and the hours he’d spent at the site where the cabin had once stood—writing everything up and making calls that had woken more than one person.
One of those calls had led eventually to a fire investigator. The other man had agreed to come to Golden Cove today, see if he could confirm their suspicions of arson.
Anahera needed to say good-bye to her home first, needed to say good-bye to her mother.
Throat thick and body reclad in the same clothes she’d worn the day before, she pulled on her boots and walked out of the house. She made no attempt to take the police SUV—a walk would do her good. Fog rolled around her ankles and a cool morning wind whispered across her cheeks as she strode along the road heading to the beach.
The small stops she made left her hand wet and color in her grasp.
When she heard an engine behind her, she glanced back—and wished she hadn’t.
Jason Rawiri brought his truck to a stop next to her. “Heard about the cabin,” he said, his jaw grizzled gray but his hair black. “I’m driving out to see.”
The invitation was unspoken.
Anahera wanted nothing from him, but neither could she allow him to go there alone, not after what he’d done. Ignoring the passenger-side door, she hauled herself up onto the bed of the truck and sat with her back to her father as he drove on through the fog.
Thankfully, it was a relatively short drive.
Jumping off the instant they arrived, Anahera walked to the ruins of the small home where her mother had been happiest. She didn’t attempt to go into the debris—if there was anything for the arson investigator to find, she didn’t want to contaminate the evidence. Anahera didn’t need to enter to see that it was all gone.
Burned down right to the foundations.
Gone with it was the last place in this world where Anahera had felt the echo of her mother’s footsteps. There was no grave; Haeata had told Anahera she wanted to be cremated when she died, her ashes scattered into the ocean.
Anahera had followed her mother’s wishes.
She placed the wildflowers she’d picked beside one corner of the foundations. Then, filling her lungs, she sang a waiata—singing in the tongue of her people again for the first time since she’d found her mother’s body… and cracking the hard, scarred shell that encased her soul. And because she knew her mother was in a better place, she sang it not as a lament but as full of piercing hope even as her eyes burned and her che
st ached.
Only after the last echoes had faded from the air did she turn and meet the eyes of the man who had abused her mother until even Haeata’s gentle and warm spirit couldn’t take it. “I want nothing to do with you,” she said calmly in Māori. “I have no forgiveness in my heart for you and I never will. Forget you ever had a daughter.”
He was old now, her father. So many lines on his face, so many cracked veins from his drinking days, his bones pushing up against the sinewy brown of his skin. He’d been bigger before, with a thick neck and thicker arms, a physically strong man who’d yelled for his dinner, yelled for Anahera to shut up, yelled for his wife to bring him a beer or he’d give her a busted lip. Now he was smaller, grayer, more pathetic, but Anahera would never forget what he’d been.
“Your mother wouldn’t have wanted this,” he said.
“No, you don’t get to bring her up. You lost all rights to her the first time you beat her, the first time you kicked her, the first time you made her less than a person.” She saw him flinch at her unvarnished words, but she wasn’t about to hold back.
He’d never held back his fists or his kicks or his words. “You’re the reason she was living alone in this cabin so far from town. Even if you didn’t push her, you’re the reason she lay at the bottom of the ladder for three long days before I found her.”
Anahera had been studying then; she shouldn’t even have been back in Golden Cove that day, but, homesick, she’d decided to surprise her mother. As always when she first stepped through the door, a part of her had been braced to discover that her father had finally beaten her mother to death.
What she’d found had been far worse.
Haeata crumpled at the bottom of a fallen ladder, the glass front of a framed picture of her and Anahera smashed on the ground beside her, and her dried blood a dark stain against the wood.
All those dreams of happiness gone. Just like that.
Later, the authorities had told her that her mother’s heart had given out, but they hadn’t been able to meet her eyes when she asked if it had been before the fall or after. They’d wanted her to believe Haeata had died quickly and without suffering, but it was equally possible that she’d lain there too hurt to summon help but conscious and in pain.
Her mother’s heart hadn’t always been weak. It had been destroyed by stress, by fear, by the constant anguish of living with a man who treated her worse than he would a stray kurī. “I’d like it if you got off my property.” She didn’t take her eyes off him. “And don’t come back or I’ll have you charged with trespassing.”
A twisting flash on her father’s face, his hand fisting by his side.
“Yes,” she said softly in English, “leopards never do change their spots.”
Angry red rising under the darkness of his skin, Jason jumped back behind the wheel of his truck and reversed out of the drive in a grinding screech of rubber against stone.
Only after she was certain he was gone did Anahera turn back to the ruins and allow her tears to fall. Those tears were for her mother, for all the dreams that Haeata hadn’t been able to realize, for all the pain she’d suffered in her forty-one years of life. And for all the dazzling hopes she’d had for her daughter.
“Auē, aroha mai, māmā, aroha mai,” Anahera said, the words of apology a rasp and the smell of burned wood in her throat. “I’m so sorry I came so close to giving up on life. I promise you I won’t do it again. I’ll fly again, get out of this damn town.” Rubbing away her tears, she went to the cliff edge and watched wave after wave crash onto the sand in a natural symphony as haunting as those she’d heard in the great performance chambers of Europe.
At the sound of footsteps on gravel, she turned expecting Will. He might’ve been out cold when she left, but she knew he wasn’t a man who slept much. But it wasn’t Will walking toward her. “Vincent,” she said, trying not to think about those bonfires on the beach and how eagerly he’d crouched by the kindling. “What are you doing here?” At the same time, she realized she hadn’t heard the sound of a vehicle.
“Decided to get in a run before a set of virtual meetings.”
His clothes seemed to bear that out: running pants in black that hugged his legs and a fitted long-sleeved dark gray hoodie with black stripes down the sides, his hands gloved against the cold. Mud coated his shoes and splattered his running pants halfway up his calves.
“Took the bush track down from my place,” he said, catching her glance. “I heard about the cabin, wanted to see how bad it was.” He pushed back the hood to reveal the golden strands of his hair, his tawny eyes returning to her after a quick look at the ruins. “I’m sorry. I know how much it meant to you.”
“I’m just glad I wasn’t in it at the time.” Using the excuse of turning to regard the damage, Anahera took several steps away from the edge of the cliff. Paranoia or not, she felt a hell of a lot safer now that she wasn’t anywhere near an edge over which she could be pushed. “Do you remember that summer when my mum and I moved in and we all had a picnic in the yard?”
Vincent angled his head slightly, his breath fogging the air. “I wasn’t here, remember?”
Frowning, Anahera thought back, the past unraveling in a string of faded Polaroids. “No,” she said slowly. “You weren’t. I guess I’m so used to thinking of you as part of my childhood that I put you into memories where you weren’t actually present.” He’d been one of her closest friends for so many years, before life splintered them into shards going in different directions.
Before they all made choices.
Vincent’s smile was that guileless, sweet one that made her heart ache. “It’s funny,” he said. “I do that, too. We had some good times, didn’t we?”
Anahera nodded, far enough away from the edge that she felt comfortable talking with him. “Too bad we couldn’t stay children,” she murmured. “But then, I never much liked being a child.” Playing with her friends had been one thing, but the helplessness of her size had eaten away at her. All she’d wanted was to get bigger so she could physically fight her father when he began to beat on her mother.
“Neither did I.” Vincent’s smile faded. “Always had to listen to my parents telling me who I was supposed to become, the man I was supposed to be.” He flexed and closed his hands by his sides. “Sometimes, I felt like a prize poodle, being trained and given pats on the head when I behaved properly.”
It was odd, Anahera thought, how thoroughly he’d stifled his anger as a child and teenager; they’d felt sorry for Vincent but he’d seemed fine going along with his parents’ demands. “Your parents took tiger parenting to the next level,” she said aloud. “But you’ve found your own way, reached for your own dreams.” That wasn’t quite true, but she wasn’t heartless enough to point out that he was still following the blueprint the senior Bakers had drawn up for his life.
“I loved her, you know.” A soft confession by a handsome golden-haired man gilded in the morning light. “She was the first thing I loved in all my life that was mine. That no one had trained me to love, trained me to like.”
Anahera stilled. “You’re not talking about Jemima, are you?”
“Don’t pretend, Anahera,” he said, dropping his head. “You’re sleeping with that cop. I’m pretty sure he’s told you.”
Anahera didn’t say anything, waiting, watching.
58
“Miriama was the most beautiful woman I had ever seen,” Vincent murmured, his eyes on the ocean in the distance. “Like a dancer even when she was standing still. I wanted to wrap her up and freeze her in time so that nothing would ever hurt or destroy or taint her. At the same time, I wanted to take her to every glorious corner of the earth and show the world that she was mine.” A rough exhale. “I booked us a surprise trip to Venice. It was to be this month.”
“I think she must’ve loved you, too.” Anahera didn’t have to lie to speak those words. “For her to break the rules by which she’d been raised. I remember how she and Ma
tilda always went to church on a Sunday, rain or shine.” Matilda in her best matching long skirt and top, Miriama in her white church dress with a ribbon in her hair.
Vincent held her eyes, his own welling with pain. “She resisted at first, but I kept on pursuing her, kept on courting her.” A faint smile. “That’s such an old-fashioned word, isn’t it? But that’s what I did with her. Because she was like that. Had to be treated with care.”
Vincent, Anahera saw, had put Miriama on a pedestal. And she’d walked away from him. Had the rejection pushed him over the edge, caused him to seethe until he lashed out and destroyed the very thing he professed to love? Men did that. Anahera’s knowledge was born of a thousand dark memories of screams, of the sound of a fist hitting flesh, of guttural, drunken swearing that turned a person into a thing.
“Did you hurt her?” she asked because the question was a ticking bomb between them.
Vincent’s smile turned lopsided. “Thank God you asked—it’s so stupid to just ignore it, isn’t it? No, I didn’t hurt my Miriama.” He swallowed, his throat moving. “If I was going to murder anyone, it’d be Jemima.”
The flatness of his tone had Anahera very grateful she’d put distance between them. “You don’t mean that,” she said, thinking of Jemima’s recent joy and the Vincent the other woman must’ve seen in comparison to the one standing here now. “She’s deeply in love with you.”
“I didn’t say I would.” Another smile, as if they were talking about the weather or old memories. “I’m just saying it would make more sense. Jemima’s the trap, while Miriama was my freedom. With her, I could be the man I would’ve been if my parents hadn’t decided to mold me into their image of a perfect son. If only Miriama had been patient a little longer, I would’ve made it happen.”
With every breath she took, she inhaled the memory of fire until it seemed to be in her hair, her skin, her mouth. And she remembered another fire. The one that had ended with two dead people and Vincent finally free of his parents. “Were you thinking of divorcing Jemima and marrying Miriama?” she asked, playing along with his delusion that he’d been willing to walk away from his perfect life for a girl with the wrong pedigree to fit that illusion.
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