by Lisa Harris
“Probably not.” Ian wrapped his hands around his mug again, even though it was empty now, tapping the side with one finger. “I don’t like it. If you say this guy was dead—“
“He was. I know dead. This guy was gone.”
“Then keep at it. He was in your house for a reason. I’m not saying you should be scared, but I’m saying you need to follow this up and figure it out if you can.”
“I’m not sure if that makes me feel better or worse.”
“Check in with your old firm, see if anyone’s been asking about you. And maybe at your place in Tampa? And what about your fiance?”
“Ex-fiance,” she answered, feeling the familiar tightening around her heart. It wasn’t sadness exactly. More like disappointment.
“Oh. I’m sorry,” he apologized, his expression troubled.
“It’s okay. It was just one of those things. He couldn’t handle the substance abuse issue, him being a resident on the rise and all. Didn’t want it to mar his reputation.”
Sour distaste crinkled Ian’s deep-set, slate-grey eyes. “He just abandoned you?”
“Oh,” she said, sighing resignedly, “I think we abandoned each other long before what happened in that courtroom. I was lying about how I was managing my anxiety and taking pills and the rest. And he was too busy to get to the bottom of why, or invest in helping me overcome it. It wasn’t meant to be.”
“Sounds like a lucky escape if you ask me.”
She chuckled softly. “That’s what my dad said,” she replied, then yawned, quickly throwing a hand up to cover it.
“You’re exhausted,” Ian said, then checked his watch, an old classic, not a smartwatch, with a simple black leather strap. “It’s only seven forty-five, though.”
She wrinkled her nose. “No sleep last night. Burglar, remember? Dead body?”
He clicked his tongue. “Right,” he said, then nodded at the half-full plate in front of her. “I can wrap that up for you. You should head home, try to get some rest.”
“That’s probably a good idea.” The thought of crawling into bed sounded like heaven.
“And, Quinn, use your alarm, okay? Cody was right about that.” There was an urgency in his tone that made it clear this was more than a suggestion.
“I will.”
“But forget what he said about there being nothing more you can do. You should keep looking,” he encouraged her. “See if you can find anything that might make him take you more seriously.”
“I will. Thanks for listening. And for believing me.”
“Thanks for trusting me with your story.”
A sudden bit of daring seized her. “You know, something tells me that I’m not the only one with a story.”
He had risen from his chair and reached for her plate, but at her words he paused, leaving him positioned much closer to Quinn than before. A charge surged in the space between them as he seemed to consider her comment, but his face remained stoic. For a few seconds she thought that maybe she had presumed too much—perhaps stumbled into forbidden territory. But then his countenance cracked into a subtle but roguish smile, and he snatched the plate up, stepped back and waltzed off without another word.
Chapter Thirteen
Ian’s words of support were still ringing in Quinn’s ears when she pulled into her driveway at eight o’clock. She turned the engine off and sat in silence, staring at the door in front of her.
It’s just a door.
Of course, it had just been a door the night before, when she walked in and found a corpse on the floor.
She hadn’t anticipated feeling jumpy about going in alone tonight. Ian offered to follow her back and even check the house to make her feel better. But truly believing at the time that she would be fine, she declined.
Now she was second-guessing that decision.
Gathering her gumption and the doggie bag Ian prepared, she slid out of the truck and heard her name being called. Annalise Sardis, the renter of Number Five Bello Breakers, was standing in the drive of the yellow house, waving wildly.
“Quinn? Oh, Quinn! Have you got a second?”
The brunette woman was in her early fifties, and faring well with the passing years, although Quinn suspected she had countered the natural aging process with more than one visit to a plastic surgeon. She and her husband had made a killing in the cosmetics industry, then sold the business which bore their name, “Sardis Skincare.” Now they spent most of their days vacationing in a variety of places they owned and rented, favoring warmth and the water from what Annalise told Quinn.
“Hi, Annalise,” Quinn replied, mentally steeling herself as she crossed the cobblestone circle to where the woman stood by her Mercedes SUV. The Sardises were the opposite of the Garbers. Annalise and her husband were difficult, high-maintenance tenants, delivering nonsensical complaints by call or text almost every other day about some aspect of the property. The complaints included ridiculous grievances from “it’s too sunny in the sun room” to “the woman staying in Number One walks past our house each morning around nine, interrupting our coffee time.” Quinn expected this conversation would be no different.
“Everything all right?” Quinn asked.
“Well, no, Quinn, it’s not. What happened last night?” Annalise’s voice was sharp and demanding, her hands on her hips. “We were terrified! The police were banging on our door and asking us all kinds of questions—‘Have we seen anyone in the area? Did we see anyone leave your house? Have we noticed anything strange? It just went on and on—”
“I’m sorry about that Annalise. I had a break-in. I was pretty unsettled by it all too.”
“They said you thought there was a body,” she said, abruptly switching to a hushed tone, “but that they didn’t find one.” She accentuated each of these last words, locking eyes with Quinn, her gaze begging for details.
Quinn’s center hardened. “Did Shane…Deputy Cody tell you that?”
“I don’t know which one it was. And then at the farmers market today the people at the honey stand were talking about it. Said you’d seen a corpse but when the police got there, it was gone.”
Figures. There was an outdoor farmers and arts market on The Green every Saturday. The couple who ran the honey stand was notorious for spreading gossip about anyone and anything. Unfortunately, they had known Quinn since she was a girl and were well aware of her antics.
They probably ate this new information up like…well…honey, Quinn thought. “Uh, huh,” she answered abruptly, refusing to bite on Annalise’s bait.
“People were, um, saying that maybe…you’d…” Her sentence trailed off, one eyebrow rising hopefully.
Quinn’s eyes narrowed. “Maybe I’d what?”
“That, you know, maybe you’d…imagined it.”
Something snapped inside as Quinn’s eyebrows shot toward the sky, along with her pitch. “Imagined a corpse on my floor? As in I saw something that wasn’t there?” Quinn didn’t care that Annalise was a client. She didn’t care that there was another month left on their contract. Ire rose in her spirit like bitter bile and she stiffened. “That is ridiculous! You realize how ridiculous that sounds, right?”
“Well, I don’t—” Annalise sputtered.
“That is cruel, unwarranted gossip and I don’t appreciate it at all.”
“Well, I’m not trying to be cruel—”
“Yes, my house was broken into last night, and yes, there was a body on the floor. And though you might not believe me, and this town might not believe me, I know what I saw and I am not going to give up until someone takes me seriously!” Quinn’s chest heaved as she finished, her nerves blazing. Annalise’s eyes were the size of yogurt lids, brimming equally with shock and offense.
“I…I…” Annalise stammered before recovering herself. “I was not being cruel,” she said indignantly. “I was only trying to find out if you were all right.”
“Mm-hmm. Well, I’m fine. Thank you for your concern,” Quinn said, and leaving t
he woman slack-jawed, turned and marched to her own back door.
Fuming, Quinn jammed her key in the lock, ready to be inside and out of Annalise’s view, when she noticed a vase of flowers tucked beside the large urn to the left of the door.
“What in the world?” she said, and holding the doggie bag in one hand, lifted the arrangement of white roses, baby’s breath, and blue hydrangea blooms with the other. Her name and address were scribbled on the attached envelope. Juggling both loads, she opened the door.
A wailing alarm immediately pierced her eardrums.
“Shoot!” Quinn bellowed. Racing to the alarm panel in the foyer, she set the flowers down and punched in the security code at the same time her cell phone rang.
It was the alarm monitoring company, calling in response to the triggered alarm. After assuring them all was well, she tossed the doggie bag in the fridge, and dropped onto a barstool, rubbing her hands over her face, her heart pounding. It had been so long since she used the alarm, she had unintentionally set it to go off immediately without any delay for deactivating it. She coughed as her heart uncomfortably skipped one beat, then another in the wake of the adrenaline rush. She breathed deeply from her belly, willing her pulse to slow.
As she vowed to set the alarm properly the next morning, her gaze fell across the flowers on the floor of the foyer. She retrieved them, grabbed the envelope and slid a finger beneath the flap, pulling the card out just enough to read the words, Quinn, I still love you. Please—
Embers of the anger smoldering after her altercation with Annalise flared as she jammed the card back inside the envelope. “You have got to be kidding me,” she said caustically as she stomped to the trash can, dropped the arrangement in and slammed the lid shut.
After months of silence he has the nerve to make contact by sending flowers?
When she left Tampa, Simon had made it very, very clear he wanted nothing to do with her. Had he decided it was a mistake to let her go? Had he finally grasped what he had lost by not even trying to make it work? If so, he couldn’t have chosen a more passive way to test the waters before taking a risk.
“Coward,” Quinn grumbled, sparing one last loathsome glare for the few petals poking out from under the lid before turning away.
As her steps pounded toward the porch, it occurred to her that, actually, the gutless gesture made complete sense. Simon never had been one to stick his neck out. What’s more, it showed just how little he understood her—to think that she would welcome this token attempt, or that it might open things back up between them.
The perfect ending to this day.
Flinging the French doors open with a gusto that sent them banging into the wall, she moved outside, the fresh air off the Gulf filling her lungs as she breathed in and out, then expelled a huge sigh. As she calmed down, her mind cleared, and eventually she felt a twinge of guilt.
I shouldn’t have gotten so upset with Annalise.
Simon might have deserved her wrath, but Annalise hadn’t. Not that she had been justified in prying the way she had, but unloading like that on the unsuspecting woman had been wrong. Annalise had simply been the pin that burst the balloon of all of Quinn’s pent-up frustration over the events of the last twenty-four hours.
Once again, my short fuse gets me into trouble.
She would apologize first thing in the morning. Not only because it was the right thing to do, but also because they could lose a client over it. The last thing she needed was for Annalise to call the office and demand to speak to the owner—her dad. One, she didn’t want her parents learning about the break-in that way and two, complaints like that were not going to boost her parents’ fragile confidence in her, and she really needed them to believe in her right now.
The way that Ian believes in me.
Even in her own mind, the thought came off sounding a little bit needy. Sense told her she was grabbing onto this particular rope way too soon. But in her defense, at the moment it was the only one being thrown to her. If she wanted others to believe her—if she wanted Shane to believe her—she would need evidence. She would need to keep looking for something to support her story, as Ian suggested. Which was exactly what she was going to do.
Starting with the room where the body had been.
Chapter Fourteen
Every light in the kitchen and living room was on. With a flashlight in hand, Quinn’s eyes raked over every surface, every corner, every nook and cranny, looking for anything that hinted something untoward happened there. She had already given it a once-over herself after the deputies left, even getting on her hands and knees to look along the cabinet baseboards and beneath furniture without any luck, but now it was time to dig deeper.
She walked the floor in a grid, shining the light ahead of her steps, looking for a mark, a smear, a foreign hair…but after pacing it twice, she still came up empty. She ran her hands over the cabinets and side tables in the living room not far from where the body had lain, checking for gashes or chipped wood, or maybe a speck of blood where his head might have struck a surface, ultimately sending him to the floor. Still nothing.
She felt along the countertops, swept the floor, looked in the shell-shaped urn she used as an umbrella stand in case something had fallen in it, even combed through the stack of mail on the counter—for what reason, she wasn’t sure, other than it was somewhere else to look.
As a last resort, Quinn got down on the kitchen floor and lay flat on her stomach. Moving slowly, she spun in a circle on her belly, again shining the flashlight under everything—the refrigerator, the cabinets, the island, the sideboard chest—
Wait.
On the wall opposite the kitchen island, about six feet from where the body had lain, was a wooden sideboard chest painted a deep aquamarine. It was divided in half by two swinging doors and stretched almost all the way to the floor, where stubby, bulbous feet raised its base about an inch off the tile.
The gleam of the flashlight had illuminated something beneath the cabinet that was pressed up against its right rear foot. After hurriedly slipping on a dishwashing glove, Quinn moved around to the side of the chest, crouched down on the floor and shoved her hand under, her fingers scrabbling against the foot.
Yes!
Yanking her arm out, she sat up, revealing a plastic, cream-colored shirt button clutched in her fingers. Exactly the kind one might find on a men’s button-down shirt.
And there it was. Proof she wasn’t imagining things. That she hadn’t made it up. Because three days ago she moved that cabinet away from the wall to paint. She had moved it to the other side of the room, swept the spot and even vacuumed to remove any possibility of dust or debris marring the new paint job. She had only just put the cabinet back on the afternoon of the break-in. So the button had to have ended up under it sometime after that. And she knew it hadn’t come from her, because nothing she had worn in the last several days had this kind of button. The fact that it matched the color of the tile almost perfectly explained why neither she nor the deputies saw it during earlier searches.
Excitement coursed through Quinn, her nerve-endings tingling with the anticipation of sharing this discovery. But the person filling her mind’s eye wasn’t Deputy Shane Cody.
It was Ian Wolfe.
Her nervous system did a one-eighty. A wash of apprehension flooded her as she thought of the handsome man at The Shed and his caring, determined expression as he listened to her, his strong hands wrapped around that mug, and the sincere concern in his tone when he insisted she use her alarm.
Oh, no.
Sitting on the cold tile, holding the button that was her only hope, Quinn realized that despite her best efforts to keep her distance from people and her resolution to swear off men for the foreseeable future, Ian Wolfe had managed to push past those self-imposed boundaries.
And she had absolutely no idea what to do about it.
Chapter Fifteen
Quinn had never found it easy to sit still for long. It was one reason sh
e loved the kayak so much. You could paddle along or drift but you were always in motion, always headed somewhere. The steady current was dependable, forever working for you, never leaving you in the same stagnant place.
So it wasn’t surprising she found it difficult to sit in a chair or pew or whatever for an extended length of time. This Sunday morning’s service was proving no different, especially given last night’s discovery and the way her mind was whirring with possibilities.
The sanctuary of Hope Community Church was bright and airy, with tall, stained-glass windows running down both sides. The coastal sun was bursting this morning, streaming in and splashing rainbows of color across the stark-white walls. The building had existed for decades, like something you would see on a postcard—complete with a cedar-shingled steeple atop a belfry pointing toward the heavens, contrasted by the white-washed exterior and wide front steps leading to towering double oak doors.
As usual, Quinn had taken her spot in the very back row. Across the aisle and a dozen rows up she could see Lena and her children, her friend listening intently to what Pastor James was sharing. Oddly enough his words coincided with yesterday’s devotion, which Quinn hadn’t gotten around to reading until this morning, after first calling Annalise to offer an apology the woman only half-heartedly accepted. The passage talked about how, once we’ve confessed something and repented, we’ve been forgiven and we shouldn’t hold on to our guilt and keep revisiting it. Now Pastor James was asking a related question: how do you define yourself? It wasn’t a question Quinn liked to ask. Lots of words like failure, liar, broken, disappointment, and loser came to mind. It wasn’t a pleasant rumination for her. Even though she knew that wasn’t how God defined her, it was sometimes hard to accept that He saw her as His child—forgiven, restored. So, before she knew it, she had let her mind drift like her kayak in the current of the Cove Springs River, carrying her along to last night at The Little Red Shed with its cozy string lights and jazz melodies…and Ian Wolfe.