The Widow

by Carla Neggers

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean-”

  “Doyle,” Owen said, “nobody wanted the boys to see those pictures. I’ve had the image of my sister burned into my brain for twenty-five years-of Chris for seven years. I’d have done anything to keep Sean and Ian from having to see that. We all would have.”

  All the air seemed to go out of the chief of police. He swore under his breath, but quickly pulled himself together, pointing a finger at Abigail. “You need to remember what your role here is and what it isn’t. Understood?” He didn’t wait for an answer. “Knock out all the walls in this whole damn house, Abigail. Paint. Decorate. If we learn anything about the phone calls and the pictures, we’ll let you know.”

  Abigail gave him a cheeky smile. “Lou told me the same thing.”

  Doyle managed a grudging smile back at her. “Smart guy, that Lou.”

  Doyle climbed into his car, the window down, mosquitoes thick in the cool, salt-tinged air. Owen had followed his friend outside and could feel Doyle’s frustration and resentment-his powerlessness. “Let me know if you want me to talk to the boys about what happened.”

  “Some days, I swear-” Doyle shoved the key into the ignition with more force than was necessary. “I swear Katie and I should just pack up the boys and get off this damn rock. I should find another line of work.”

  “Your work didn’t cause what happened today.”

  “I’m not talking about today.”

  Owen knew he wasn’t. “You’re a small-town cop, Doyle. You’re good at what you do. You enjoy it. You just never thought you’d have to investigate the murder of your best friend.”

  “You’d think after seven years…”

  “What, that we’d all have forgotten? I’d think after seven years we’d be itchy and irritated that Chris’s murder was still unsolved, and worried that other people might be at risk.”

  Doyle gripped the wheel, shaking his head. “We’re never going to find the killer. That’s the truth, Owen. Abigail knows it. She’s trying to create leads where there are none. For all we know, she planted those pictures herself. She’s been collecting her own stash of evidence for years. She’s-” He eased off the wheel and turned the key in the ignition, starting the engine. “I’ve said too much.”

  “Forget it.”

  But Doyle looked at him through the open window. “She’s not going to tell you anything she doesn’t want to tell you. She’s got a tight lid on herself. Never mind those dark eyes, Owen, my friend.”

  He smiled with feigned innocence. “What dark eyes?”

  When he returned to Abigail’s kitchen, she had dumped lobster bisque into an ancient saucepan and had it simmering on the stove. “Big confession,” she said. “I’ve never cooked my own lobster. Then again, I’ve never claimed to be a real Mainer. I just have a house here.” She peered into the saucepan. “I think there’s enough butter in there to give us six heart attacks apiece.”

  Owen stood behind her and peered over her shoulder as she stirred the bisque with a wooden spoon. “I can’t remember the first time I was in this house. I must have been a toddler. Not much has changed. Chris’s grandfather used to heat up chowder in this same pan.”

  “I wish I’d had a chance to know him better. He died nine months after Chris and I met.”

  “He was a great guy. Salt of the earth. I used to come over here all the time before my sister drowned. After that-” He eased his arms around her waist, wanting to feel her warmth as much as to provide some kind of reassurance for her. “It wasn’t easy for my family to be here.”

  “But you came back.”

  “After I was on my own, yes. Chris was off to school by then. I’d come over here and sit on the back porch with his grandfather, and he’d tell me stories about lobstering and living out here. He was laconic-it took some doing to get him going. Once he did, he was mesmerizing.”

  “That’s what I remember about him. Chris was like that, too. He didn’t tell me everything.” She stared at the pinkish bisque, the smell of lobster, butter and sherry filling the air as the pot heated. “I think he believed there’d be time for all that. Time to fill in the gaps. Tell me his secrets.”

  Her matter-of-fact tone only added to the intensity of her words. Owen kept his arms around her. She sank her weight into him. He tried to picture all the horrific images that were seared into her brain, not only of her husband’s bloodied body on the rocks, but of other murder scenes, other grieving loved ones.

  “The police will talk to Ellis Cooper and anyone up at his house,” Abigail said. “Anyone who might have been out here today and seen something.”

  “If the pictures were Mattie’s doing, people wouldn’t necessarily notice him. He’s a fixture around here. Part of the landscape.”

  She nodded. “Fair point. They’ll interview Jason and Grace, too. Not great timing for her, but right now, as far as we know, no crime’s been committed.”

  She continued to speak in that same deliberate, calm tone. Owen could feel the heat of her skin under his hands and suspected that, underneath that cool exterior, Abigail Browning was churning.

  “Mattie took those pictures, Owen,” she said.

  “I know.”

  “I’m just not convinced he’s the one who left them here.”

  Owen tightened his arms around her. “You don’t trust any of us, do you?”

  She slid out of his embrace without answering and got bowls down from a cupboard. He noticed the pull of her shirt against her skin. She’d taken off her purple bandanna and cleaned up, but she’d still managed to get plaster dust in her dark curls.

  She let the bisque simmer until it was heated through but not boiling.

  “Abigail, I want you to trust me.”

  She turned the heat off under the saucepan, keeping her back to him. “I’ve been fighting for answers on my own for a long time.”

  “We should have done more to help you. All of us.”

  She ripped open a drawer and pulled out a dented soup ladle. “I tell myself that everyone wanted to give me the space to get on with my life. And you had your own grief. You all knew Chris longer than I did.”

  “We weren’t married to him,” Owen said, making a face. “Hell.”

  She gave him a small smile. “Fair enough. I have got on with my life, but-I want to find his killer. I want answers. I know I probably should have sold this place that first year after Chris’s death, but-” She shrugged. “I didn’t.”

  “The pictures.” He sighed. “They’re tough to look at.”

  “If we’d gone to Ellis’s party that day…” She shook her head, making it almost a shudder. “We were invited, but we didn’t go.”

  “You were on your honeymoon.”

  “When I saw those pictures, I felt the breeze off the water and smelled the salt and the roses in the air as I went into the back room and got my head bashed in. It all came back.” She switched the heat off under the pan. “Was that what it was like for you, seeing the photo of your sister?”

  He nodded.

  “At least I was an adult when Chris was killed. Twenty-five.” She kept her tone even as she dipped the ladle into the bisque. “You were a little kid when your sister drowned. I can’t imagine. Or maybe I can, somewhat. When you’ve lost someone close to you that young, that tragically-people treat you differently. It’s like all of a sudden there’s a circle around you that people have to step into before they get close to you. Where before there was no circle.”

  “Abigail, don’t-”

  She swore, dropping the ladle, and spun around at him, into him. His mouth found hers, and if he was tentative, she wasn’t. She took his hand and placed it on her breast, and he found her nipple with his thumb, even as their kiss deepened. Her urgency fired his own. She lifted his shirt, and he felt her fingers cool on his back, inside his belt.

  But he felt her tears, dripping onto his cheek, hot, and pulled back, his heart breaking for her. “Abigail-I’m sorry.”

  “It’
s not you.”

  He knew it wasn’t. But he was sorry, anyway, and didn’t know how to explain it even to himself.

  Without a word, she fled from the kitchen.

  Owen stared at the simmering bisque. What the hell was wrong with him? Why not carry her upstairs and make love to her? He wouldn’t be taking advantage of her. It was what she wanted as much as he did.

  He walked into the front room and stood in the doorway of the torn-apart back room where she’d been attacked so long ago. “Bisque’s going to get cold.”

  She kicked at the debris on her floor. “I don’t know what the hell I was thinking, making this mess. I should get Bob and Scoop up here.” She smiled over her shoulder at Owen. Self-deprecating. Tears dried. “Have you met Bob and Scoop?”

  “Cops?”

  She nodded. “My upstairs neighbors.” She gestured to her pile of debris. “They’d be like Doyle and want me to stay out of trouble, to keep knocking out walls. Well, maybe I will. I’ll head to the hardware store in the morning and order some wallboard. Buy a new hammer.”

  As if she wasn’t going to think about the call, the articles, the pictures. Mattie Young. As if she would just switch off her cop mind, her sense of obligation to her murdered husband.

  Owen kept his expression neutral. “Sounds like a plan.”

  She blew out a breath and angled a look at him. “I was this close-” she held up two fingers, a quarter inch apart “-to throwing you over my shoulder and carrying you upstairs. You know that?”

  He laughed. “It would have been a fight, then, for who carried whom.”

  “Nah. I’d have let you win.”

  But when she hooked her arm into his and walked him back into the kitchen, Owen realized what had just happened.

  Abigail wanted to make love to him.

  But not here, he thought. Not in the same house where she’d spent her short-lived honeymoon.

  “Owen…”

  “It was a very nice kiss, Abigail. We’re not just distractions for each other. We both know that much now, don’t we? But let’s leave it at that.”

  He could see the relief wash over her.

  After their lobster bisque, he walked back to his house and started a fire in the woodstove to take the chill out of the air, to hear the crackle of a fire and feel its warmth and coziness. DidAbigail worry about staying in her house alone tonight? He reasoned she was a police officer, and a widow, and she’d spent more nights alone than not.

  Once he got the fire going, he walked outside, the stars and the moon guiding him out to the far end of the point, waves crashing on three sides of him.

  He looked back toward the old foundation of his family’s original house and saw a solitary silhouette.

  Abigail.

  No way was she out there contemplating life. She was checking to make sure Mattie Young hadn’t returned to his party spot.

  Owen gave a loud whistle and waved to her.

  She waved back.

  But he thought he heard her call him a jackass, presumably for startling her but who knew-who cared? It made him laugh, which, he decided, was a good way to end such a day.

  CHAPTER 19

  Abigail woke before dawn and drove out to Cadillac Mountain and up the twisting access road to its pink granite summit. She jumped out of her car, the wind brisk at almost sixteen hundred feet, the sky awash in the lavenders, pinks and oranges of the Maine sunrise.

  Below her, ocean, bay and islands came into view, and she could hear murmurs of pleasure from other early risers. She emptied her mind as she walked along the well-traveled granite trails, enjoying her surroundings and the feel of the crisp mountain air. But thoughts of last night crept in. Lou Beeler had stopped by her house before heading home. Mattie had declined to tell the state police anything, either, and denied all knowledge of the pictures or how they’d ended up on Owen’s and Abigail’s doorsteps.

  On Lou’s way out, Mattie asked him to demand Abigail stay away from him.

  She had sensed the senior detective’s frustration-and his misgivings. The calls could have come from a faraway crank with nothing better to do. The pictures were another story. They’d come from someone on the island. Lou admitted he’d never seen any of the shots taken at Ellis’s party, nor the one of her and Owen at the murder scene.

  He definitely had never seen the shot of Dorothy Garrison’s body.

  That picture, even more than the others, clearly troubled the older detective.

  Abigail had dreamed about the drowned teenager. She’d awakened with a start, unable to breathe. She’d been a little kid getting ready to move to Boston twenty-five years ago, but the scene she’d created in her nightmare of the Brownings, the Coopers and the Garrisons on the dock that awful day was so vivid, so real, that she might have been there herself.

  Why leave such a photograph for Owen? To get under his skin?

  Why?

  On her way back from Cadillac, Abigail stopped at a popular roadside restaurant on impulse and took herself out to breakfast. Wild blueberry pancakes, pure maple syrup, bacon, far too much coffee. She was wired on caffeine and sugar by the time she turned onto her shared driveway.

  She parked at her house, debating how she’d tackle Mattie Young today. Unless ordered to do so, she had no intention of staying away from him-and Lou had all but given her the green light to get under his skin a little more. Get out of him whatever it was he knew and wasn’t telling.

  She thought of the cash in the envelope. Did it mean anything? Had to. Mattie wasn’t one for saving his money.

  As she climbed out of her car, she noticed a robin perched on a high branch of the spruce tree at the corner of her driveway. Why couldn’t she sit on her porch and watch the birds?

  “You could,” she said aloud. “You absolutely could.”

  No one would blame her if she did.

  The spruce branches rustled in a strong breeze off the water. The robin fluttered off.

  Abigail unlocked her front door, immediately feeling the fresh breeze off the water blowing through the house. She’d left the windows open all night. It’d gotten chilly, but she didn’t care. She wanted to get rid of the last of the paint fumes, any mustiness, anything that would slow her down and clog her mind.

  In the entry, she remembered that she’d left the porch door open, too.

  Not much point locking the front door and leaving the back door unlocked, but she hadn’t given it a second’s thought before heading up to Cadillac.

  With no pockets in her lightweight hiking pants, she dropped her keys on the stepladder, still set up in the entry, and headed to the back room. She could see specks of plaster dust suspended in the sunlit air.

  The smell of the room was off. Different.

  Sweat.

  She heard a sound behind her, in the short hall leading from the back room to the cellar door and kitchen. But even as she reacted, the blow came to the outside of her right thigh. She went with it, didn’t fight it, putting out her arms as she dropped forward, allowing them to absorb the force of her fall. She hit hard, the rough floorboards scraping her left forearm, then rolled instantly to her feet.

  But no one was there.

  She heard her front door bang open and shut.

  Damn it.

  Her thigh ached, stinging, slowing her pace as she grabbed a crowbar and charged through the front room. She realized whatever she’d been struck with had managed to rip through her pants and bloody her. It wasn’t her sledgehammer. A knife? Hell, had she been stabbed?

  She reached the front door, tore it open.

  No one. Nothing.

  She turned to get her car keys off the stepladder, but they were gone. She shot outside, hobbling as fast as possible down the steps and out to her car.

  No one was there, either.

  She shuddered at the pain in her thigh and felt warm blood oozing down her leg. She’d never catch up with her intruder, even if he was on foot.

  Mattie.

  That was
his sweat she’d smelled.

  “Damn.” Abigail gulped in a breath and cupped a hand over her injured leg. “Damn, damn, damn.”

  What killed her wasn’t that she’d been caught off guard or that she’d been cut. She’d had no reason to suspect anyone was in the house until it was too late. And if her assailant had sliced at her again, she’d have tackled him.

  No, she thought. What killed her was having to explain her stolen car keys to Owen Garrison, Doyle Alden, Lou Beeler, the FBI agents in town, Bob, Scoop, her father and whoever the hell else would find out about them.

  Owen had worked with enough victims of accidents, violence and disaster to recognize those who found their sudden vulnerability more difficult to deal with than the pain of their injuries.

  Abigail was one who hated her vulnerability. Hated having to ask for help.

  She leaned over his stainless-steel sink with her sweater on the floor in a heap as she stuck her scraped arm under cold running water. Despite her bloodied leg, she’d staggered across the rocks from her house, burst in from his deck and gone for his phone, not explaining, just calling Lou Beeler, then Doyle Alden. She hadn’t bothered with 911.

  She told Beeler she was at Owen’s house because the phone line at hers had been cut, presumably before she’d arrived back from her trip up Cadillac Mountain.

  Owen sat on a tall stool at the counter. He’d gotten out his first-aid kit. He tapped its plastic box. “You’re welcome to help yourself to whatever you need.”

  “I don’t need anything. Thanks.” She glanced back at him, her color slightly improved since she’d called in the law and got the cold water running on her arm. “I didn’t even know anyone was in the house until I had a drywall saw slicing through my pants leg.”

  “How do you know it was a drywall saw?”

  “Because he dropped it in the entry on his mad dash out. I’m never going to live that one down.”

  “You’re positive it was Mattie?”

  “I am. Enough to question him, if not convict him. Assuming we can find him. He must have taken off on his bike. If my damn leg…” She scowled and turned back to the sink. “And my car keys. I could have followed him in my car.”