The Widow

by Carla Neggers

  He smiled, but she could see in his gray eyes that his mind was elsewhere. “Not necessarily.”

  “The rough rock’s probably a good exfoliator.” She paused, seeing the emotion behind his impassive face. “Owen-”

  “Why the picture of Doe?” he asked quietly.

  She understood his question. Of all the pieces they had of whatever was going on, the photo of his drowned sister was the one that jarred most, that didn’t seem to fit. “There has to be a reason. It’s not necessarily a logical reason.”

  “To us.”

  She nodded. “Exactly. This caller isn’t trying to help us find Chris’s killer.”

  “No, he’s not. But we have to be sure, Abigail.”

  “I’m sure. This creep is Chris’s killer.”

  Saying the words felt unreal to her. She tried to stand back from them emotionally and pretend she was a homicide detective working a case, not the victim’s widow, not a woman who’d lived with questions and doubts about how her husband had died for seven long years. But how could she pretend she wasn’t involved? With the strange voice fresh in her mind, with the photos, the cut on her leg, the memories of last night, objectivity was elusive.

  “Your caller knows something about Doe’s death,” Owen said, staring down at a deep tide pool among the rocks. “He’s talked a lot about secrets. Maybe he knows a secret about her.”

  “It’s possible. It’s also possible the picture of your sister could be a red herring designed to throw us off track, or just to upset you.”

  A muscle worked in his already tight jaw. He seemed to force himself to drink some of his coffee. “I want this bastard.”

  “I know. So do I.” Abigail’s voice sounded calmer than she felt. “This caller is daring and manipulative-maybe desperate, maybe at wit’s end. But it’s someone with a plan, even if it’s not a good plan. And if it is Chris’s killer, then it’s also someone who’s managed to go undetected for seven years, at least.”

  “Yes. At least.”

  She took a breath. “If you’re thinking your sister was pushed-”

  “I saw her go over the cliffs. She wasn’t pushed. She was upset-more upset than her fight with Grace would account for.” Owen looked up, squinting at a trio of seagulls flying out across the water from her house. “What if someone was in the woods that day? What if I didn’t make that up?”

  “Who?”

  He watched the seagulls land on a finger of rocks that jutted out into the water. “It couldn’t have been Will Browning or Chris-or Mattie. They were on the boat together.”

  “You’re sure Mattie was on the boat?” Abigail asked.

  “I was eleven. I’m not sure of anything.”

  Sean Alden’s age. She remembered his wide eyes yesterday, his fear, his desire to make sense of a situation he couldn’t understand. If she’d said there was a ghost in his father’s garage, he would have believed her.

  She asked Owen, “Did someone tell you there was no one in the woods?”

  “Everyone.”

  “Specifically, who?”

  Owen didn’t answer. He sipped his coffee and watched the seagulls. It was a bright, clear day, already warm. Finally, he said, “The Coopers. My parents. Polly. They were all there.”

  “But who told you no one was in the woods?”

  “I don’t remember.”

  “Did anyone take a look around?”

  He shook his head. “There was no time. We had to get to Doe.”

  Abigail didn’t even want to imagine that scene, the terror and grief and shock as they’d stood out on the stunning granite cliffs and realized fourteen-year-old Dorothy Garrison was in the water.

  “Understandable,” she said. “Do you remember in what order people arrived?”

  “My grandmother was the last to arrive. I remember that. The rest-” He shook his head, his emotions well in check. “I don’t know.”

  “If you remember Polly was the last to get there, you might be able to remember who was first.” Abigail took another swallow of coffee, the rock suddenly feeling very hard and rough under her feet. “I don’t know that it’ll make a difference. After everyone arrived on the cliffs, what happened? Had your sister’s body been removed-or did they see her-”

  “They watched Chris’s grandfather pull her out of the water into his boat.”

  “Then what?” Abigail asked, pressing him, resisting the tug of her own emotions.

  “We drove out to the harbor.”

  “How? Who were you with? Where were the cars?”

  “The cars were up at Ellis’s house. Jason Cooper and my father went to get them. The rest of us walked out to the road and met them there. I’m not sure I’d remember, but I saw an owl in a fir tree-it didn’t fly away. It perched on its branch and stared at me. My sister was into birds. I thought somehow…” He shrugged, tossing the last of his coffee out into the encroaching tide. “I thought the owl was trying to reassure me that whatever had happened, wherever she was, my sister was okay.”

  Abigail touched his arm. “I don’t know who put that picture on your doorstep or why, but it was an awful thing to do.”

  Owen turned to her. “If it helps find this killer, then it’s worth it.” He glanced out at the sparkling water. “I don’t need a picture to make me remember that day.”

  “No. I imagine not.”

  “When we finish up with Lou, I’m going up to Ellis’s house, then out to the cliffs. Maybe being there will jog my memory for any details I’ve buried all these years.”

  “I’ll go with you.”

  He managed a smile. “Somehow, I knew you would.”

  “Unless you’d rather go alone-”

  He shook his head. “No, I wouldn’t.”

  Abigail refused Lou Beeler’s suggestion that she put herself into protective custody. She was polite and appreciative of his concern, but adamant. “Not a chance, Lou,” she said, refilling his mug with fresh coffee.

  He didn’t give up. He’d perched himself on the bar stool Owen had vacated and had listened to her recap of the call, asking few questions. “At least let me post a trooper at your side.”

  “That’s the same thing.”

  “I don’t like this caller. I haven’t from the beginning.”

  “You said it was probably a crank.”

  “I did? Well, it still could be.” He blew on his steaming coffee. “Makes you not want to answer any more phones, doesn’t it?”

  “No, it makes me hope he’ll call again.”

  Lou didn’t comment.

  Once the state detective was finished with him, Owen had retreated to the shower, leaving Abigail to fend off Lou by herself. From the moment he’d walked in the door, it was obvious his anxiety about the situation had been ratcheted up a few notches.

  Not that she blamed him.

  She dumped out the last of her coffee into the sink. “Next time this bastard calls, I want to have enough caffeine in me so I can figure out a way to back him into a corner and nail him. I hate it when I get calls like that before I’ve had my morning coffee.”

  “I see you’re coping,” Lou said, just short of a grumble.

  “I want this guy, Lou. This caller is Chris’s killer. I know it is.”

  “Think he meant to give himself away?”

  “Yes. I think everything he’s done and said is intentional.” She looked at the older man across the granite-topped peninsula. “And we’re using ‘he’ in the rhetorical sense. It could be a woman.”

  “You have anyone in mind, Abigail? Any names you want to throw out there for consideration, just between us?”

  She shook her head, then said, “Not Mattie Young.”

  “Even with the pictures, the necklace, the attack on you, the blackmail?”

  “Even with.”

  Lou studied her a moment, nothing about him giving away what he was thinking or feeling.

  “Hell, Lou, you’re like a stone statue,” she said with some impatience. “You could be si
tting there thinking about blueberry pancakes for all I know. What’s on your mind?”

  “Nothing.” He picked up his mug but didn’t take a sip of the coffee. “Abigail-”

  “I know what you’re going to say. I’m not jumping to conclusions. I’m keeping an open mind.”

  “You’re not on this case. Think for a moment what you’d do if you were in my position. Your father’s the FBI director. Your deceased husband was an FBI agent. There are presently a couple of G-men in town sniffing into the secrets of a high-level State Department appointee.”

  “I know, Lou. It’s awkward.”

  “Awkward? It’s a damn tangled-up mess is what it is. And I haven’t even gotten to the Garrisons and their history, and Owen and his work. I caught up with Doyle last night. His wife’s got a big job ahead of her as director of this new field academy in Bar Harbor. Fast Rescue’s not an outfit for the fainthearted. Owen has ambitious plans. He doesn’t do anything by half measures-” Lou stopped suddenly, and Abigail realized she must have reddened or something, because he groaned. “Oh, hell. Damn it, Browning.”

  She cleared her throat. “Back to the pictures. Have your guys discovered any concrete evidence that Mattie shot them?”

  Lou seemed almost relieved that she’d redirected the subject to the investigation at hand. He shook his head. “Nothing so far. Apparently he did burn a bunch of negatives, but his files are just the disaster you’d expect them to be. Maybe worse.”

  “If he did take the pictures, he could have given them to someone, sold them. We don’t know if they’ve been in his sole possession all this time. He could have made copies and given them out to a half-dozen different people.”

  “Not likely. Someone would have come forward.”

  “But possible,” Abigail said. She didn’t wait for Lou to continue to speculate with her. “What about Linc Cooper?”

  “He’s home with his family. He should have told us what was going on, but now he has. The FBI was interested in what he had to say. What he did shouldn’t have an impact on Grace’s appointment. It’s just a whiff of scandal. But what she did herself-lying all these years about talking to Chris at her uncle’s, not saying anything about her brother-” Lou shrugged, not going on.

  Abigail finished for him. “That could be more than a whiff of scandal.” She pointed to his mug. “Finished?”

  “Yeah. Doyle makes lousy coffee. This was better.”

  “How’re the boys doing?”

  “They seem fine. They know Mattie. They’re not afraid of him, even if they should be.”

  She dumped out the last of his coffee and put all three mugs into the dishwasher, closing it up with a thud. “What about weapons? Did you find any guns in Mattie’s house?”

  “No.”

  “You’re not going to tell me what the murder weapon was, are you, Lou?” “I haven’t in seven years. I’m not today. You know I can’t.”

  Withholding that kind of detail was standard operating procedure, but Abigail persisted. “An automatic. There were shell casings. I didn’t know what they meant at the time-”

  “Abigail,” he warned.

  “It wasn’t a lucky shot that killed Chris. The killer knows how to shoot. He likes guns. If he threw the murder weapon into the ocean, then he got himself another just like it.” She walked around to Lou’s side of the peninsula. “That’s my guess, anyway.”

  The state detective ignored her completely. “What are you going to do now?”

  “Owen and I thought we’d walk up to Ellis’s.” She smiled with feigned innocence. “I have this thing for delphinium.”

  “Mattie.”

  Mattie stirred amid the thick evergreens that grew along the cliffs where Doe Garrison drowned, listening in case he’d conjured up the voice whispering his name.

  “Mattie Young.”

  A ghost?

  Chris’s ghost?

  He brushed pine needles off him and stood up under the low branches of the prickly balsam firs and spruces. He’d made his way down there before dawn, after a rough night up on the ledge. A state cruiser had purred along the private road just after he crossed it and disappeared into the forest. It wasn’t great timing on his part. It was luck. Pure damn luck.

  He heard the rustle of dead leaves and underbrush from his own movements, and he smelled the tang of salt in the air from the ocean just below him.

  It wasn’t Chris.

  Chris is dead. What the hell’s the matter with you?

  “I know you’re here, Mattie.”

  That voice.

  It wasn’t Abigail, or Owen. Doyle. The people he’d betrayed but who wouldn’t hurt him.

  It wasn’t any of them.

  A cold serenity came over him. He knew what was happening now. He shut his eyes a split second and pictured himself in the ice and snow of Acadia on a soundless, frigid winter afternoon. His winter photography was some of his finest. He liked the island best on the coldest, clearest, sharpest winter days.

  He’d trapped himself along the edge of thirty-foot rock cliffs.

  There was nowhere to run. Behind him was the ocean. Ahead of him, a killer.

  “Mattie.”

  He recognized the voice but refused to look to see if he was right.

  He’d had his chances, and now they were done. He had nothing more to do in this life.

  He would need a miracle to live out the hour.

  “Mattie, what are you doing?”

  I’m going to Chris.

  I’m going to one of the friends I betrayed.

  My best friend.

  And he turned to meet his killer.

  CHAPTER 30

  Abigail stopped at her house to shower, change clothes and clear her head. Owen had agreed to meet her on the steps up to Ellis’s. She needed a few minutes alone-a few minutes to think in the quiet rooms where the man she’d loved and married and lost had lived for most of his short life.

  If only the walls could speak, she thought, heading downstairs to the entry, her hair still damp from her shower. She’d pulled on jeans, her good running shoes, a camp shirt and her gun, a.40 caliber Glock. The niceties of jurisdictions and Maine ’s gun laws notwithstanding, she doubted Lou Beeler would object.

  She spotted Special Agents Ray Capozza and Mary Steele out on her doorstep and yanked open her front door. “What can I do for you?”

  “We thought we’d stop by and see how you’re doing,” Capozza said.

  “I’m fine. Just washed my hair. I didn’t blow-dry it-”

  Steele rolled her eyes. “It’s a courtesy call, Detective Browning. We wanted to let you know that Grace Cooper has withdrawn her name for the State Department job. No reason stated.”

  Capozza stared straight at Abigail, his gaze unwavering, hard-ass. She decided she liked him. “Lying to the police in a murder investigation could have something to do with it,” he said. “She told your husband at Ellis Cooper’s party-the day Agent Browning died-that her brother was down here on the water. She believed that was the case. If she’d told the investigators that fact seven years ago-” He shrugged. “Who knows?”

  Abigail opened the door wider. “I’m off to meet Owen Garrison in a minute, but would you two care to come inside?”

  Steele shook her head. “We have some loose ends we need to tie up.”

  “Let us know if we can be of any assistance,” Capozza said. Abigail believed his courtesy had nothing to do with who her father was. The guy just wanted to help. He winked at her. “See you around, Detective.”

  “Abigail,” she said.

  “Yeah.”

  She shut the door after the two federal agents left and headed for the back room, making sure the porch door was locked this time. She stood in the middle of the gutted room and heard the clatter of the tools, as if that summer afternoon so long ago were happening now. She remembered the hit on her head. The split second fear that she was going to die.

  And, later, seeing Chris. That awful expression. She reme
mbered the countless times she’d tried to describe it in her journals. He knew who’d smacked her on the head.

  Mattie.

  Probably, she thought. Almost certainly. But what had happened that day went beyond Mattie Young and his anger at Chris, his drinking, his sense of entitlement.

  When he’d gone up to Ellis’s house, Chris had asked about Linc, not because he believed the boy was responsible for the break-in, but because he wanted to make sure Linc was safe. That was all.

  “Things are happening on Mt. Desert.”

  Her caller. The killer. Why draw her up here? Why now?

  Abigail went into the kitchen and dug out her descriptions of the photos that had been left for her and Owen. She’d tried to be as precise as possible.

  She read through them, pictured each shot-the people in them, the angles, the shadows, the time of day. Lou would have experts looking at them. They’d have all the right equipment.

  Objectivity.

  She thought of the photo of her and Owen on the rocks. She could feel his arms around her, his breath on her as he’d kept her from running to her dead husband, and she could remember how much she’d hated him. It was a visceral reaction, natural. He was the one who’d found Chris. He was the one who’d first realized there was no hope for her husband.

  And he was the one who’d had to tell her.

  She put her notes away and headed outside, locking her front door behind her. She saw the fat robin back up on its branch and felt a surge of hope that she couldn’t describe or even understand.

  Halfway up the driveway, she veered off onto the path through the woods that led to the cliffs where Doe Garrison had drowned. Chris had taken her out there once, but this had never been one of her favorite spots. The transition from woods to cliffs and ocean was too abrupt-downright scary, as far as she was concerned. She wasn’t much on vertical drops unless there was a rail or a window.

  Owen, she knew, wouldn’t mind at all.

  One of the differences between them, she thought, picking up her pace.

  They’d assumed Mattie took the picture of Doe’s body on the dock, after his and the Brownings’ failed attempt to rescue her. But he was just seventeen then, a boy still himself.