by V. K. Sykes
“Are you in such an all-fired hurry that you can’t take time for a glass of lemonade, Deputy?” she called after him.
Micah smiled as he turned to face her. “Well, you do make the best lemonade in Maine, Daisy.”
She nodded and then trundled into the house, returning moments later with a tall, iced glass of lemonade. They sat together on her creaky porch swing and talked about the weather and the deer problem for ten minutes before Micah decided he’d better get moving.
After thanking Daisy for her hospitality, he got into his car and headed back down the semi-overgrown path to Island Road, braking when he heard a rattling roar approach from his right. About a second later, a familiar golf cart buzzed by on the main road.
Rocket Roy Mayo—at it again.
Micah heaved a sigh and bumped up onto the road, turning on the cruiser’s light bar. He flipped the siren on too, since Roy never bothered to look in his rearview mirror. Then again, he knew the siren might have no effect, since the old guy tended to shun his hearing aids, and the straining cart motor made as much noise as the average jetliner. Fortunately, about a hundred yards down the road, Roy figured it out and stomped on the brakes. The cart screeched to a stop and ended up with two wheels on the sloped grass verge.
Micah put on his hat and pulled his sunglasses down. He strolled up to the cart and bent down a little to look at Roy. “Hell, Roy, is Miss Annie dying? Because that’s the only good excuse I can think of for driving this thing like some idiot teenager.”
Miss Annie was Roy’s live-in girlfriend and the widowed matriarch of the Doyle clan. She and Roy seemed to have found a crotchety sort of happiness in each other’s company.
Roy peered up with startling blue eyes that made Micah think of the North Atlantic in winter. Tall and wiry, he looked at least ten years younger than his chronological age. “Well, there’s no excuse for harassing a ninety-year-old man either, Lancaster. Not when the only thing I could hit on this goat track is a deer, and the island would be a damn sight better off without both me and the varmint if I did.”
“Roy, I have it on good authority that you’re ninety-two. But never mind, because you could definitely pass for ninety.”
The old dude bared his teeth or, more accurately, his dentures. “Ha, ha. I’ve always said you’d make a better comedian than a cop, and you’re not even funny.”
Micah laughed. “Be that as it may, here’s the deal, Rocket Man. No more free rides. One more speeding offense and I’ll have to finally confiscate your keys.”
Roy gave him a pretty credible sneer. “Just try it, sonny, because I’ll sue your ass off. And you know what else? I’ll file an age discrimination complaint with the government too. Just watch me.”
Both of them knew the exchange was mostly in fun. Despite some locals griping about Roy’s driving habits, the old guy wasn’t much of a threat to life and limb. While Roy often drove the cart too fast, he remained an efficient driver who slowed to a crawl whenever he neared the school or the busy areas around the ferry dock.
“Nothing like a litigious old codger to ruin my day,” Micah said with an exaggerated sigh.
“There you go again. Ageism, plain and simple,” Roy retorted.
“Yeah, yeah. So, how’s Miss Annie?”
Roy shook his head, sending his wispy white hair flying around. “Right now she’s got her knickers in a twist over that Night Owl store they want to build. Says it’ll ruin the Jenkins sisters for sure.”
Micah’s mood went south just thinking about it.
“I figure most of our people should stay loyal,” Roy went on, “but the frigging tourists and day-trippers won’t give a damn what happens to Florence and Beatrice.”
By our people, Roy meant the island families who’d founded Seashell Bay and lived there for generations—the Doyles, Flynns, Mayos, Letelliers, Coolidges, and dozens more. Micah wasn’t sure he’d be included in Roy’s cut. While he’d lived on the island all his life, his parents had moved here shortly before he was born, barely a blip in time by local standards, and his mom was now gone, living in Arizona with her second husband. The only Lancaster in an island cemetery was his lobsterman father, dead more than twenty years. Micah planned on being the second someday—way in the future, he hoped.
Micah propped a foot up on the cart’s wheel well. “The Night Owl news had to be what sent Florence over the edge. When they applied for a building permit, it must have felt like a knockout punch.”
“Yeah, but Florence is tough. And, hey, I hear Holly’s on her way home now to help out.” Roy gave Micah a sly grin. “I don’t blame you for being sweet on that filly, Lancaster. Hell, if I was twenty years younger…”
Sweet on her.
That was one way to put it, though that old-fashioned expression hardly captured the way Micah felt about Holly. He wasn’t sure exactly when he started looking at her as more than simply a good friend he’d known all his life. Growing up, he’d always figured he’d never have a chance with the willowy, auburn-haired girl who had drawn boys like flies to honey. He wasn’t the smartest kid, and he wasn’t one of the athletes who got a lot of notice. With his size and strength, he always made the team but never in one of the star positions.
Basically, he’d never thought he was good enough for Holly Tyler, so he hadn’t even tried.
Later, she’d gone on to marry a hero—an army helicopter pilot—while Micah had become mired in an ultimately hopeless four-year relationship with another cop, which in retrospect should have been over in four weeks.
Micah snapped out of his brief reverie. “Holly got in half an hour ago,” he said.
Now why the hell did I say that?
“Ha!” Roy cackled. “You were waiting for her boat, huh? Hell, I can’t say as I blame you. That girl reminds me a little of Rita Hayworth. Not that a young buck like you would know who Rita was.”
“Famous movie actress and dancer in the forties and fifties. I’m not a complete moron,” Micah said. “Anyway, just go a little easy on the pedal, okay, Roy? And give my love to Miss Annie.”
Holly quickly unpacked a week’s worth of casual clothes. Her room was still a step back in time to her teen years, since her aunts refused to change anything. They wanted the old two-story clapboard house to always feel like home, even though she’d told them dozens of times to change whatever suited them. But if keeping the faded rosebud wallpaper and braided carpet made them happy, Holly was fine with that too.
The only significant changes since high school were the curtains and the counterpane, the eye-searing pink shades of her teen years giving way to the earth tones she’d later picked out herself. But the old furniture remained the same. The four-poster bed with its well-scuffed corners and its matching side table still faced the large window with its amazing view of the bay. The chest of drawers—a gorgeous oak antique—had come from her parents’ bedroom. That old dresser had been handed down in her mother’s family since the late nineteenth century. Mom had told Holly many times that she wanted her to have it after she was gone and, hopefully, pass it on to her own children. She’d thought about moving the historic piece to Boston but figured it somehow belonged in Seashell Bay, in the place her mother had loved so much.
The top of the dresser was bare except for a pink jewelry box where she kept a few pieces for her island visits, and a photo of Drew in a pewter frame. Her husband was posed in front of their Boston town house with his classic 1956 Harley, his proud grin as bright as the bike’s polished chrome. She’d captured the image on his thirtieth birthday, less than a year before the Taliban shot down his Black Hawk in Afghanistan, killing him and every single soldier he was transporting on a rescue mission.
She had the same picture in a larger frame in Boston, and also a few casual shots of the two of them on the island. There were no pictures of her husband in uniform, even though a few of her friends thought that was kind of strange. But Holly hated looking at him in his army gear. While she would always be proud of his service
to his country, she didn’t want the daily reminder. She didn’t need pictures, because the memories of his ultimate sacrifice were lodged deep inside, in blood and bone. Some days the pain was as real as it was four years ago.
And that wasn’t the way she wanted to remember him.
She picked up the photo and kissed it for what had to be the millionth time.
Turning away from the heartbreaking image, she forced herself to focus on the present. Job one right now was getting the store in shape, which meant getting her aunts to agree to her ideas. Holly desperately wanted them to let her inject some actual cash into renovations too. She could afford it, while her aunts didn’t have a dime to spare.
The old gals had always refused her previous offers of help, but things were different now. The doomsday clock was ticking, thanks to Night Owl. Now it was a matter of how quickly they could transform the general store into a business that would survive and prosper, instead of fading away to nothing more than a few photos preserved in the archives of Seashell Bay’s historical society.
Holly knew she could do it if they’d let her. After all, saving businesses was basically what she did for a living.
The first thing she had to do was make a brutally honest assessment of the current state of affairs. She knew the store was in pretty rough shape, but until she got her eyes on the place—and especially on its financials—she wouldn’t know the true depth or urgency of the problem.
She quickly ditched her city clothes in favor of a yellow tank top, black yoga pants, and yellow Keds—her bee outfit, according to her aunts—and then headed across the narrow gravel path leading to the back of the store. As anxious as she was to get to work, she stopped to gaze for the first time in a year across the sparkling little bay and the strait that separated Seashell Bay from Long Island. The glittering waters looked as placid as a lake in the afternoon sun, and in the distance, she could just make out the gentle curve of Long Island’s popular South Beach. The view never failed to fill Holly with a mix of tranquility and wistfulness. There was no vista more familiar to her than this one, and yet nothing she’d seen anywhere else could move her like this little corner of the world she still called home.
As usual, she had to pull hard on the brass knob of the store’s weathered door to get the lock hardware to line up. She stepped into the storage area, making a mental note to upgrade the locks and the security system. Drew had once told her that cheap dead bolts like the ones at the store could be opened with a pick or a bump key in seconds, often leaving no trace of entry. That had given Holly nightmare visions of some scumbag slipping inside late at night when Florence was working alone in her little office behind the checkout counter.
With the increase in tourism and traffic to the island, it just didn’t pay to take chances.
The storage area looked as well organized as ever, with metal shelf units lining three out of four walls. Beer sales were the store’s bread and butter, so there were always plenty of cases of both local and imported beers on hand. But other goods were kept to a minimum supply of each product. Florence had always been efficient at keeping inventory, and thus costs, down. She knew what her customers wanted and when.
Holly pushed through the swinging door into the retail area. It looked exactly the same as it had last summer—and every year before that. Wooden shelf units of canned goods, chips, bread, cereal, and household necessities like soap and toilet paper occupied the center of the square store. Wine racks, a beer fridge, and a soda cooler took up most of the rear wall, along with souvenir T-shirt racks. There was a sad-looking old chiller with packaged meats and cheeses butting up against the seven-foot-high DVD shelf unit, its old discs crammed haphazardly within the limited space. The checkout counter had metal racks with stuff like candy, gum, lip balm, and batteries. A shorter counter behind the cash register held a two-burner coffeemaker with a storage cabinet and a small refrigerator underneath.
The modern cash register was only two years old and stood out like a sore thumb in the throwback shop. Holly had bought and presented the robust machine to her mystified aunts as an overdue replacement for the manual clunker they’d used for decades. She suspected that few of the new machine’s powerful capabilities were being utilized.
Most items for sale featured small green price stickers laboriously applied each day by Beatrice. Her aunts had plenty of time to create and apply the stickers, and would die before they used a modern scanner at the register. Besides, Florence always maintained that their customers liked their old-fashioned ways.
Repressing a sigh, Holly pushed up the hinged section of the counter and passed through into the cramped office. She’d always reluctantly taken her aunts’ word for the state of the store’s finances. But those days were over now. She was no longer willing to back off in the face of Florence’s unconvincing reassurances that the store was doing quite all right. Holly knew she would feel like a jerk for snooping, but it was the only way she could learn the truth and develop a plan.
Unfortunately, Florence was still in the Stone Age when it came to keeping records. Holly had bought her a laptop three years ago and some books on systems and software, but her aunt had eventually confessed that she wouldn’t trust the store’s records to some darn machine. Most of the accounts were still kept in bound ledgers, accompanied by folders full of printed receipts. Holly had no intention of wading through that mass of detail today. Everything she needed to know would be in their Portland accountant’s profit and loss statements and balance sheets. Those documents would tell her if she was dealing with a sick patient or a critical one.
Or worse yet, the store could already be effectively DOA. The mere thought of the last possibility made her stomach do a sickening flip.
She dragged the old office chair over to the ancient four-drawer filing cabinet by Florence’s desk. Opening the second drawer, she scanned a jammed row of buff file folders. Holly pulled out the one containing last year’s reports from the CPA and started reading.
Fifteen minutes and two files later, she had a nauseating understanding of the Godzilla-sized disaster that currently loomed over her aunts.
Home for an hour or so until he had to head to Lily’s for dinner, Micah had just popped open a beer and started to check the mail he’d picked up at the post office, when his cell phone rang.
His secretary always set calls to be forwarded to his cell at the end of the day. “Deputy Lancaster,” he answered.
“Jesus, Micah, somebody broke into my house!”
“Fitz?” Micah recognized the young woman’s voice, though it sounded half an octave higher than usual.
“Yeah, it’s me. Sorry, I’m pretty freaked out right now.”
“Okay, but slow down and tell me what happened.”
He heard her suck in a deep breath.
“I got home from work, like, five minutes ago. My foot’s been driving me crazy all afternoon, so I went to take one of my prescription painkillers and damned if the bottle was gone. That freaked the crap out of me, because I knew I’d left it on the bathroom vanity this morning.”
Fitz was a bright and responsible woman. As far as Micah was concerned, her word was gold. “I’ll be there in three minutes. Leave everything exactly as it is.”
“Okay. Thanks, Micah.”
His mind racing, Micah grabbed his hat, locked his door, and hurried out to the cruiser that was parked in his driveway. Unless Enid Fitzsimmons had suddenly gone loopy, it looked like a real crime had just been committed in Seashell Bay.
Micah made a tight turn onto a semi-overgrown path leading to a ramshackle cottage set back a couple of hundred feet from Yellow Grass Road. Fitz’s place was in one of the island’s least desirable locations. The homes on this winding, north-end lane offered no views of anything other than rather scrubby landscape. While most of them were at least well maintained, a few were serious candidates for demolition. Fitz, a young marine mechanic at O’Hanlon’s Boatyard, had told him she bought the old Cavanagh place for pocket c
hange in an estate sale. Since then, she’d been working hard to fix it up herself. She hadn’t done much with the exterior yet, instead focusing on making the interior habitable after years of neglect by the previous owners.
Still wearing her grease-stained work coveralls, the young woman pushed open her screen door as Micah got out of the cruiser. “Can you believe this, Micah? Who the hell would rob this dump?” She swept her left hand around in a dramatic gesture.
Micah had to admit that Fitz had a point. It would take a pretty desperate—or stupid—thief to hit on a place that could only be described as modest.
“I know this sucks, Fitz, but I need you to focus,” he said as she waved him to come in. “You can start by telling me if the doors were locked.”
He put the odds of that at about 10 percent.
Fitz rolled her big green eyes. Red-haired and heavily freckled, she was cute rather than pretty, but with her sunny personality and dynamite little body, she never lacked admirers. Micah didn’t date much but had asked Fitz out not long after she arrived from somewhere out west. They’d had one date—dinner at a Vietnamese restaurant in Portland—but nothing had sparked, at least not for him. Then again, no one had been able to ignite any true heat in him for years—no one other than Holly Tyler.
“Like I’d bother,” she scoffed. “How many people on this island lock their damn doors? Hell, one of the reasons I came here was because it was supposed to be ultrasafe. Micah, this is crazy.”
“No point in checking for signs of forced entry then,” he said pointedly.
“Smart-ass,” she grumped.
Micah scanned the small, neatly furnished living room. Nothing seemed out of place, as far as he could tell. “Take me through what you’ve found. What’s missing?”
Fitz slipped past him, taking quick strides down the center hall. Micah followed.
She swung left into a bathroom that was tiny but had been completely redone. There was a new tub and shower combo, a small new vanity with a stone countertop, and updated light fixtures. The walls had been painted sunflower yellow, and fluffy blue towels hung on a rack by the tub.