In the Waning Light

by Loreth Anne White

  As lightning cracked out over the bay, he caught sight of a hooded figure in a glistening wet coat running along the fence above the small harbor, and ducking into a camper fitted onto a dark truck. A light went on inside the camper, but the blinds were drawn.

  Blake watched for a few moments longer. No one in their right mind would be out on a camping trip now. Had to be a traveler passing through.

  “Dad!” Noah’s voice came from the top of the stairs. “You coming to read to me, already? You promised!”

  Lucy bounded back up the stairs at the sound of his son’s voice.

  Blake hesitated, watching as a shadow moved behind the camper blinds. Lightning cracked again and thunder boomed, the sound rumbling like a giant off into the dark night. He wondered if that rig would even be there come morning, or if the occupants might decamp before paying. It didn’t matter. His priority right this minute was Noah. He’d learned this the hard way. Way too hard—and reading bedtime stories was one of the few real connections he had with his eight-year-old son at the moment.

  “Sure, kid,” he called up. “You better be all tucked in by the time I get up there!”

  The thumping of socked feet sounded on the upstairs landing, followed by a skittering of dog claws. Blake clicked off the lights downstairs. He’d check in the newcomers tomorrow, if the rig was still there.

  Once he was upstairs and had snugged back into pillows propped against the headboard, Noah cuddled under the covers next to him, Lucy lying like a heavy log on their feet, Blake cleared his throat theatrically, and began, “Once upon a time—”

  “Oh jeeze, that’s for babies, Dad. Read the proper story.”

  Blake smiled, just a little. It was rare to tease fun out of Noah. He began to read from their latest boys’ adventure series while outside lightning lashed over the bay and thunder growled. As he read, a part of Blake’s mind wondered again who was huddled outside in that camper, and if they would be there come dawn.

  Jonah snagged a fresh, white towel from the pile his housekeeper maintained daily. Naked, he made for the floor-to-ceiling sliding glass doors. Beyond the glass, the black surface of his infinity pool shimmered with pockmarks of rain. Mist obscured the ocean view, making eerie halos of lights on the opposite shore. He reached for the door handle.

  “What’re you doing?”

  He stilled, glanced over his shoulder. Jan Mascioni propped herself up onto her elbow, her breasts small and pale in the dim candlelight. Her hair was blonde, again. It fell in a mussed tangle over her shoulder.

  She was beautiful. A good fuck. And not interested in any sort of relationship beyond a hot tumble in the sack. His head pounded. He wished he hadn’t taken Meg’s call. She couldn’t comprehend this side of him—his need for tactile comfort in the face of hurt. She was unable to wrap her head around the idea that he could sleep with a woman, and it didn’t have to mean anything more than that. Besides, she was the one who’d made it crystal clear that it was over—three years of their life together. And now this bombshell—he’d had no hint that she was spiraling in this direction. He wasn’t sure how to process the fact she’d returned to Shelter Bay. And why.

  “Going for a swim,” he said, coolly. “Coming?”

  Jan gave a throaty chuckle as she flopped back onto the pillows, flinging her arms out wide as if in sated bliss. She was comfortable in her own skin, this woman, and had reason to be. She ran at least forty miles a week, held a black belt in karate, taught Krav Maga classes, practiced mindful meditation, and only ate plants. Her physique was faultless. Her mind formidable. Jonah had yet to unearth whatever vulnerability it was that she worked so hard to hide behind her carapace of so-called perfection.

  “I’ll keep the bed warm for when you’re done.” She raised a knee to afford him a view of the Brazilian-waxed delta between her thighs.

  He felt his groin stir, and he yanked the door open too hard. Chill air gushed in from the night. His hot body braced to meet it.

  Cold rain pecked at his bare back as he swam laps until his muscles burned. But when he reentered the house he felt no less relieved.

  Toweling his hair, he walked up to the bed. Jan sat up, dropped her feet over the side, and opened her thighs wide, reaching out for his fingertips. She drew him toward her, and lowered her head, teasing his cock with the tip of her warm tongue as he stood there. He felt a moan building in his chest as blood rushed south and his erection rose. Conflict tightened.

  He halted her abruptly, hands clamping down firmly on her shoulders.

  With heavy-lidded eyes, she looked up. “Not good enough for you tonight, Doc?” she whispered.

  “You’re always good, Detective.”

  She sat back. “Ah, but not good enough to get her out of your system.” She reached for the sheet, wrapped it around her torso, held his gaze for several beats. “I think you love her. I mean, really love her.”

  He snorted. “Want a drink?”

  “Make mine a double.”

  He tucked a towel around his waist, and poured two glasses of Balvenie thirty-year-old whiskey that had been matured in a mixture of traditional oak and sherry casks, his favorite at the moment. He added a small block of ice to hers. He took the crystal glasses to the low table in front of the fire where she joined him, propping her feet up onto the ottoman and warming her toes to the fire. She sipped, and sighed with pleasure as she put her head back, turning to catch his eyes. “You live in the equivalent of a luxury hotel, you know that?”

  He pulled a wry mouth.

  Outside the rain was turning to snow.

  “So, why did you let her go, Jonah?” Always the assessing, questioning cop. This was not a woman who rested. She was one of the city’s top homicide detectives with a doctorate in psychology and a scary-ass solve rate. Jonah pitied the poor punk who got on the wrong side of Detective Sergeant Jan Mascioni.

  He met her eyes. She was also a good friend of his, and respect he had for her in spades. He shouldn’t have gone back to bed with her like this. The shrink in him knew why he had, though.

  “Because she wasn’t going to stay,” he said after a while. He took a big pull on his drink, letting the warmth of alcohol blossom through his chest. “I suppose I knew it from the start. Maybe I was just hoping I was wrong. Tell me,” he said, steering the topic onto safer ground. “Any leads on the floating feet thing?”

  “Expect a call from brass in the morning. They want to bring your team on board with this one.” She finished the last of her drink, got up, and dropped her sheet to the floor. She padded over to her pile of clothes, pulled on her skirt and blouse, holster. Adjusting her jacket over her weapon, she slicked her hair back into a ponytail with a deft flick of her hands.

  She came over, kissed him full on the mouth. And in his ear, she whispered, “You can have any woman you want, Lawson, and you know it. Time is a healer of all things. Let her go.”

  Trouble was, he didn’t want any woman. He wanted the crazy redhead who wrote books in her camper, who didn’t give a shit about his wealth. Who didn’t really fit into his lifestyle at all. Was that why he wanted her?

  Whatever the reason, he was seized by a dark and pressing sixth sense that maybe he’d made a fatal mistake in forcing her back home, and into the past.

  He sipped his drink, wondering if he should have preempted this, her returning to Shelter Bay. Meg Brogan was not one to shy away from a challenge. If she wanted something.

  He hadn’t realized she truly wanted him.

  CHAPTER 4

  Meg woke abruptly and listened for a moment, trying to determine what had roused her. The wind had died. All had gone quiet. She could still hear the plaintive moan of the foghorn, but now she could also discern the distant crunch of waves against the man-made breakers at the mouth of the bay. She climbed down from her bed. The clock above the stove read 3:00 a.m.

  Wrapping a sweater around her shoulders, she peered through the camper blinds. Clouds scudded up high, revealing glimpses of a gibbous m
oon that silvered the water and cast a ghostly glow on the sand dunes along the opposite shore. The spit. The dunes behind which they’d found Sherry. She shivered and rubbed her arms, caught for a moment between past and present, snared between the horror of that memory and the beauty of this bay that was once her home. This little marina that appeared to have been trapped in time. Returning here was like stepping right back into it all.

  It made her think of Blake. He’d defined this bay for her.

  She turned up the thermostat, lit the stove, and put the kettle on to brew tea. If she couldn’t sleep, she might as well get started with an action plan. Better than lying here thinking. And in the morning, she’d visit her aunt’s assisted care facility first thing. From Irene she’d get the keys to the chain across the gate, and the keys to the house. She’d check out the old place, get cracking on a list of repairs. She’d also drop by a real estate office. All this she could juggle while working on the story, setting up interviews, obtaining police, court, and autopsy records.

  Meg seated herself at her small camper table. Sipping her tea, she opened her laptop and began to type a list of “primaries”—people who’d been directly involved with her sister’s case. Her goal was to find out which of them still resided in Shelter Bay. If they no longer lived here, she’d get contact details and chase them down further afield. But right now, this was ground zero. And while emotionally challenging, the story itself should be simple—she knew it, had lived it. All she had to do was tell it in the voices of all the players.

  Top of her list was Sheriff Ike Kovacs, who’d handled the investigation. The medical examiner. The old DA. Tyson Mack’s defense attorney. She’d also love to score an interview with Keevan Mack, Tyson Mack’s father. The image of Mason Mack from the convenience store suddenly filled her mind. The hostility in his eyes. A chill whispered over her skin. The words of her old mentor filled her mind.

  … make no mistake, if you want to write true crime, you are going to have to talk to people who have suffered something awful.

  She typed in both Keevan and Mason’s names.

  She’d also want to interview Bull Sutton, who’d led the initial search for the Brogan girls that fateful day. And Dave Kovacs, Ike’s son, the young deputy who was among the first on the scene of the murder. Plus someone from the sheriff’s search and rescue team, plus the doctor who’d treated her concussion. The female cop who’d interviewed her in the hospital. And Father John McKinnon, who’d tried to help her devoutly Catholic parents navigate the aftermath, to no avail, because an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth had clearly trumped thou shalt not kill … She paused, then typed in Blake’s name. She’d get his army contact details from Bull. She didn’t really want to speak to Blake, but on another level she knew she had to, if she wanted to do this properly. Blake was the one who’d found her. Saved her life. In more ways than one.

  She reached for her mug of tea and sipped as she watched her blinking cursor, listening to the familiar crunch of waves. Emma Williams, Sherry’s best friend, went down next on the list. Sherry had told Emma on the phone that day that she was going with Tyson Mack to the spit for an “illicit” liaison. Tommy Kessinger, of course. Her sister’s boyfriend at the time had also been a close family friend. The whole Kessinger family had been close with the Brogan bunch. Everyone had believed the Kessingers would eventually become in-laws. Meg inhaled deeply at the possibility of seeing Tommy again. She rubbed her brow. This was going to be hard. But she’d started down this path now. She would not turn back until she was done.

  She began to type notes in rough, from memory, starting with things she’d learned from Blake about that fateful day she and Sherry went missing.

  THE STRANGER AMONG US

  By Meg Brogan

  BLAKE

  Two hours pass and Meg is still not back. The marina guests return in their boat with a bucket full of fair-sized male Dungeness crabs. Blake keeps casting an eye out over the bay as he helps them moor and disembark, all smiles and sunburned faces. It’s turning cool on the water, a band of thick fog blowing slowly across the spit, where Meg had headed. Dusk begins to steal insidiously out of the shadows, and the light wanes.

  Blake’s curiosity edges into worry. He’s been not-so-secretly in love with Meg Brogan all summer, and probably long before that in a kid-soulmate-friendship kind of way. Young love is complex. It’s fervent and fierce and spins on a dime. To Blake, Meg is summer. She’s the ocean. She’s crabbing. She’s the heartbeat of this bay. She gives him the zest to bite into life with full-bore zeal, to throw back his head and laugh with a mouthful of purple berries. She makes him lie awake in his bed at night, watching the arc of the moon, listening to the electric beat of his own heart.

  He’s sixteen. She’s almost fourteen. And their relationship is headed into trickier, headier, darker territory. This summer has been complicated by a kiss that tasted of salt, and watermelon. By a touch of his hand to bare breasts.

  Back on the mainland, across the coast road, in a subdivision abutting the forest, stands the Brogan residence, a classic vinyl-sided double-story that speaks of love and detailed attention. Mowed lawn. Happy little flower beds. A birdbath cloaked in moss and homemade birdhouses hammered into a giant chestnut that offers shade in hot summers, and a twisted monkey bar of a climb up to a second-story bedroom window.

  Smoke wafts from the BBQ out back. Meg’s father, Jack Brogan, has a ginger beer at his side in a mug frosted from the freezer. He tends the flames, sips his drink, relishes the sweet scent of freshly mowed grass. A sprinkler throws staccato arcs at the end of the garden near the woods. It’s a last summer get-together. In just over one week he and Tara, Meg’s mother, will be driving Sherry down to Stanford.

  Tara Brogan is busy making burger patties. She glances up at any sound; the crackle of tires on the street, a call out front, laughter … she’s beginning to wonder where her daughters are. They’d gone to see that new movie at the cinema in town. The sky clouds over, and rain begins to spit. A sudden wind teases, tests, swirls, calling in a wall of dense sea fog that fingers with dark glee up from the marina and along the streets and into the village and subdivision. The fickle vagaries of coast weather.

  Jack pulls the BBQ in under the eaves. It’s getting dark. Rain comes down more insistently.

  Tara begins to make a few phone calls, checking in first with Sherry’s best friend, Emma. She’s not home. Tara finds someone who was at the movies. No one saw Sherry or her little sister, Megan. Worry edges into anxiety. A storm starts to lash against the Oregon seaside town. The foghorn begins to sound from Shelter Head. The radio says it’s supposed to get worse.

  The phone circle widens, friends calling friends. Panic blackens Tara’s eyes and chalks her face. Neighbors come around. The kettle is boiled and tea is poured. Voices are low murmurs as Jack Brogan finally calls his good friend, Sheriff Kovacs.

  Kovacs immediately activates Search and Rescue. They start to put a search party together, but have no clues yet where to start. The woods? Town? Around the movie theater? The beaches? This place is between ocean, miles of dunes, and a state forest that reaches all the way into the mountains. And there is no “point last seen.”

  It’s almost full dark when a call comes from Bull Sutton’s Marina. Sutton’s son, Blake, saw Meg Brogan taking the Brogan family crab boat out late that afternoon. The boat is still not back.

  “Where? Which way? Did you see?” Jack Brogan demands when he gets down to the marina, grabbing Blake’s collar, shaking the boy, wind, rain lashing at his face. His eyes are wild and his words hard, angry, full with a father’s fear. “Why in the hell didn’t you tell someone!”

  “I didn’t know she was missing! I was busy with the crab boil.”

  “What direction?”

  “There. Across the bay, to the spit.” Blake points. “I … I didn’t think it was a problem. Meg knows this water—”

  “She’s only thirteen, goddammit!”

  Blake doesn’
t remind her father Meg will be fourteen next week. He doesn’t tell Jack Brogan how sweet his daughter’s mouth tastes, and how he’d like to do things with her, like he does in his dreams.

  “How could you not know there was a storm blowing in!”

  “Jack.” Sheriff Kovacs places his big hand on Jack’s arm. “Easy now. Let me talk to Blake.”

  The fire engine arrives, and an ambulance, and a SAR incident van. More cops. Lights pulse red and blue in the storm. Men and women in heavy weather gear gather around the SAR van. A klieg light spits on. A rescue boat starts across the bay.

  The sheriff takes Blake aside. The big cop’s face is now white with worry.

  “Was Sherry with her?”

  “No.”

  “Did she talk to you before she left?”

  Blake swallows. Looks at his feet. His face, too, is bloodless, his jaw tight, his arm and neck muscles corded wire. He should have done something, told someone earlier, left the tourists and gone to see for himself …

  The sheriff’s eyes darken and a frown begins to cut across his brow as the questions enter his mind.

  “Were you the last one who saw her, Blake? Anyone else see her leaving the marina?”

  “How would I know if someone else saw her after I did?” he snaps. “She took the boat, and she was being weird. I asked her where she was headed and she told me it was none of my business.”

  “She take crab bait? Was she going fishing?”

  “No. It didn’t look like she was going fishing. She … she appeared to be on a … mission. She looked worried. Was moving fast. Went right across the bay to Sunny Beach.”

  “You like the Brogan girl, don’t you, Blake? Pretty little redhead. You know her well.” A beat of silence. The foghorn blares. “Very well.”