Temptation Bay (A Windfall Island Novel)

by Anna Sullivan

  He should have been having the time of his life. And what was on his mind? Maggie Solomon. She was hardheaded, sarcastic, argumentative, uncomplimentary, and a general pain in the ass. And he couldn’t wait to see her again. He’d known her less than twenty-four hours, but the world seemed so much brighter than it had yesterday, so much more filled with possibilities. Which was saying something when he stood on the brink of the biggest opportunity of his life. He solved this case and clients would be beating down his door, clients with substantial cases that didn’t involve who was doing whom in some tawdry out-of-the-way motel room.

  And he couldn’t keep his mind on the prize. Okay, not only his mind.

  Christ.

  He took a deep breath, put Maggie in a tiny little box he locked away in an obscure corner of his brain, and swung through the door of the Windfall Island Antique Store. And stopped dead.

  Hoarders: The Antique Chronicles, he thought, taking in the haphazard stacks of merchandise crowding the place with absolutely no sense of order.

  A Chippendale dresser sat against the wall, its top crowded with vases, one of which could have dated to the early Roman Empire, others to the post–World War II trinket trade in Japan. A cheap dinette table was flanked by a six-pack of chairs; at least one of them looked to be a Windsor, if Dex remembered even a tenth of the research he’d done for an elderly client whose nurse had systematically stripped her house of antiques, replacing them with halfway decent fakes.

  Ottomans sat on chairs, which rested on tables propped up by statuary, all of it balanced precariously, sometimes to the rafters high overhead. Dex stepped in and found himself in a maze of winding aisles barely wide enough to navigate. Around every corner something new caught his eye, items ranging in age and value from priceless museum quality to cheap flea market. Ten minutes later and with no idea where he’d left the door, he came to what appeared to be the front counter, if the gold and silver-plated antique cash register sitting on a glass display case was any indication.

  Beside the counter stood a tall, gaunt figure with a white, slightly shiny complexion, dressed in the clothing of a nineteenth-century magistrate. Wax, Dex decided, despite the eerily lifelike eyes.

  And then it spoke. “Can I help you?”

  Dex pasted an open and friendly expression on his face and stepped forward. “You must be the proprietor.” Josiah Meeker, or so the discreet gold lettering on the front window had informed him.

  “And you’d be Dexter Keegan, lawyer from Boston,” Meeker said, staring distastefully at the hand Dex held out.

  Dex might have been offended if he hadn’t seen the way Meeker’s own hands rubbed against his pants legs. OCD in some form, he would have bet. Dex glanced around. That would explain why it looked like the man had never parted with a single piece of merchandise in his entire life.

  “You after anything in particular?” Meeker said, still looking like he’d been sucking on a lemon.

  “No.” Dex wandered over to a trio of cabinets made of lacquered wood fronted with age-spotted glass.

  Smalls—little collectible items—crowded the warped wooden shelves. He pretended to study the worn and well-loved old toys, costume jewelry, miniature china figurines, and matchbox cars that took him back to his childhood. But his eyes shifted to a pair of doors in the corner. Both doors bore signs limiting access to staff members, but one of those doors was narrower, with an external lock and a small thermostat on the wall beside it. Temperature-and, he’d have wagered, humidity-controlled.

  “What’s your business on the island?” Meeker wanted to know. “Maybe it will help me steer you to something likely.”

  History. But Dex stopped himself from saying it. There was something about Meeker that made his gut talk. Dex always listened to his gut, especially when caution was the message it sent.

  “I’m just getting to know my way around the village.”

  “You’re that lawyer checked into the Horizon yesterday.”

  “Word travels fast.”

  “I haven’t heard anything about who you represent.”

  “Why would you?”

  Meeker’s face shifted into a smirk. “You tell me.”

  Dex borrowed Maggie’s signature shrug, let his gaze drift around the place before they landed on the door with its telltale little thermostat. “I’m a sucker for a good cigar.”

  Meeker glanced over his shoulder, and when he turned back, those black eyes of his narrowed on Dex’s face. “Don’t sell tobacco products of any sort.”

  “That’s not a humidor, then?” Dex said with a tinge of disappointment, indicating the smaller door behind Meeker.

  “Cigar smoking is a nasty habit,” Meeker said sourly. “I keep books in there. Which, no doubt, AJ Appelman told you.”

  “AJ Appelman? At the Horizon? Why would he tell me you keep books in a humidor?” Dex asked.

  “Why indeed? Just who do you represent, Mr. Keegan?”

  Frowning a little, Dex turned to look at Meeker. “What does my client have to do with anything?”

  “Because they’re more than just books. They’re journals, some of them going back to Windfall’s beginnings.” Meeker’s mouth lifted in a slight, self-satisfied sneer. “I’ve had museums, universities, and all manner of research people begging me to loan them, to image them, and whatnot. I’ve turned them all down, with their letters and e-mails and phone calls.”

  “None of them bothered to come in person.” Which would have given Meeker the respect he thought his due, even if he tried to deny his ego had anything to do with it.

  “An outsider is still an outsider, even when he deigns to show up in the flesh. What makes you think I’d let you waltz in here and have them just for the asking?”

  “Who said I was asking?”

  “Are you meaning to tell me you’re not here at the behest of some museum or university, to convince me to part with the only written history of this island?”

  “I can assure you my client has no idea those journals exist.” Which he could say with such absolute conviction that for the first time Meeker seemed uncertain.

  “Oh,” he said, moving to fuss nervously with a display of little china boxes on a nearby shelf.

  Mission accomplished, Dex thought, all but shaking with the effort to keep his expression placid. Those journals might yield nothing, but the possibility they’d help him solve this case… It made his head spin a little, the idea that he could be the one to discover the whereabouts of a child kidnapped nearly a century past. And not just for himself. Eugenia Stanhope had a family who were still alive, still searching for her. He could only imagine what it would be like for them to finally see an end to all those years of wondering.

  Yeah, he wanted those journals—as much as he wanted his next breath. Instead he turned away, taking small consolation in knowing he must have convinced Meeker he wasn’t interested in them, or the man would still be hovering in front of that door like his skinny frame and nasty disposition posed any real obstacle.

  Getting out of there before he did something stupid seemed like his only option, so Dex pointed himself into the maze, the natural light filtering in the front windows his only directional beacon.

  Meeker followed along behind him. “Is there something I can help you find, then?” he said, sounding pained that he’d lost a sale.

  Dex turned back at the door. “Didn’t see anything that appealed to me.”

  And that was the absolute truth, he thought as he pushed through the door and stepped out onto the raised boardwalk. He hadn’t laid eyes on the journals, but he’d discovered their existence—although Dex doubted Meeker’s assertion that they were a written history.

  On an island like Windfall, a community that operated as a sort of corporation to salvage shipwrecks and mete out shares, likely some of those books were more ledgers than anything else. The rest would be personal accounts, most probably written by women since they were more apt to keep diaries or journals than men.

&nbs
p; Still, he might find a nugget somewhere in them, a bit of information that could lead him to Eugenia Stanhope’s ultimate fate.

  Just as soon as he found a way to get his hands on them.

  Chapter Four

  Within a week, Windfall’s few remaining vacationers would be gone. Maggie knew, as she’d be flying them out herself.

  Though the seasonal loss of the tourists, with their pockets full of mad money, meant lean times, Maggie preferred it that way. No outsiders meant the residents weren’t reenacting a historical salvagers’ community. They were themselves, and that, she thought with an indulgent smile, suited her so much better.

  She swung through the door of the island’s only fuel station, her smile widening into a full-out, time-to-have-some-fun grin.

  Jed Morgenstern, all five and a half feet of him, had what looked like a bed sheet wrapped around his waist with a tail of it draped over one shoulder. He wore a t-shirt under it, a rope belt around his waist, and a slight look of embarrassment on his craggy, weathered face.

  “Maggie,” he said by way of greeting.

  She could all but see him bracing himself. She didn’t disappoint, taking a half step back and looking him over with a critical eye. “Could use something,” she pondered. “Maybe a crown of olive branches.”

  “Jeez—”

  “Or some gold sandals, and if you really want to pull off that look you should lose the t-shirt.”

  “Knock it off.”

  “What do Romans wear under their togas, anyway?”

  “Maggie,” he said again, casting a cautious glance over his shoulder before he added, “You know Martha.”

  “Not as well as you.” But she did know Martha. Everyone on the island knew Martha and her affinity for the tragic romances of history: Arthur and Guinevere, Romeo and Juliet, Burton and Taylor—they didn’t all have to end with death. Combine that with her constant search for novelty, and Jed’s comfort zone didn’t stand a chance. Then again, he probably had the best sex life of any man on Windfall. Not to mention more variety. “So who are you supposed to be, anyway?”

  “Anthony and Cleopatra.”

  “I think you mean Antony.”

  Jed gave her a look, not caring a rat’s ass about the distinction.

  “Did you just roll your eyes?” Martha called from the back room.

  “How does she do that?”

  “Hey, Martha,” Maggie called back to her.

  “Call me Cleo.” Martha appeared and struck a dramatic pose in the doorway, looking like a forty-something version of Elizabeth Taylor, if Elizabeth Taylor had been a five-foot ten inch beanpole with magenta hair. Martha got the costume right, though—hair done in spit curl ringlets, heavy black cat’s eye makeup, white toga, chunky Romanesque costume jewelry. “I didn’t hear you complaining last night,” she said to her husband.

  Jed’s complexion went about three shades redder, and he ducked his head. “I’m thinking you didn’t come in here to bust my chops, Maggie.”

  “No, that was just a bonus. My fuel coming in Friday?”

  “Maybe.”

  Maggie shrugged. “Maybe I’ll get it somewhere else.”

  “On this island?” Jed said, getting a little of his own back.

  “It’ll be here Friday,” Cleo put in.

  “It’s not coming by chariot, is it?”

  “Funny,” Jed snapped before his wife elbowed him away from the small front counter so she could lean on it, her eyes avid as they latched onto Maggie’s face. “Tell me about the outsider you flew in from Portland the other day.”

  “Lawyer,” Maggie said, “staying at the Horizon.”

  “And?”

  “He paid me to bring him to Windfall, I brought him.”

  Cleo/Martha gave an impatient little huff. “You didn’t talk on the way? For crying out loud, Maggie, didn’t you ask him one blessed thing?”

  “Oh, I grilled him,” Maggie said. Mostly because he’d insisted on it, but still, the questions had come from her own brain, right? “He wasn’t giving anything up. The lawyer-client thing, I guess.”

  Martha planted her hands on her toga-draped hips. That close-mouthed lawyer crap might be all right for the Supreme Court, her expression said, but she wasn’t buying it. Martha smelled gossip, and she wasn’t giving up until she got some. She opened her mouth to let Maggie have it, but the bell over the door jangled, and Trudie Bingham, blond, bright-eyed, and barely twenty, breezed in and sang out, “Ma-il.”

  Maggie didn’t waste any time thinking she was off the hook.

  “Here’s yours,” Trudie said, handing Maggie a stack of random advertisements with one or two junk envelopes on top, addressed to occupant. “I heard you brought a man to the island.”

  “Lawyer.” Maggie dumped her “mail” into the wastebasket behind the counter. “Staying at the Horizon.”

  Martha threw her hands up.

  Trudie was more optimistic about her chances of learning something useful. “Is he cute? Is he tall? Is he single?” she wanted to know.

  Cute? Cute definitely was not the right terminology for Dex Keegan. Dangerous, secretive, potent, but not cute. “No, yes, and I didn’t ask him,” she said to Trudie. “In that order.”

  Trudie stuck out her bottom lip. “Mean.” Which didn’t, unfortunately, put her off. “Is he at least famous?”

  “Never heard of him before,” Maggie said.

  “Oh. Then why are there reporters down at the Horizon?”

  “What?” Martha streaked around the counter, clamped a hand around Trudie’s wrist. “There are reporters at the Horizon?”

  “With cameras. Mom went down there to find out why.” Trudie’s pout turned into a sulk. “She made me stay behind to man the counter at the post office.”

  Martha let her go. “I’ll bet it’s Paige Walker.”

  Maggie froze, her heart thundering in her ears so loud she barely heard the conversation buzzing around her. Not that she gave even half a damn about Paige Walker, Windfall Island’s most famous daughter, gone to Hollywood to be a big star.

  Paige might have gotten herself all polished up, earned fame and fortune, but while the surface might be as gold as the little statues Paige had earned herself, it seemed the base alloy was still just cheap metal.

  She’d been a friend once upon a time, a good friend, back when they were both schoolgirls. Before Paige had betrayed her.

  “Last I heard she was in Cannes,” Martha was saying, her broad New England accent making it sound like something on a market shelf filled with pork and beans, rather than a playground of the rich and famous. “That girl never stays in one place long, even when those tabloid bloodsuckers aren’t hounding her to dish up a scandal. And she never comes home.

  “ ’Course,” Martha continued, “this ain’t her home anymore, and a sex tape with a married director is more than a scandal.”

  “I read the wife is going to sue her for,” Trudie screwed up her face in a Herculean effort to remember the exact wording, “alienation of affection.”

  “I doubt there was much affection on that director’s side—or Paige’s, for that matter. Right, Maggie?”

  “Don’t know, don’t care.”

  “Well, I doubt the girl’d come back here to lick her wounds.”

  Maggie figured Martha was right about Paige; she’d brushed Windfall Island off like so much beach sand a decade ago, made it clear just how much better she thought she was than everyone here. No way Paige would show her face while her precious reputation was in tatters.

  But there were cameras down at the Horizon, and Paige Walker wasn’t the only famous name with a Windfall Island connection. In Maggie’s estimation, she wasn’t even the worst.

  “You going down there, Maggie?”

  “No.” But as she turned away from Martha and walked out the door, she knew she didn’t really have a choice.

  Maggie pulled her Mustang to the curb a block away from the Horizon, then sat there until her legs were steady. Th
e sky was the clear, aching blue of a bright fall day, the air wafted in crisply through the open window, and she could smell the tang of the sea. Everything was familiar and dear to her. And the heart she’d thought was shattered beyond repair was breaking again.

  A fair-sized crowd of Windfallers had gathered in front of the inn. She couldn’t see who they’d gathered around, but she knew. If Paige Walker, star of stage, screen and, just lately, the Internet, had set foot on the island, there’d have been enough paparazzi swarming around her to pick up the island and carry it away.

  And if she’d had any brains at all, any inherent sense of self-preservation, Maggie told herself, she’d turn the car around and give the Horizon and its plague of reporters a wide berth, just get the hell out of Dodge. It would have been the smart thing to do, easier on her nerves, better for her pride, even if slinking out of town made her feel like a felon. Better a felon than a tool.

  And better, she thought with a vicious oath, to be a tool than a coward. She slammed out of the car, strode the half-block with her mind carefully blanked, and if her stomach was swimming sickly, if her legs wanted to buckle, who had to know? Definitely not the man who appeared at the other end of the narrow aisle that opened when those in the crowd caught sight of her.

  Phillip Ashworth Solomon, Admiral of the United States Navy and her father, was nearly blinding in his dress whites. He was handsome and fit, his hair threaded with just the right amount of silver to denote the wisdom and experience of age without diminishing his strength one iota. He wore command like a comfortable old shirt, held himself uncompromisingly straight; and Maggie knew there was no softness in him, no pity for anything he judged a weakness. Like emotion.

  That didn’t mean he couldn’t feign a good sentiment if he thought it useful. He caught her into a hug that had the camera flashes, press and civilian, firing wildly.

  And in her ear he hissed, “Behave yourself.”

  All she could think was how much it hurt. She couldn’t even be angry, just sick and achy and feeling like a kid again, too young to understand why she seemed to disappoint him, just by being.