“I forgot to ask,” Huck said. “Any word on the woman who was out here this morning? Miller—Alicia Miller, right?”
“She went back to Washington,” Sharon said stiffly.
“That’s what I heard. Did she drive herself?”
“I don’t know if she did or didn’t drive herself. She objects to Breakwater Security having its headquarters and training facility out here. This morning’s histrionics were nothing but a rude, inappropriate protest.”
“Was she drunk?”
“I have no idea.” Sharon caught herself, softening. “I don’t mean to sound cruel. Obviously Alicia Miller’s a troubled woman.”
Joe touched his wife’s elbow. “We should get back to the house. Didn’t you say Oliver was calling at seven?”
“Right. Yes, of course.” She shifted her attention to Vern and O’Dell. “Mr. O’Dell? What do you think of Breakwater so far?”
The kid beamed. “Awesome.”
Quinn buttoned her sweater and crossed her arms against the cold early-April wind as she stood at the water’s edge across from her bayside cottage. Even in the small cove, the bay was choppy after the line of thunderstorms had blown across the Northern Neck and off to the northeast. The heavy rain had slowed her drive to Yorkville but left behind dry, fresh, much cooler air.
She’d arrived thirty minutes ago, parking her silver Saab practically in the branches of her huge holly, her hope of finding Alicia’s ten-year-old BMW in the driveway or even the black sedan that had picked her up immediately dashed. The side door to the cottage was locked. Alicia had cleared out of the cottage—the only traces of her weekend stay were the hastily made bed in the guest room, towels in the bathroom hamper and an unopened nonfat, sugar-free strawberry yogurt in the refrigerator.
Quinn had walked next door to the only other cottage on the quiet, dead-end road, but the Scanlons, the couple who’d retired to Yorkville just before Quinn bought her place, were still not home.
A wasted trip, she thought, watching an osprey—a female—swoop up from the marsh into the clear sky above the bay. In spite of her concern for Alicia, Quinn felt some of her tension ease at the familiar sight of the huge bird. Once facing extinction, ospreys had become opportunistic in choosing their nesting sites, using channel markers, buoys, old dock posts and even the occasional bench on a quiet private dock. The nests could only be removed with a permit.
The two young ospreys that had constructed the oversize mess of a nest on a marker at the mouth of Quinn’s cove had returned. The nest had survived several fierce winter storms. With luck, the ospreys, mates for life, would have baby ospreys in a matter of weeks.
But they were raptors—birds of prey. Although they dined primarily on fish, if Alicia had indeed walked out to the water early one morning and saw an osprey scoop up an unsuspecting duckling in front of her, she would have been horrified. Stressed out as she was from the pressures of her job, perhaps on the verge of a breakdown, she could have latched onto such a gruesome sight as she’d melted down, twisting it into a metaphor for all her fears and troubles.
Speculation, Quinn thought, turning away from the water.
Built in the 1940s, her cottage occupied a half-acre lot with lilacs and azaleas, not yet in bloom, and a vegetable garden out back that she meant to revive. Right now, it was mostly weeds. Alicia had promised to rent a tiller and dig up the garden, but Quinn had known it was just well-meaning talk. She loved Yorkville for its simplicity. A picnic, kayaking, walking on the beach, prowling mom-and-pop shops for books and antiques, sitting on her porch and reading. What Quinn enjoyed most about Yorkville, Alicia found lacking. Quinn grew up in the Washington suburbs, but Virginia’s Northern Neck, with its wide, shallow rivers, its marshes and inlets, its beaches and rich history, spoke to her soul.
She walked across the road and up the stone walk to her cottage, the grass, which needed mowing, wet from the pounding rain. She stepped onto her porch, no railing to impede the view of the water from her wicker chairs. On one of her weekends on the bay, Alicia had put out a blue ceramic pot of yellow pansies as a gift for use of the cottage.
Quinn tucked her hands up into the sleeves of her sweater. Dusk was easing into night, the wind quieting, the air cold and fresh. Shivering, she went inside, her small living room dark enough now that she needed to switch on a lamp.
When she’d bought the cottage, it was a wreck. For two years, she’d poured herself, and coaxed various friends, into fixing it up. The scrubbing and painting and foraging for deals served as a welcome contrast to her days spent researching and analyzing criminal networks with tentacles that knew no borders, no boundaries, no ethics or morals but the lust for power, money and violence. She painted the simple wood floors and replaced the wainscoting, splurged on tile for the bathroom that she had put in herself.
Quinn remembered a sun-filled weekend in Yorkville, shortly after Alicia had moved to Washington. They’d gone on long walks together and had crab cakes at the marina restaurant, then drank wine and talked until midnight on the front porch, rekindling a friendship strained by busy lives and different interests and goals.
It was just before Alicia had introduced Quinn to Brian Castleton, the Washington, D.C., reporter for a Chicago newspaper, and they’d begun an on-again, off-again six months together that now, in retrospect, seemed doomed from the start. Brian found Yorkville too small, too boring, too unsophisticated, too, as he liked to say, 1947. He’d drag himself along with Quinn as she scavenged flea markets and yard sales for bargains—her mishmash of dishes, a Depression glass pitcher and tumblers, a copper pot for kindling, tables and chairs she’d refinished and painted.
The cottage, ultimately, had helped end their relationship. He wanted to buy a boat—he said he might stand the occasional weekend in Yorkville if he had a boat. They’d bought two kayaks together. Then he said a kayak wasn’t the sort of boat he meant.
Before long, he was staying in the city on weekends, and she’d drive out to the bay by herself.
Yet, in spite of how easily and completely they’d drifted apart, Brian was the first to see that she needed to leave the Justice Department and strike out on her own. If she was content to spend a weekend stripping paint off an old chair, he reasoned, the day-to-day grind of her work was getting to her. She needed to take a risk and broaden her horizons. Dare to go out on her own.
“I’m too young,” she’d argue. “I need more experience.”
“You’re from a family of daredevils. Go on, Quinn. Jump.”
It was another month after they broke up for good before she finally turned in her resignation.
Her withering relationship with Brian had put an added strain on her friendship with Alicia, who couldn’t hide her disappointment, even irritation, at Quinn’s decisions. “First you dumped Brian, then you quit your job. What’s next, Quinn? Who’s next?”
She hadn’t dumped Brian, and Alicia knew it. She’d exaggerated. What really got to her was how hard Lattimore had tried to get Quinn to stay at Justice—and then, once she’d made up her mind, how he continued to press her to come back. Last month, when he’d invited Quinn to an informal party at the Yorkville marina restaurant—his first social event without his wife—she had debated not going. The party was a good opportunity to network, but she also found herself wanting to go, hoping she could get Lattimore and Alicia to accept that she’d had to move on—it wasn’t a slap in their faces.
Alicia was at the party. She and Quinn chatted outside on the dock, shivering in the cold as they’d danced around the recent tension between them. Whatever had bothered Alicia about Quinn’s behavior over recent months seemed to have evaporated.
When she asked to use the cottage for a weekend getaway, Quinn hadn’t questioned Alicia’s motives. She’d simply handed her a key and told her to come and go at will.
Not once that night or in the next weeks did she sense that Alicia was seriously troubled or burned out.
“Alicia—where are you?”
>
Quinn spoke quietly into a cold breeze, shuddering at a sudden sense of loneliness. She’d always felt safe, comfortable, at her cottage. Now, she pictured an osprey swooping down to a fluffy little duckling, heard Alicia screaming in horror and prayed that her friend was all right. But darkness was coming fast, and Quinn knew there was nothing more she could do tonight.
8
W hen she took her tea out to the porch in the morning, Quinn told herself that Alicia must have shown up at her apartment last night and by now was on her way to work, yesterday’s drama behind her. Quinn had tried calling, but her cell phone was balky. She’d walk down to the water after her tea and try again.
She sat on a wicker rocker and pulled her feet up under her, cupping her mug with both hands to feel the warmth of the steaming tea. She had on her oversize sweater, a flannel shirt, jeans and just her socks. She expected the cool air and the cry of seagulls in the distance, the sounds of the tide washing in and out, but not, she thought, the very buff man in running shorts and a ratty T-shirt jogging on the road in front of her cottage.
He didn’t seem to notice her. When he reached the end of her road, just past her cottage, he did a wide turn and paused briefly to stretch. His dark hair was cut very short, not quite a crewcut, and he had a thickset build, with a flat abdomen and muscular arms, shoulders and thighs. He was obviously a physical man, not some guy dragging himself out for an early-morning jog to lose a few pounds.
When he reached the end of her stone walk, Quinn couldn’t resist calling out to him. “Nice morning for a run, isn’t it?”
She didn’t seem to have startled him. He stopped, not even remotely out of breath as he squinted at her on the porch. “That it is. I’m new in town. You live here?”
“It’s my weekend place.”
“Today’s Tuesday.”
She set her mug on a small table to one side of her rocker. “I was speaking in broad terms. My name’s Quinn—Quinn Harlowe.”
“Huck Boone.”
“Are you one of the new guys at Breakwater Security?”
Just a flicker of hesitation. “That’s right.” He nodded toward the dead-end road and the barbed wire. “I guess we’re neighbors.”
“No one but a seagull or an osprey would try to get to Breakwater through the marsh. It’s rough going. When did you get here?”
“Over the weekend.”
“This your first time jogging out this way?”
“No, why?”
He was calm and very direct, but obviously wondering why she was asking such questions. But she had dreamed about Alicia last night, not good dreams. “I got here late yesterday thinking a friend of mine who borrowed my cottage for the weekend might still be here. I guess I’m wondering if you’ve run into her.”
“Was she supposed to be here?”
“I don’t know where she’s supposed to be. It’s a long story.”
“Hope you find her.”
“Does that mean you haven’t seen her?”
He paused a moment. “What’s her name?”
“Alicia Miller. Her car’s not here, and none of her stuff’s here.”
And no suicide note, Quinn thought. In a fit of paranoia, she’d searched the cottage before going to bed last night and found nothing that eased her mind about Alicia—nothing, either, that indicated she’d had a complete mental breakdown. The place was clean and tidied up, not even a dish left in the sink.
Huck Boone, she noticed, hadn’t moved a muscle.
“I’m sure she’s fine,” she said quickly.
“You don’t sound sure.”
Quinn found herself wanting to tell him about Alicia’s odd behavior yesterday, but she resisted. “I’m heading back to Washington this morning. If you do hear of anything—” She debated her options. “Can you hang on a second? I’ll give you my cell-phone number.”
Boone shrugged. “Okay.”
She ran inside and grabbed a notepad and pen off the coffee table, where she’d spread out files and papers and had tried to work last night. She quickly scrawled down her number, folding the small sheet in half as she returned to the porch.
She walked along the stone path in her stocking feet, Boone meeting her halfway. His eyes, she saw, were a dark green, at least in the cool morning light of early April. Quinn tried to smile, but knew she didn’t quite manage. “Since you’re in private security…” She let her shoulders lift and fall in an exaggerated manner. “Never mind. I’m just covering all the bases I can think of, in case something’s happened to her.”
“Why do you think anything’s happened to her?”
“I don’t—”
“Yes, you do.”
She felt sudden tears in her eyes and hoped he would blame them on the cold air.
“Does she know Oliver Crawford?”
“Not well. They met briefly at a party last month.” Quinn blinked back the tears. “He and I have met a few times, but I don’t know him well, either.”
Interest rose in Boone’s expression. Little, she suspected, escaped this man’s attention, a skill that had to be a plus in private security work.
But she brought her mind back to the subject at hand, adding, “Oliver Crawford and my former boss—Alicia’s current boss—are friends. They went to college together.”
“And your boss would be—”
“Gerard Lattimore.” She didn’t know how she’d ended up giving him this information about herself. “He’s a deputy assistant attorney general at the Justice Department.”
“What are you, a lawyer?”
“Historian.”
Boone took a second to digest that information but had no visible reaction. “You don’t work for this Lattimore anymore?”
“No. I left Justice in January.”
“He knows your friend’s missing?”
Quinn realized the tables had turned and now Huck Boone was interrogating her. He was a security type, she reminded herself, and such tactics probably came naturally to him. But she didn’t feel particularly reassured. “Alicia’s not missing. She’s just—I just haven’t accounted for her.”
Boone didn’t relent. “But Lattimore knows?”
“Yes.”
“And Mr. Crawford?”
“I have no idea. I haven’t talked with him.”
“You don’t socialize with him in Washington?”
“I told you, I don’t know him that well. And these days, Mr. Boone, any socializing I do is work related.”
He grinned unexpectedly and leaned toward her. “Then it’s not socializing, is it?” He straightened, his eyes softer now, not as intense. “Since we’re neighbors, you can just call me Huck.”
She felt a twitch of a smile. “Huck Boone. That’s quite a name, isn’t it? Makes me think of Huckleberry Finn and Daniel Boone—”
“My folks have a strange sense of humor. I should get rolling. You okay? Anything I can do for you?”
His concern took her aback, and she wondered just how tight and preoccupied she appeared. She glanced out at the osprey nest at the mouth of the cove and almost told him about Alicia’s pleas, but she’d told Boone, a man she didn’t know at all, more than she’d meant to as it was. “I’m okay. Thanks for asking,” she said. “Don’t let me keep you from your run.”
“Just getting loose. We’re getting put through our paces today at Breakwater.”
“Good luck.”
He winked at her. “Thanks.”
He jogged off toward the loop road at a moderate pace.
Quinn didn’t immediately return to her hot tea. The bay glistened in the morning sun, the water quiet and very blue under the clear sky. She wondered how many of Oliver Crawford’s guys would be jogging past her cottage now that he’d converted his estate into a private security outfit.
She started across the road, then remembered she was in her socks. But they were damp now, anyway, and she continued on her way, taking the narrow, sandy path through the tall marsh grass down to the water. The t
ide was out, leaving behind wet sand, slippery grass and swirling shallow pools. Using one hand to block the sun, she squinted out at the enormous osprey nest, but it was empty, the female, presumably, still out hunting.
As she turned to head back to the cottage for her cell phone, a fishing boat out in the water beyond her cove caught her eye. Something bright drew her gaze downward, out past her waterfront to the edge of the protected marsh.
Red.
What would be red on the shore?
“I have a red kayak,” she said aloud.
Had Alicia left it in the marsh?
Why? Dropping her hand from her eyes, Quinn ran back up to the road and down to the marsh, pushing her way through thick marsh grass onto a narrow path. Her socks were soaked through now, covered with sand. Barely breaking stride, she lifted one foot and pulled off her wet sock, then lifted the other, leaving the socks on the path and pressing forward barefoot, the cold sand a shock.
She kept running toward the water, noticing gulls up ahead.
Gulls…
Why so many? Quinn counted five near the shore.
The path curved, and she saw the red kayak lying parallel to the beach, partly submerged in the receding tide. The gulls seemed to be picking at something in the tall marsh grass.
Quinn felt a crawling sensation at the top of her spine. Her mouth went dry. She tucked her hands up into the sleeves of her sweater and slowed her pace, ignoring her frozen feet.
More gulls arrived.
“Shoo!” She waved her arms at the birds, but they stayed with their find, whatever it was.
She looked up toward the road, hoping to see someone—anyone—she could call to walk with her down to the kayak and the gulls and see what was there. But there was no one.
With a nauseating sense of dread, she forced herself to veer off the path through the knee-high grass, still cold with the morning dew, slapping at her as her feet sank into the wet, shifting sand.
A dolphin? A small whale? Was it possible something had beached itself here on the edge of a Chesapeake Bay marsh? She was a historian, not a naturalist. She’d fancied that in her spare time, on long, lazy weekends, she could study bay life, learn the names of the birds and fish and wildflowers and grasses.
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