Breakwater

by Carla Neggers

  “Just one fed,” Huck said. “The rest were local guys.”

  “You’re a cheeky bastard, aren’t you?” Travis took a step closer to him. “I’d watch that mouth if I were you.”

  “Cheeky. That’s a PBS kind of word, isn’t it?” Huck replied. “Shouldn’t you say ‘cheeky bastard’ with an upper-crust British accent?” Huck yawned. “You know that Lubec and Rochester are both names of towns, right? Lubec, Maine. Rochester, New York.”

  Vern rolled his eyes at Huck’s taunting the two meats. Lubec’s fair cheeks turned red, but he didn’t say anything. The kid told Huck to fuck off.

  “Boone’s had a rough morning,” Vern said. “Don’t kill him.”

  Lubec took a couple of breaths through his nose, then glared at Vern. “I’ll excuse him this time. Next time, I’m not cutting him any slack.”

  After Lubec and Rochester left, Vern stuck a thick finger in Huck’s face. “I’m not bailing you out again. If you want to mouth off, you can take the consequences.”

  “I was just stating a fact. Lubec and Rochester—”

  “Shut up, Boone. I don’t care if you did find a dead woman this morning. Just shut the hell up.”

  Huck thought he was displaying just the right amount of rule-breaking attitude for the vigilantes among Breakwater Security to take notice. On the other hand, he could just be pissing people off. He couldn’t make himself care. He pictured poor dead Alicia Miller and her friend Quinn Harlowe, fighting tears and panic—and guilt. A lot of guilt.

  Not that he had much hope for Harlowe heading back to Washington and minding her own business. Huck knew a few research analysts and he’d never met one who’d leave well enough alone.

  11

  FBI Special Agent T.J. Kowalski joined Quinn on her porch, the smells of low tide heavy in the air. She’d been sitting out there for more than an hour trying to grasp the reality that Alicia was dead.

  Kowalski looked out at the water. “Nice spot.” He was trim, lean and very good-looking in his dark gray suit and red tie, with his classic G-man square jaw and close-cropped dark hair. He also had a not-so-classic two-inch scar under his left eye. “You must like coming out here.”

  “I love it. But after today—”

  “Don’t think about that right now. Alicia cleared out of here yesterday morning and drove back to Washington. Then she came back here. Why?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Where’s her car?”

  “I don’t know that, either. Maybe it’s still in Washington, and whoever picked her up there could have driven her to Yorkville and dropped her off here. She was very upset when she came to me at the coffee shop. I couldn’t make sense out of half of what she said.”

  “Would she have taken her car to go kayaking?”

  “It’s possible. I generally put in right out front, but if I’m taking a different route, I’ll launch somewhere else to save on time. Alicia didn’t like launching here. It’s fairly deep, and the underwater grasses—” Quinn stopped, staring at the porch floor but seeing the kayak, Alicia’s body, the wet grass on her. “But she ended up back here in the cove.”

  The FBI agent’s expression softened. “The local police are looking for her car. You don’t need to worry about it.”

  “Alicia was fixated on ospreys. There’s a nest out here in the cove—she could have wanted to avoid getting too close to it.” Quinn shook her head, sinking deeper, if possible, into her wicker chair. “I just don’t know.”

  “Did she have her own key to your cottage?”

  “Yes. I gave her one in March.”

  “Is there a spare?”

  “It’s outside on the kitchen windowsill. I haven’t checked to see if it’s there.”

  Without a word, Kowalski headed down the stone walk and across the yard to the side entrance. Quinn didn’t move, didn’t think. The cove was quiet, nothing like it must have been yesterday at the height of the storms.

  The FBI agent returned. “Key’s still there. What about your kayak? Where do you keep it?”

  “I have two. One red, one green. I keep them in the garden shed out back. The door’s padlocked.”

  “Did Ms. Miller have that key?”

  “Yes—it’s here in the kitchen.”

  “And you didn’t notice one of your kayaks was missing?”

  “No, I didn’t. I never looked. There’d been storms…”

  Kowalski waited a moment for her to continue, and when she didn’t, he rubbed the back of his neck and looked out at the glistening bay. “Was Alicia an experienced kayaker?”

  “Not very, but she could handle quiet water—”

  “Not big waves?”

  “I’m not sure. We haven’t gone kayaking together in a long time.” Her stomach clenched at her automatic use of the present tense. Taking a quick breath, she continued. “She might have improved.”

  “You’re a pretty good kayaker?”

  Quinn nodded without looking at him.

  “Would you have gone out yesterday?”

  “No,” she said almost inaudibly.

  He turned, facing the water. “Wish I had a friend who owned a cottage on the bay. You and Ms. Miller were good friends?”

  “We were.”

  “Were?” the FBI agent prodded her.

  Unable to sit any longer, Quinn shot to her feet. “We haven’t been as close in recent months, especially after I left the Justice Department.”

  “You didn’t like your job?”

  “I wanted something else.”

  Kowalski managed a quick grin. “A life?”

  “Something like that.”

  “Do you have one?”

  She gave him a sharp look, not deluded into thinking any of his questions were idle or friendly. “I work hard, Agent Kowalski, but what I do now is on my terms. I saved aggressively when I was at Justice and could afford—” Quinn broke off. “It doesn’t matter. I have no regrets.”

  “Alicia was a spendthrift? Did she have a lot of debt?”

  “I didn’t say that. We spent our money on different things.” There it was, she thought. The past tense. Her eyes filled with tears, but she didn’t explain them to T.J. Kowalski. “Money was never a serious issue between us as friends, if that’s what you’re getting at.”

  “She have enough money to do what she wanted to?”

  “Do any of us?”

  He shifted his gaze from the water and settled it on Quinn. “You don’t have to defend her, Ms. Harlowe.”

  “Please, just call me Quinn. And I’m not defending her. She was upset yesterday. Frightened, paranoid. She didn’t say anything about wanting to kill herself. In fact, the opposite. She was afraid of being killed.”

  “By an osprey,” Kowalski said.

  Quinn didn’t respond.

  “The local police are in charge of the investigation into her death, but it’s still too early to make a judgment about what exactly happened.” The FBI agent sounded almost sympathetic. “Are you going back to Washington tonight?”

  “No, I can’t imagine making the drive.” She glanced at the pot of cheerful yellow pansies that Alicia had left for her. “This place is supposed to be my refuge. I love it here.”

  “You have any friends around here who can stay with you?”

  “No, I—” When she realized what he was implying, Quinn groaned. “Oh, come on, Agent Kowalski. I am not afraid to stay here by myself.”

  His eyebrows went up.

  “I’m not!”

  “I’d be scared if I found a friend of mine—”

  “No, you wouldn’t be. You’d be sad.”

  He didn’t argue with her. “What about your neighbors?”

  “We get along. Why? Are you going to talk to them?”

  “After I finish up here.” But she could tell that wasn’t what he was getting at. “Are the Scanlons the kind of neighbors who will take you in if you get creeped out in the middle of the night?”

  Quinn looked at him with wh
at she hoped was a measure of resolve. “I’m not going to get creeped out. Alicia’s drowning was almost certainly an accident. There’s no evidence that she—of anything else, is there?” But when he raised his eyebrows again, as if she should know better than to ask such a question, she sighed. “Right, you wouldn’t tell me if there were.”

  He reached into an inner pocket of his crisp dark gray jacket and withdrew a card, setting it on the small painted table next to her wicker chair. “Call me if anything else comes to you. Anything at all. About what you saw this morning, what your friend said yesterday. Don’t dismiss anything as unimportant. Call me.”

  “All right, I will. What about the guy this morning—Huck Boone?”

  “What about him?”

  “Is there anything I should know about him?”

  “He seems legit, but next time he runs past your cottage, I’d let him keep running.” Kowalski pointed to his card. “If for some reason you decide you don’t feel safe, you’ll call me, right?”

  “As opposed to Breakwater Security?”

  He didn’t smile. “As opposed to anyone.”

  Quinn tried not to let his serious tone affect her. If he had information she didn’t, or if he had any suspicions, he wasn’t sharing them with her. She had never met him before today, but FBI agent or not, T.J. Kowalski was obviously closemouthed by nature.

  She glanced at his card. “It says T.J. there, too. What do the T and the J stand for?”

  Now he smiled. “T.J.”

  After he left, Quinn sank against a porch post and gazed out at the water, watching a fishing boat make its way into shore just to the south of her cove. Seagulls hovered over it. In the bright late-afternoon sun, the osprey nest sprawled undisturbed on its buoy, no sign of the birds that had so preoccupied Alicia in her last hours.

  When Quinn started to sob, she pulled herself from the peaceful scene and dashed inside, putting on a kettle for tea. As the water came to a boil and the kettle whistled and rattled, she almost missed the quiet knock on her side door. She saw her neighbors in its window and turned off the heat under the kettle, then let them in.

  Maura Scanlon sniffled, tears in her eyes. She was in her early sixties, a sturdy, five-foot-tall retired nurse with more energy than most people half her age. “Oh, Quinn. We’re so sorry.”

  Don, her husband, a retired accountant, nodded in agreement. “We know it’s an awful day for you. Alicia was a good girl. We enjoyed seeing her.”

  Maura tried to smile. “She was so proud of those yellow pansies she put out on your porch.”

  “They’re beautiful.” Quinn could feel the steam from her tea kettle warming the small kitchen. “Alicia…”

  “We’ll miss her.” Maura held up a steaming covered pot. “We brought you dinner. We couldn’t think of what else to do.” She walked straight to the stove and set the pot on a gas burner. “Crab stew. Nothing fancy. It’ll stay hot for a while, but if you need to reheat it, just don’t let it come to a boil.”

  “Thank you so much. I love crab stew.”

  “Well, you could hardly have a cottage on the Chesapeake and not love crab, could you?” But Maura’s lightheartedness was forced, and she shook her head sadly, her amiable face drawn and pale. “What an awful day.”

  “Did the FBI talk to you?”

  “Oh, yes. Special Agent Kowalski.”

  Don, a lanky man at least a foot taller than his wife, remained by the side door. “We weren’t around much yesterday. We saw Alicia leave in the morning—”

  “In her car?”

  “That’s right.” He paused, glancing over at his wife as he scratched the back of his neck. “We knew she’d had an emotional weekend.”

  “We could hear her crying out on the front porch,” Maura added. She shook her head again, as if she was still trying to absorb the reality of what had happened. “We thought she just needed a good cry. You know, sometimes people do.”

  Her husband sighed with a palpable sadness but said nothing. Quinn grabbed the old cookie tin where she kept tea bags. “I was just making tea. Would you like to join me?”

  But they declined, and she understood. If they stayed, they would end up either rehashing everything or avoiding the topic altogether and staring awkwardly at each other, talking about anything but the events of the past two days.

  Quinn followed the couple out the side door and down the driveway to the road, the air still, the tide going out again. “I met a man from Breakwater this morning,” she said abruptly. “Huck Boone. He was out here jogging just before I found Alicia.”

  Don shook his head. “We didn’t see anyone this morning. To be honest, Maura and I didn’t realize anything had happened until we heard the police sirens.”

  His wife took his hand, her eyes shining with fresh tears. “I wish we’d been able to help.”

  “I don’t know there was anything any of us could have done,” Quinn said quietly.

  Maura stood up straighter, dabbed her eyes. “The Breakwater Security people are out this way from time to time. Jogging, boating. It wouldn’t be unusual to see one. They’re generally polite.”

  “Do they happen to drive black Lincoln Town Cars with tinted back windows?”

  “Black SUVs for the most part,” Don replied. “Why?”

  “Alicia came to see me in Washington yesterday. She was upset. Before she could tell me what was wrong, with any clarity, a black sedan picked her up and whisked her off. I have no idea who it was.”

  The Scanlons exchanged glances with each other. After more than forty years together, they were on each other’s wavelength. Maura said, “I don’t know whose car it was, Quinn, but I don’t mind saying that we don’t approve of Oliver Crawford turning his estate into the headquarters and training facility for this private security firm. Too much can happen. It’s not his field of expertise. I know he went through a terrible ordeal, but how is having a bunch of guys with guns on his place out here going to help him feel safe?”

  “It seems to us he’s leaped without looking,” Don said. “A lot of people in town feel that way, even if they’re sympathetic to his situation.”

  Quinn could understand that sentiment. She had felt something similar ever since Alicia had blazed onto the coffee-shop patio in her semicoherent frenzy. “Did Alicia go out to the Crawford compound that you know of?”

  “No,” Maura said quickly. “Not that we know of.”

  Don dropped his wife’s hand and slung an arm over her shoulder. “We should go. We’re so sorry about Alicia, Quinn. If you need anything, let us know. Knock on the door or give us a call.”

  “Thank you.” Quinn smiled at the couple. “And thank you for the crab stew.”

  After they left, she smelled the rich stew, grateful to have such decent people as neighbors, even if she had the feeling they had held back something, if only out of respect for her friendship with Alicia.

  If they knew anything important—anything that would help people understand what had happened to Alicia—Quinn was positive that Maura and Don would tell the authorities.

  She couldn’t eat.

  Quinn finally gave up trying and put the crab stew in the refrigerator and made herself a pot of chamomile tea, hoping it would help soothe her. She used a flowered teapot she’d found at a flea market and a mismatched, cheerful cup and saucer, sitting at her little kitchen table with its view of the bay. She opened a box of saltine crackers, eating a stack, like a little kid, with her tea.

  And crying, silently at first, tears dripping into her tea until, finally, she was sobbing. She couldn’t stop. She stood up, knocking over her chair, then gave it a good kick as if somehow that would make her feel better.

  She cried until she couldn’t stand up any longer.

  Then she pulled a quilt, another flea-market find, off her bed, wrapped it around her shoulders and went for a walk.

  Yesterday at dusk, after the storms, when she’d stood on the water’s edge, Alicia was almost certainly already dead. Quinn
kept picturing herself by the cove after she’d arrived in Yorkville, but she couldn’t remember seeing anything out of the ordinary. Her red kayak. Gulls. Anything in the water.

  She tightened her quilt around her, passing the Scanlon cottage, continuing along the waterfront on the loop road. There were more cottages, people working out in their yards on the cool but pretty spring evening. She smelled charcoal and barbecue sauce, and she heard children laughing.

  She caught sight of an osprey high in the sky.

  “The osprey will kill me.”

  Had Alicia had a premonition of her own death?

  Or had her fears and delusions lured her out onto the bay at a dangerous time and become a self-fulfilling prophecy?

  Quinn forced herself to pull her gaze from the osprey.

  She could feel where the frigid, wet sand had rubbed her winter-tender feet raw, but at least they were warm now. After the police had arrived, Huck Boone had taken her back to her cottage and insisted she find dry socks.

  She came to the small local motel that marked the halfway point of her usual waterfront walk. Instead of continuing, she sat on a bench, listening to the steady rhythm of the tide. A lone gull perched on a post of the motel’s rickety dock and turned to her, staring at her. Quinn shivered, wondering if it was one of the gulls from that morning, if it recognized her somehow.

  It flew off, and its cry into the empty sky seemed to echo her mix of sadness and loneliness.

  Alicia had come to her for help, and now she was dead.

  A shadow fell over her, and a dark, drop-dead-handsome man handed her a tissue. “Thank you,” she mumbled, wiping her eyes.

  “Aren’t you going to ask me how I happened to have a tissue?”

  She managed a smile. “How?”

  “My mother. She said a man should carry tissues in case a pretty woman needs one.”

  “That’s very old-fashioned, isn’t it?”

  “It was her way of getting a fourteen-year-old to be prepared. If she said I should keep tissues in case I needed them for myself—” He shrugged. “I’d have told her that’s what shirtsleeves are for.”

  Quinn laughed, sniffling. “I’m Quinn Harlowe, by the way.”