by Beverly Bird
"That’s ridiculous," Maddie said too sharply. "You can’t take responsibility for someone else’s actions." Then she thought again of what Rick had done to Josh, and how she blamed herself for his silence.
He shot a look at her, one brow up, as though reading her mind. Then his eyes went back to the road.
"After that," he went on, "she got a couple of DUIs on the mainland, things I couldn’t help her with. A judge ordered her to get professional help drying out. I guess it’s pretty obvious that it didn’t work." He paused, wondering why the hell he was telling her this. The islanders knew better than to mention it to him. "Leslie says that somewhere within that nasty little mind of hers, she wants me to fight back. To hurt her somehow, because she feels guilty."
"Is that why you don’t do it?"
He looked at her again. This time his eyes were appraising. "How do you know I don’t?"
"If you did, you probably would have tonight."
His silence was an acknowledgment in itself. But what he thought was that it was easier. Easier not to fight her. Easier not to date anyone right under her nose. Because then she would drink. And when she drank, she found ways to make him remember.
"Why do you stay here?" Maddie asked suddenly. "Why not just get away from her, from the memories?" And she realized almost distantly that something about Candle Island made it so easy to be intrusive and nosy. It was not a habit she’d ever gotten into before.
A ghost of his smile touched Joe’s face. She thought it was self-mocking this time.
He raised one shoulder in a shrug and started to give his standard, pat answer. "Stubborn male pride, I guess. That’s part of it. If I left, it would be because she drove me out." And then something happened. He heard himself going deeper, thinking about it. "And then there’s the fact that I ache, too," he went on. "Christ, the whole thing still blooms inside sometimes, like some kind of rotten mushroom. If I don’t keep stomping it out, then I keep thinking, what if I had fought for custody? Would I have heard something if Lucy had been with me that night?"
Maddie pulled in a careful breath. "Probably not. They say that with SIDS, the babies just . . . stop breathing."
"Yeah," he said flatly.
He was quiet for a long time. She thought he’d closed the subject. When he finally continued, he surprised her.
"Then there’s the fact that if I went to the mainland, if I worked in a city, I don’t think I’d be able to keep stomping," he said. "Kids die on the mainland, people shoot each other, people shoot up—nah, I don’t need that. I just want peace and quiet, so I can concentrate on keeping myself sane."
Leslie had said that, Maddie remembered. She had said that Joe Gallen would not appreciate a cop-killer landing on his turf.
They were on the bridge. Maddie was both relieved and disappointed that the ride was almost over.
"You okay up here?" he asked suddenly. "In that house?"
Maddie hugged her coat tighter. "I didn’t know it was my house until yesterday," she admitted before she thought about it. He was easy—too easy—to talk to.
So she really didn’t remember anything, Joe realized.
He watched her chin come up, then he could have sworn that he saw it tremble. That made the shifting start inside him again, everything scraping and moving. He realized that he wanted to protect her, as he had failed to do for so many others in the past.
He couldn’t help but wonder if he would ever learn.
"So you have no memory of Candle at all?" he asked bluntly, keeping it professional.
"I didn’t say that," she replied. Too tightly, he thought.
"So what about that day? That last day?" Joe pushed.
"When my parents left? Of course I know what happened." Because Aunt Susan told me, a little voice mocked.
Joe slowed the Pathfinder as they neared her house. "So what happened?"
She looked over at him. "Didn’t you live here then? Don’t you know?"
"I was young."
"How young?" Maddie demanded. Oh, God, had she known him, too? No, she thought, no way. There was no way she could have forgotten Joe Gallen, even a pre-pubescent Joe Gallen. ,
But apparently, she had.
"I was twelve," he said shortly. "You were nine. Even in that tiny school, I don’t remember much of you." She’d been pretty and quiet, he thought, young and almost painfully shy.
"Do you remember my parents?" she demanded.
The urgency in her voice alerted him to tread carefully. He turned into her drive, and the stones crunched beneath his tires. He dropped the gearshift into neutral, and stared thoughtfully out the window.
"No," he said finally. "Beacher—your father—used to work down on the boats. I remember your mother even less than that. You were Wick folks."
"What does that mean?"
"It means the rest of us didn’t have much to do with you."
What had Karen Eagan called the houses? Eyesores. With a sneer in her tone. And it hadn’t been the first time Maddie had heard it.
"Like we carried some kind of stigma up here?" she asked incredulously. "Is that it? Like everyone on the south island is superior to us in some way?"
"Yeah. Used to be folks felt like that."
She wasn’t sure it had changed. She pushed on the door handle angrily. "Thanks for the ride."
"Wait." Joe realized that he wanted to ask her why the starfish bled. "You never answered me," he said instead. "What did happen that day?"
Maddie turned around in the seat, one leg already out, one hip resting on the leather. Her eyes were wide, dark in the moonlight, still sparking. Her hair caught the lights from the dashboard and swung with her quick movement.
He wondered how long it was going to be before he could get the scent of wildflowers out of his truck.
"My aunt told me that my father didn’t show up for work, so the cops came to the house," she answered, still snipping off her words. "And they found me there—here—all alone. My parents had just gone. Walked out on me. Greener pastures, and all that. Why? Is there something else I should know?"
Joe felt his pulse thrum. And he knew, in that moment, that there was no way in hell he was going to be the one to tell her that she had been cowering in a pantry, drenched in her mother’s blood.
Sleeping dogs didn’t lie, he thought. They dozed, ready to wake up at any time, and he’d be goddamned if he’d be the one to take a stick to these particular mutts. Since she had blocked it all so ferociously that she wasn’t even aware of having done so, it was reasonable to assume that taking the wall down would hurt her badly. And toward what end? It wasn’t as though he had a serial killer on his hands, Joe reasoned. Whoever had killed Annabel and Beacher had done it and stopped. It had been a one-shot deal.
Digging into it, making her dig into it, could change all that, could rouse all those snoozing dogs.
Maddie slid the rest of the way out of the truck. "Listen—" he began.
"Oh, damn it!"
"What?" he asked, startled.
"Doe Carlson is here watching Josh. Gina brought her. I’ve got to take her home."
Joe leaned forward, scowling, to peer through the windshield. "Is that Angus?" Even from there, he could hear the man’s snores rumbling. "Never mind. Send Mrs. C out. I’ll give her a lift home. Angus is your problem." Maddie leaned down to look back in at him. Her hair swung forward. "Thanks, Joe," she said more softly.
He watched her walk into the house. She moved with an easy stride, without all the deliberate sashaying that Gina and Cassie and Flannery were prone to. Then again, he thought, Gina and Cassie and Flannery were all competing for a very small pool of available island men.
Maddie Brogan wouldn’t give a damn about the available men on the island. She’d leave and go back to someplace far more cosmopolitan, and that was just where she belonged.
She was different, elusive, honest . . . and hell, she already knew that starfish could bleed.
She disappeared inside, and Mrs. C c
ame waddling out. Joe drove away from the house a little faster than he had to.
Chapter 8
When he stepped outside into his carport on Saturday morning, Joe stumbled over something on his doorstep. His first instinct—always—was that it was another of Gina’s tricks. God knew she’d been drunk enough last night. It would be one of Lucy’s dolls, a dress ...
He hunkered down stiffly, slowly, to inspect the parcel. The hairs on his nape rose instinctually, like any male animal sensing danger, he thought darkly. The human species was not, after all, that very far removed.
Another unpopular theory.
His breath left him harshly, in relief, when he picked up the package. It was from that publisher in New York, the one he’d called on Thursday afternoon about Maddie Brogan’s books.
Abruptly he changed his plans, going back inside. He’d been on his way to the diner for breakfast; instead he stuck a cup of water into the microwave for instant coffee and peered disconsolately into the refrigerator. He dropped two eggs into boiling water. He didn’t own a frying pan and wasn’t entirely sure why he kept buying eggs under the circumstances.
He didn’t wait for them to cool but peeled them and ate them warm, washing them down with mouthfuls of black coffee. He took the books from the envelope.
Half an hour later, he made himself another cup of coffee. He drank it on the back deck, looking, thoughtfully at the roiling sea. If it was this rough on this side of the island, he thought, then a storm was coming.
Oh, hell, yes, a storm was coming to Candle Island.
Damn it. Somewhere in there, somewhere in that pretty mind, Maddie Brogan did remember. He knew that. She just didn’t have a clue that she was repressing those memories.
Joe went back inside, to the books, and flipped through them one more time. They were big, coffeetable editions, and he leaned over them on the breakfast bar. Nearly all the photographs were like that of the starfish, he realized, evil lurking beneath a charming surface. At least fifty percent of them carried a common theme—waves, the beach, sea, and sand.
There was a woman’s bare footprint, perfect and delicate. A white evening glove lay forgotten beside it in the receding foam of the water. The glove was tom and stained by the elements. He’d like to own that one, Joe thought. It tantalized the mind with possibilities. What had happened to the woman? Where had she gone? Had she been chased, haunted, hunted into leaving that glove behind?
Yeah, he thought, he liked it.
There was another of a sand castle. He had to look twice to realize that the tiny, unfurling flag was held up by a rusted, nasty-looking nail, and still another look was required to notice that the sea was eating the castle away from behind.
There were some that didn’t quite fit the mold, he realized, but none of them really gave off a good feeling. There was a toothless, homeless woman crossing a city street against traffic. The cars and her shopping cart were vaguely indistinct, as was her hunched, tired body. But her eyes . . . Jesus, Joe thought, her eyes. They burned with hatred for all the people who had, when she had not. There were tiny, licking flames in her irises.
He pushed the books away abruptly. He grimaced fleetingly at the kitchen wall, a look that was both wry and sad.
He wanted to see to her again.
He wanted to spend some time with her, he thought, more time than it took to make the four-mile drive from the south end of Candle Island to The Wick. He wanted to talk with her, to watch her move. The woman he had spent that brief time with last night had not been the one who had taken these pictures. He wanted to know both women, Joe realized, the one on the surface, and the one inside.
And that, of course, was impossible.
Leslie Mendehlson had once accused him of staying on the island because as long as he was there, Gina would not allow him a new relationship. She’d lost his income, his celebrity—such as it was—and her own prideful coup of catching him. She’d lost their daughter, the one thing that would have held him reasonably close in spite of a divorce. And she couldn’t bear the idea that someone else might enjoy what she had lost She caused problems whenever that seemed like an imminent possibility.
As long as he was there on Candle, Joe knew he wouldn’t risk doing anything that would set her off and invite too many packages on his doorstep. He’d called it bullshit when Leslie had guessed as much—after all, he did go hunting on the mainland from time to time. But
that was safe enough; Gina wasn’t watching. And he wondered, for the first time, if maybe Leslie had been right. His days on the island—and the vast majority of them were spent right there—were solitary. And it was by choice.
Now there was Maddie Brogan, stirring him up, worrying Gina. In fact, Maddie was quite capable of wreaking havoc on the entire peace of the island. His peace, the peace he coveted.
Sooner or later, somebody was going to tell Maddie Brogan just how she had been found that day, he thought. It was a small miracle that it hadn’t happened already. At first he’d feared that the house would trigger her memory. But since the previous night he knew that her defenses were stronger than that. Still, she could not put up a wall against someone telling her.
It would be all in the line of duty if he tried to prevent it, or at the very least, if he tried to make sure he was close at hand when it occurred.
He finally left the breakfast bar. He grabbed his keys again and went downstairs to the Pathfinder.
Angus came to the house in time for lunch.
The sun was almost warm, as though straining to remember summer. It was the kind of morning that Maddie had fantasized about when she had brought Josh to the island. The sea crashed, hurling mist and spray over the cracked asphalt of the road. A few gulls circled overhead.
She and Josh were on the front deck. When Josh saw Angus, he actually made a grunting sound, deep in his throat. He hurried to the steps to meet him, then he whipped around again, going back inside.
It had been so long since Maddie had seen such
animation in him that her throat closed and her eyes burned.
Angus sat down on the steps, and Josh brought him the new kitten. To Maddie’s surprise, the big man reared back from the tiny animal.
"Claws!" Angus shouted.
"Mmmm," Maddie agreed. "That’s true."
"They scratch. Hurt."
"Only when he’s threatened." And that made her think of Gina Gallen. She shook her head against memories of last night. She wasn’t going to allow anything to mar the day.
Then she saw the white Pathfinder coming up the road from the bridge.
Her mood definitely changed. The oddest thing happened to her stomach. It felt as if it curled in upon itself. She was surprised when the truck turned into her drive.
Joe got out, and she realized that he wasn’t limping today. In fact, he walked like a jock, she thought, with an aggressive stride. His hands were stuck in his jacket pockets. His shoulders moved with that rare kind of self-awareness that came to a man who was very sure of his own strength. But when he got closer, Maddie thought that his face just looked like that of a tired cop.
She wondered if he had had a hard time sleeping last night, as she had.
She wondered what had kept him awake.
She wondered what in the world he was doing there.
"Hi," she managed.
He nodded at her. "Hey, Angus," he added.
"Hello, hello," Angus answered.
Maddie stood up. "Would anyone like a cup of coffee?"
Joe started to shake his head, then he looked hopeful. "Do you have the real stuff? You know, out of a coffeepot. Not instant."
"Oh. No, sorry."
He seemed to sigh. "I’ll pass then. Thanks anyway."
He looked down at Josh. "That’s a fine animal you’ve got there," he went on finally, hunkering down to the boy’s level.
Josh looked at him mutely, but his eyes lit. He clutched No-Name a little tighter.
"If he came from Mrs. C, then he’ll p
robably be a good mouser," Joe said.
"Why?" Maddie asked. "Does she train them?"
He looked up at her, startled, then realized that she was joking. Something like she had last night, he thought, when he had told her that he was glad she didn’t think he was sniffing.
Looks and wit, too. It was subtle. You had to be paying attention to catch it. Joe almost smiled.
"Nah. She’s just got a house full of mice," he answered after a moment. "Her place is old, and on a double lot. The lot breeds mice, and the old foundation lets them inside."
"Oh," Maddie answered simply, and she smiled.
The look filled him with warmth. There was that shifting inside him again, in the area of his gut, and the pleasure glowed upward from the crack. Joe looked away from her.
"I just came by to warn you that a storm’s coming." he said shortly, standing again.
"A storm?" Maddie glanced up at the sky disbelievingly. "Josh has had the TV on all morning, and I didn’t hear anything about it."
"Because all the networks tape for the mainland. They forget about us sitting out here in the ocean all by our lonesome. Any bad weather that hits them gets to us hours before. By the time they get around to broadcasting a warning, we’re usually in the grip of it."
"So how do you know one’s coming?"
"The west ocean is choppy."
Maddie nodded slowly, taking his word for it. "Is there anything I should do?"
Joe’s gaze moved over the house. "You might want to tape up this big window."
"I don’t think that really does any good." At least it hadn’t had much effect on the rare hurricanes she’d witnessed down South.
Joe shrugged. "Why take a chance?"
"Because I don’t have any tape."
His gaze swung around to her again, his deep blue eyes assessing her. And then he grinned. "A good reason. Let me see what I’ve got in the truck."