by Beverly Bird
Hector cleared his throat. Joe’s gaze swung to the man.
"You can let that guy go," he said, coming off the desk. "But print him first."
"Print him? For jaywalking?" Hector asked dumbly.
"Oh, shit," Joe muttered, rubbing his hands across his eyes. "Okay, give him a glass of water. Or a cup of coffee in a real mug."
Hector continued to stare at him. "Water?"
"Glass, Hector. Glass is the key word here. I need prints. You following me now?"
"Uh, yeah. Yeah, sure, Joe."
"But I told you I don’t know him," Maddie protested. "I’ve never seen that guy before in my life."
"And your cat died yesterday, and your phone line’s been cut, and he’s here today even though this isn’t tourist season. I’m thinking that maybe your Rick hired him."
She stiffened. "He hasn’t been my Rick for a long time." Then she took a breath and scowled. "I just can’t see it, Joe. The only money Rick ever had was mine."
He gave her a hard look. "Well, it’s not impossible. Graycie’s on the run. He wouldn’t want to be seen, might have somebody else do his dirty work for him. And God knows he could have robbed a bank or something. In for a penny, in for a pound." He went to the door and leaned out. "Hey, Sheila," he shouted again. "Bring me those partials from the window!"
The same woman they had seen in the hall came in and handed him a folder. Joe spread everything out on the desk. Maddie left the chair to let him sit down there and study them.
"Goddamnit," he muttered after a moment, pushing them away.
"What’s the matter?" she asked cautiously.
"The matter is that I don’t have a clue what I’m doing."
"Didn’t they teach you this stuff in cop school?"
He looked up, and a comer of his mouth quirked again. "I told you. I didn’t go to cop school. I went to Penn
State." Then he sobered. "I took law enforcement, and they skimmed this sort of thing, but hell, they have people in the cities who just do prints. Specialists. It’s a science. And Candle Island ain’t a city, and I’m no scientist."
"Oh." Maddie sighed. "Can you send them to Ellsworth?"
"I’m going to. Jesus, they’re going to love me over there." He slapped the file shut again. "I haven’t used their resources like this since ..." He hesitated, thinking about it. "Ever," he finished grimly.
They went out into the hall again. Joe gave the file back to Sheila.
"I think I can tell which ones are yours," he went on. "I think I can ID my own, chiefly from where they were taken on the inside part of the sash. It doesn’t look like Josh ever touched it, but yeah, someone else did, and they left their marks."
Her heart started thrumming as they went outside and got back into the Pathfinder. "That’s good, Joe. That’s great."
"Not necessarily."
"Why?"
"It doesn’t do me any good if I don’t have a suspect to match them to," he pointed out sourly. "And I’m fresh out of suspects right now."
"No! You said you were getting Rick’s file, and that his prints had to be in there—"
"If it’s Rick."
She started to argue, then clamped her mouth shut. He was working harder to believe her than anyone else had yet. She didn’t think she should be so unreasonable as to ask him to rule everyone else out just because of her instincts.
They picked up Josh. Doe told her that he wouldn’t even set foot in her bedroom, much less have anything to do with the remaining kitten. Something inside Maddie withered all over again.
She was so tired. She needed to sleep, and didn’t think she dared. She closed her eyes and wished fervently that they were back in that bar in Ellsworth.
She put that brief, provocative respite out of her mind.
"So what do we do now?" she asked quietly.
"It’ll take an hour or two to get that guy’s prints off whatever glass Hector gave him. Christ, I hope he didn’t screw it up." He turned onto the bridge. "In the meantime, I can’t think of anything else I can do."
Stay with us tonight. Please. Protect us. She hadn’t realized how much she’d been hoping that he would suggest it until he didn’t mention it.
They drove up over the promontory on The Wick, and both of them saw Angus leaning over the windshield of her car at the same time.
"Now what the hell?" Joe growled.
He turned hard into her drive, and the Pathfinder jerked to a stop. Maddie struggled with herself. Her stomach had hardened into a knot again, and she looked back at Josh, wondering if she dared expose him to whatever was happening at the moment. She wasn’t sure what Angus was doing, but she sensed trouble again.
Then again, it was only Angus. She reached over into the backseat and popped the seat belt for him.
"Come on, tiger. We’re home."
By the time she got out of the Pathfinder, Joe’s expression was stony, and Angus’s face was red. They were facing off over the hood of her car. Angus was trying to explain something.
"Wait a minute!" Joe finally roared, and Angus’s face got even redder. "Just wait one goddamned minute," he repeated. "Start from the beginning. Slowly."
Maddie looked at her windshield, and at first she didn’t understand what she was seeing. It was shattered, but something was clumped all over it. She leaned closer and stuck a finger to the stuff. It was tacky. She looked worriedly at Angus again, then she noticed the tube of glue in his hand.
She didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.
"Wait, Joe, wait. Somebody smashed my windshield, right?" she said to Angus. "And you’re trying to fix it?" He nodded hard and held up the glue. She was touched, and her lip trembled. She had to bite it. "Did you go all the way down to the big island to get that?" "What difference does it make?" Joe snarled.
"Relax," Maddie urged quietly. "Remember how the sun and the wind tried to get the coat off that man." "Huh?" But then he remembered the old story about the wind blowing, and the man pulling his overcoat even tighter against it. And then the sun had baked warmly, and he had finally taken it off. "Oh. Right," he said tersely.
"Had the glue," Angus said. "I tried to tell him." He looked at Joe, his eyes pained and angry and accusing.
"He’s just trying to watch out for me, Angus," Maddie said softly. "It’s okay. Who hurt my car? Did you see?" He looked like he was going to cry. "Broke it."
"You broke it?" Joe demanded. "How?"
"No! Your lady! It was your lady!"
"My lady?" And then the look that came over his craggy features made Maddie gasp.
"Gina?" she managed. Impossibly, her heart tried to hope. Gina. It was Gina doing all this. It wasn’t Rick after all.
Then something in her head scoffed. She remembered the circular.
"She said . . ." Angus scrunched his face up. "She
said don’t touch Maddie or she’ll make you give her money. You shouldn’t touch Maddie, Joe. That’s bad." "Touch—" Joe began, then he seemed to choke. Maddie moved quickly to pull Angus backward, a healthy distance from him.
The radio in the Pathfinder began squawking. Maddie jumped.
"Wait a second," Joe snapped. "Don’t anybody move." He went to the Pathfinder and spoke into the handset for a few minutes, his expression going even darker. When he came back, she saw that something ticked at his jaw.
"Did you hurt her, Angus?" he demanded. "Did you hurt Gina?"
Maddie gasped.
"I picked her up and put her at her car," Angus said strongly. "She had to go."
Maddie groaned, and Joe swore. "Well, she’s pressing charges." He looked at Maddie. "Do you want to?"
She looked back at her poor car. Suddenly, she felt light-headed. The Dramamine, the glass of wine ... far too little sleep, she thought. She put a hand on the hood to steady herself.
"I don’t know. My insurance ..."
"Well, as a cop, I ought to tell you that a police report will help expedite things there," Joe said flatly. His blue eyes were somehow bot
h simmering and cold as he, too, looked at her windshield.
"Tell me, Joe," she managed. "What should I do? You know her a lot better than I do."
Take a stand, Joe. He heard Leslie’s voice buzz at him as though she were standing right beside him. It was a hell of a time to start, he thought. He rubbed his forehead.
"It’s your call." He heard himself and his headache
bloomed. "Pressing charges won’t have any effect on whether or not she goes after you again," he went on. "For some goddamned reason, she thinks she’s got a bone to pick with you—" He broke off suddenly and swore again.
"What?" Maddie asked.
"It was last night."
"You do think she—" She started to say killed the cat, but Josh was right beside her. Her hand tightened protectively around his. "She had something to do with all that?" she Finished lamely.
"No." He shook his head absently. "I went over there when I left here, and I never do that, and damn it, she must have thought that I—" He broke off again uncomfortably.
"Was sniffing," Maddie finished for him.
His gaze flashed to her. "Yeah. And all I was doing was checking to see if she had anything to do with your trouble."
Her blood went cold. She was starting to think Gina was a very scary woman. She thought of Joe’s love theories again. She thought of obsession.
Joe stared across the road at the ocean, then he looked slowly back at Angus. "I’m going to have to take you back to the station, pal."
Angus nodded solemnly. "Will she put me in jail? I didn’t hurt her. I just carried her."
"Can you show me? Can you do it to Maddie?"
He moved around behind Maddie and hoisted her clear off the ground before she could react. She gasped, then laughed nervously.
"Well?" Joe asked her. "Angus, you can put her down now."
Angus dropped her. She stumbled for her footing.
"That would do it, all right," Maddie answered,
rubbing her arms where Angus’s fingers had sunk into her flesh. "Although she’s probably just bruised."
Joe tossed his keys in the air, caught them, and blew out his breath. "All right. I’m going to have to let her swear out a complaint. She’s down at the station now, bitching and complaining."
"What took her so long?" Angus asked.
"What do you mean?" Joe looked at him, scowling again.
"She was here a long time ago. In the morning."
Joe’s grin got mean and feral. "Yeah, but I just got back on the island."
He went back to his truck. Angus and Maddie and Josh followed.
"I’ll see what I can do about getting the case dismissed," he muttered when they were driving. "I have a few things I can hold over her head."
"No," Maddie said suddenly. "I do."
Joe looked at her, one brow raising slowly. She wasn’t sure if the look was appraising or appreciative, but it made something curl in her stomach again.
"I want to press charges," she decided. "I know it won’t stop her, Joe. Not if she’s decided she has reason to hate me. But I’ll be damned if I’m going to just . . . just sit by and let her throw rocks at me—at Angus."
He looked somehow both angry and amused. "So you’re going to come out with your dukes up?"
"Damned straight."
This time his other brow shot up. "Must be an estrogen thing."
She was startled. Then, somehow, in spite of everything, she actually laughed.
Chapter 16
Gina didn’t press charges against Angus. Maddie let the whole thing go as well, but Joe wrote up a police report anyway. She suspected it would get lost on his desk until her insurance company asked for it.
"Christ, I don’t need this." Joe shook his head as they drove back to The Wick a second time. Angus had declined to come with them, and Josh was quietly trembling from being forced to go into the police station after all, in spite of all Maddie’s efforts to shield him. For that alone, she hated Gina.
"Has she ever done anything like this before?" Maddie asked.
Something in his stomach tightened. "She hasn’t had much cause."
He stopped the Pathfinder in her drive again. This time he sat behind the wheel, the engine idling. Then he pushed on his door. "I’ll go in first."
Hope filled her that he would stay for a while. Then it splintered into something jagged.
"Do you think anybody’s in there?" she asked, alarmed. "Because Josh—"
Joe cut her off by getting out and slamming the Pathfinder door. Still, he had heard her.
"What I think is that a whole lot of weird shit’s been going on lately. I think that if anybody else has paid you a visit, I’d like to know about it now, rather than after I get home and put my feet up."
"Where’s home?" she asked, chasing after him. Take us there. Don’t leave us here alone.
He paused and looked over his shoulder at her oddly. "On the water. On the west side on the big island."
Josh followed them up the steps to the deck and put his hand in Joe’s. Maddie’s heart spasmed all over again.
Too much was happening. How desperately she needed to think, and how much there was to think about. Maybe it was better that he would just leave them alone for a while after all.
They went inside. Nothing had been disturbed. There were no visible signs of forced entry, no mark of anyone having been there except for the pale pink-silver dust that still clung to the kitchen window. Joe swore and grabbed a sponge from the sink to wipe it away.
"I told them to clean up after themselves," he muttered.
"Don’t worry about it." Maddie tried to take the sponge from him. "I’ll take care of it later. It’ll give me something to do."
He shot her a look. "You need to get some sleep. You look like hell."
"Why, thank you very much."
In the dim light, it almost looked as though he flushed. "You just look beat," he clarified tightly.
"I am, but I won’t be able to sleep." Then she wondered if she sounded as though she were fishing. I’m too
scared to stay alone. I’ll be up all night. "I’ll take Josh into my room with me," she decided aloud, bringing her chin up. She looked at Josh and forced a grin. "We can camp in, okay?"
There was no response.
Joe finally finished with the window and tossed the sponge back into the sink. He moved slowly, thoughtfully, into the living room again.
"Same thing goes," he said. "I’ll have a car come by every fifteen minutes or so. That’s the longest you’ll actually be alone."
"A lot can happen in fifteen minutes."
Something happened to his face, a certain hardness, maybe even self-disgust. But it was gone before she could make anything of it.
"I’m doing my damnedest to handle this professionally, Maddie."
"You’re handling it fine," she answered slowly.
"It’s frustrating. I don’t have a big-city department to back me up, and I don’t have big-city experience."
She thought of the way he had held her that morning. "I kind of like the small-town approach better."
He shot her another strange look, not quite a smile, not quite a frown. He went outside.
"Anyway, you’ve still got those flares."
But no phone, no car, she thought, and shook that right out of her head again. She could still drive the Volvo if she absolutely had to. It would be dangerous, but danger was relative.
"I’ll check in on you first thing in the morning," he went on. He ruffled Josh’s hair. Josh flinched but didn’t move away. Joe looked away from both of them.
"I can’t stay up here myself," he said finally. "That would really set Gina off."
Maddie let out an unsteady breath. "I see."
She didn’t, he thought, not really, and there was no way he was going to enlighten her.
He went back to the Pathfinder, and she watched his taillights recede, her throat tightening, her hand like a claw on the doorknob. Very slowly, very car
efully, Maddie closed and locked the door.
Joe pulled into his carport, turned the keys off in the ignition, and sat for a while. He listened to the dull roar of the sea as the west-side water churned and threw up spray. He let his eyes move around cautiously, not entirely sure that Gina wouldn’t have immediately turned her anger on him after she’d left Maddie’s. But nothing seemed out of place in the carport.
He finally got out of the truck and went inside, taking the stairs to the kitchen two at a time. Dusk was falling hard. He got a beer and stepped out onto the back deck. The sky was a mottled purple-black.
He had to work his way out of the mess he was in, Joe thought. He had to figure out what he was going to do about all of it. About the possibility of an old mystery resurfacing and a woman with vulnerable, searching eyes. About himself.
He felt as if he was treading water, more or less as Leslie had always accused him of doing, but it was an impossibility to keep it up indefinitely. Sooner or later, he thought, a body had to start swimming or sink.
He drank deeply from his beer, scowling as the sun finished its descent behind the western sea. He couldn’t see the mainland from there. In half an hour, the only telltale glimpse of its presence would be Jonesport’s lights. They would make the sky glow faintly there in one spot, with a gray-yellow tinge instead of steady, unrelenting black.
He thought about that, about a single almost-light in the darkness.
Sort of like Maddie Brogan was becoming for him.
He should have stayed up there with her tonight. He knew that. Or he should have brought her back to his place. The plea had been there in her eyes, and he had all but ignored it, had shut it out. But if Graycie—or a killer with a twenty-five-year-old conscience—was running around in the immediate vicinity, it was dangerous leaving her on her own, flares or no flares.