Luanne Rice

by Summer's Child

  “Yes, I will,” he said.

  She gave him the directions—involving driving over a chain bridge, taking a left at the chasm, going past the sawmill—landmarks appropriate to the kind of place a woman would come to hide in. Patrick had been on a roller coaster since getting to Cape Hawk, and it showed no signs of stopping.

  He buttoned his shirt, strapped on his ankle holster, and tried Maeve once more—if she didn’t answer tomorrow, he’d start to worry. Then he was out the door. Whatever Marisa was calling for, Patrick felt glad to be solving crimes again.

  The road seemed like something out of a fantasy saga—it wound high into the rocky cliffs and was lined with tall trees that formed a crazily primeval forest. Patrick saw a family of moose staring out from the side of the road. A little further along, a black bear lumbered across. Owls called, and something swooped in for a kill, and the screams were terrible and then stopped.

  Patrick actually found it comforting. Having worked the Major Crime Squad for so many years, he knew that people were capable of much worse cruelty than the vilest predator in nature. He could understand why a battered woman would find this environment so soothing. It was far from civilization—better known in America as “suburbia”—where everyone dresses nice, talks nice, and acts upstanding. Patrick had seen what went on behind the closed doors of some of those “nice” houses, including Mara Jameson’s.

  He turned into Marisa’s driveway, saw her standing in the doorway. Her body was silhouetted from behind, and her loose cotton blouse rippled in the summer breeze. Patrick reminded himself she had called him as a cop.

  “Hi,” she said as he approached.

  “Hi,” he said.

  “I feel funny, for calling you,” she said, hugging herself, seeming very nervous as she looked up at him.

  “Why?” he asked. She had beautiful eyes, brown velvet, soft and intelligent. She stared up at him.

  “Because I once asked for a restraining order. I wasn’t believed, and my request was denied.”

  “I’m sorry about that,” he said carefully. He’d never want to bash his fellow law-enforcement officials. But he knew about some domestic violence complaints—especially upscale people, with successful, well-spoken husbands. By the time the woman was ready to ask for help, she often felt and sounded crazy—because he had driven her there, and because she had protected him for so long.

  “My daughter’s not here tonight,” Marisa said. “I thought maybe I could talk to you a little. And run something by you.”

  “Sure,” Patrick said. She was tall and slender, and she moved with grace and hesitation—as if she had been unsure of herself for a long time. Patrick saw her glancing back at him, as if assessing his thoughts and moves.

  They walked through the living room, and she gave him an apologetic glance. “My computer is in the bedroom,” she said.

  “That’s fine,” he said, knowing she needed reassurance that he didn’t have the wrong idea.

  Nodding, she led him across the room to the desk. Her computer was a workhorse. The keyboard looked ancient, and the monitor was enormous. A worn Johns Hopkins sticker was stuck to the side of the monitor.

  “You went there for college?” he asked.

  “Nursing school,” she said. “I’ve had this computer since then. When I left home, in April, it was one of the only things I took. It was so important to me, so I could have the Internet and e-mail—a way to stay in touch with some people I loved. My mother …”

  “Why did you leave home?”

  “The same reason as Lily. Mara.”

  “I’m sorry,” Patrick said.

  “Thank you,” she said, looking over, as if she knew he meant it. Should he tell her that she shouldn’t feel bad or ashamed, that it wasn’t her fault? Did she know that already? Did she know that men like that often targeted women in the healing professions? But then, Patrick didn’t like statistics. That particular statistic left out people like Lily—if that’s what she wanted to call herself, that’s how he’d try to think of her. He gazed at Marisa, sitting down at her computer, her thin shoulders drawn up toward her ears, and wondered how long she’d been carrying this kind of stress.

  “Do you go online?” she asked. “Are you used to the Internet?”

  “I’m retired.” He smiled. “It’s one of the ways I make the days go by. Fishing, the Yankees, and research online.”

  “I do that too,” she said. “Research. Like, when I found out Rose had Tetralogy of Fallot, I spent days on the nursing school website.”

  “Tetralogy of what?”

  “Fallot,” Marisa said. “It’s a complex heart defect.”

  Patrick nodded and felt a tug inside. He pictured Lily and her daughter standing there at the inn door—and then he remembered Anne putting back the signboard—looking just like one of those small-town fundraisers you saw at diners and dry cleaners everywhere, where some child in the community needed medical help. Something new for Maeve to deal with—her granddaughter had heart problems. That made Patrick think of Maeve again, but right now he was focused on Marisa.

  “Anyway,” Marisa said. “There’s a band I like—Spirit.”

  “Everyone likes Spirit,” Patrick said, and he hummed a few bars of “Lonesome Daughter.”

  “Not bad,” Marisa said, giving him a real smile for the first time since he’d arrived.

  “Do you play their music on your fiddle?”

  “Every so often. But that’s not what this is about… .”

  “What, then?”

  Glancing toward the computer, her smile faded. “Well, there’s a Spirit fan website. It’s embarrassing to admit, but I go there sometimes—and have, for a few years. Spirit fans tend to be, well, kind of like the band itself. Smart, playful, but with social consciences. My kind of people.”

  Smart, playful, social conscience: Patrick checked them off, nodding. Well, maybe not so smart. He found himself wanting to be the kind of person this woman with the brown velvet eyes would like.

  “Besides which, there’s a fair amount of trading of CDs and live concert recordings not available anywhere else. I mean, well—I know you’re a police officer, so this isn’t anything I do, but it is sometimes done on the board—bootlegs.”

  Patrick nodded, trying not to look too stern.

  “Well, recently I was reading the posts on the board, and I realized that someone has been committing fraud.”

  “Fraud? How?”

  “By pretending his sister lost her home in a hurricane. He told everyone that Hurricane Catherina swept through, wrecking her house and injuring her son very badly. Spirit fans, well, they came out in droves. He calls himself Secret Agent. I’ve printed out a few of his posts—” She handed them to Patrick and he began to read through them.

  He saw the setup instantly—bait and hook. He shook his head. Years ago he had worked with the FBI on a case of Internet fraud. Chat rooms and message boards were prime opportunities for con men and predators. They were the perfect places for the Dr. Jekylls of the world—no one could look through the screen and see that the person they were chatting with was really Mr. Hyde.

  “You can see that many people responded. At one point, Secret Agent kept a running tally of what people had sent. Right here, it’s up to seven thousand dollars. Just like one of those fundraiser signs that looks like a thermometer—‘Help us meet our goal.’ In this case, he wanted to get to ten thousand.”

  “Look at all the people who wrote in,” Patrick said, amazed at the goodwill and innocence of strangers. He thought back to the FBI case he’d worked on—he and Joe Holmes, an agent who had married a local Hubbard’s Point woman, Tara O’Toole, had run down a couple who had gotten retirees to invest their life savings in penny stocks. The couple had lived in a huge house overlooking Silver Bay. The retirees had lost everything.

  “We’re a trusting bunch,” Marisa said.

  “Spirit fans?”

  “People in general,” she said. “I trusted this man my
self.”

  “You sent in money for his sister?”

  She shook her head, and angry tears appeared in her eyes. “I married him,” she said.

  “Secret Agent is your husband?” he asked.

  “My ex-husband,” she corrected. “I think so. I know he used to troll message boards—I used to go on his computer sometimes, to find out if he was having an affair. There’s something about the style of his posts here—earnest, funny—that makes me think it’s Ted.”

  “Why would he choose the Spirit board?”

  “He knows I’m a fan. I think maybe he was hoping to find me online. ‘Secret Agent’ is the title of the only Spirit song he really likes. The thing is, I never posted here until very recently—so he couldn’t find me.”

  “That’s good,” Patrick said. “That’s good.”

  “Here are my only posts,” she said. “My screen name is White Dawn.”

  Patrick read the first, about how the sister would be getting money from the government if she was in a disaster area. Then he read the second, “Beware,” and smiled. Then he read the third: “Hurricane Catherina didn’t hit Homestead. It tracked north, dude. You can do a better job conning people if you first check out the storm track on the NOAA website.”

  “You wrote that?” he asked, grinning.

  “Yep.”

  “Whoa,” he said, reading the flurry of angry replies from the board. “And a shitstorm ensued.”

  “Yes, it did. Did he commit fraud? Can you catch him for it?”

  “Well,” Patrick said, remembering back to the FBI investigation. “Whenever you go online, you leave a trail. There’s always a signature left at the website, of your IP number—which is really like a fingerprint.” He took out his cell phone—to see whether he still had Joe Holmes programmed in. “I think it’s a good possibility we can nail him,” he said.

  “Who are you going to call?” she asked.

  “FBI,” he said. “But first, do you mind if I try someone else? Just to update her on a different case?”

  “Lily’s grandmother?” Mara asked, smiling. “Go ahead.”

  Patrick hit redial, and the number rang, but again there was no answer. His stomach knotted—it was now ten at night, and Maeve should definitely be there. Before gathering his thoughts on her whereabouts, he needed to stay focused on this Secret Agent guy. Scrolling through his stored phone numbers, he found Joe Holmes’s. Just before dialing, he glanced over at Marisa. “What’s your ex-husband’s real name?” he asked.

  “Ted,” she said. “Ted Hunter.”

  Patrick nearly dropped the phone. “What did you say?”

  “Ted Hunter.”

  “As in—” It couldn’t be possible. “What’s his whole name? The one on his driver’s license.”

  “Edward Hunter,” she said.

  And then Patrick had to sit down.

  Chapter 26

  Liam had a family now. That was how it felt to him, taking care of Lily and Rose. After the situation at the inn, he had felt them too vulnerable to go back to their own house, so he had brought them up the hill, to his home. Lily seemed relieved, as if she’d been on the run, making decisions for so long, and tonight she just needed a rest.

  Determined to give that to her, Liam drove through the stone posts at the bottom of his property and then up a long, curving drive. He lived in a spruce forest, in a large stone house that had once belonged to a quarry owner. Because the house wasn’t visible from the road, he knew that the local kids had turned it into a mythological mansion—where Captain Hook lived. He glanced over at Rose and hoped she wouldn’t be scared. But she was half-asleep, just smiling to be back in Cape Hawk.

  Liam carried her, and together the three of them walked in his front door. Liam’s heart was pounding with excitement and nervousness and pride. To have Rose and Lily here meant everything to him.

  “It’s been a long time,” Lily said, smiling wearily.

  “Do you remember the first time you came here?” he asked.

  “When Rose was about three weeks old,” she said. “She had a fever, and there’d been a bad storm, and the phones were out, and a big oak was blocking my road, so I couldn’t get out. I hiked up here, to ask you to help.”

  “Did he help?” Rose asked.

  “He always helped,” Lily said softly.

  Liam smiled gratefully. He turned on lights, hoping his bachelor style wouldn’t turn them away. He had stacks of oceanographic journals everywhere, alongside piles of shark books, photos of shark attacks on marine mammals, tapes and videos of eyewitness accounts of shark attacks on humans. He had solid oak furniture and a bunch of red pillows, a big Tabriz rug Camille had given him from the family collection, a lot of bookcases without space for even one more book, and a TV in the corner, as if by afterthought.

  “It’s cozy here,” Rose said.

  “Do you think so?” he asked, crouching down beside her. “I’m glad.”

  “I don’t understand why we came here,” she said. “Instead of our regular house.”

  Liam exchanged a look with Lily, wanting her to answer.

  “Is it because of that man at the inn?” Rose pressed.

  “Yes, honey,” Lily said. “He’s someone … who knows a person I knew long ago. It’s not important tonight. The only thing we have to do is get you to bed.”

  Liam carried Rose upstairs, to one of the spare bedrooms. Lily checked out the hallway and saw a second empty bedroom next door. Liam pulled out clean sheets from the linen closet in the hall, put them on the twin bed. Rose seemed to be studying him more carefully than usual. Every time he glanced over, he saw her gazing at him with complete intensity. Lily set Rose’s medication out on the bureau and went to get a glass of water.

  “What is it, Rose?” he asked.

  “This is what I wished for,” she said. “On my birthday.”

  “Coming here?” he asked.

  But Rose was either too tired to talk, or she had decided she’d said enough. Lily returned with the water, and they went through the long process of giving Rose all her medication. Then Liam and Lily tucked her into bed, and Lily told her she’d be sleeping in the spare room just next door.

  “Where will Dr. Neill be?” Rose asked.

  “My room’s downstairs. But I’ll hear you if either of you needs anything.”

  “Thank you,” Rose said, putting her arms around his neck to kiss him good night. Having this child in his house, knowing what she had just gone through, moved Liam to the core.

  After Rose was settled, he and Lily went back downstairs. He put a kettle on the stove and turned to look at her. She stood there, leaning on his kitchen counter. Her sable hair gleamed in the lamplight. He went to her, tilted her face up, kissed her the way he’d been wanting to kiss her all day.

  They were hungry for each other—in a way Liam had never experienced before. It was as if they were separate from real life, completely swept up in whatever was happening between them. But the reality was so deep and great, Liam knew he had to pull away.

  “Are you okay?” he asked.

  “I think so. I’m just not sure which end is up. Rose’s surgery went so miraculously well, and then to come home to—my past.”

  “How did he find you?” Liam asked.

  Lily blinked and smiled, looking down at her feet. Liam had expected her to be upset, even frantic, but she didn’t seem that way at all. “My grandmother,” she said.

  “She knew?”

  Lily nodded. “She didn’t know where I was going, but I couldn’t just run away without telling her. I could never do that to her. You don’t know her, Liam, but she is the smartest, most amazing woman in the world. She raised me to be so strong. I thought I could go through anything.”

  Liam listened and watched, seeing sparks in the blue eyes he loved so much.

  “But I couldn’t. Not Edward—not when I was about to have a baby. I knew he’d never let me get away, and there was no way I was ever going to subject my d
aughter to him.”

  “You knew the baby was a girl,” Liam said. “I remember that, the night she was born. You held out your arms and said, ‘Give her to me,’ even before I told you.”

  “Yes, I knew. I’d had a lot of ultrasounds. He used to knock me down—I told you. And pretend it was my fault, try to convince me I was the clumsiest person. A cow, he called me.”

  “I’ll kill him,” Liam said, and he meant it. He felt hatred and rage boiling inside—something he’d never felt before. Even for the shark—when he was young, before he’d understood shark behavior and predation, even then he’d never felt this level of cold burning hatred.

  “I couldn’t let him be part of Rose’s life,” Lily said. “If I’d waited till after she was born, there would have been custody issues. Not that he wanted her—he didn’t. He made it really clear. But I just knew—he would have used her to get to me. He would have tortured us both, and I don’t use that word by mistake. Edward lived to cause pain.”

  “What kind of person would do that?”

  “One without conscience or empathy,” Lily said quietly. “And there’s more too. Edward is a killer.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I’ll tell you sometime,” she said. “Not tonight, but soon.”

  “And your grandmother knew it?”

  Lily nodded. “Most of it. Enough so she wanted to help me get away.”

  “Did she help you find Cape Hawk? As a place to run to?”

  “No,” Lily said. “I found it on my own. It turns out that I have a connection with Camille, and that she has a connection with Edward.”

  “My aunt? Camille Neill?”

  “Yes,” Lily said. “My parents died in the same ferry disaster as her husband, Frederic. I used to keep all the clippings about it, and once I came upon something about how Camille donated the memorial stone. I felt so grateful to her for that.”

  “She’d be happy to know that,” Liam said.

  Lily smiled. “I’m glad. I know she’s scarred, just as I am. Losing someone that way is terrible. It makes you vulnerable … I think it made me an easier mark for Edward. I was an orphan—it didn’t matter that I was thirty years old. I was still needy.”