“The door was open. The rock was so loud you couldn’t have heard me anyway,” he pointed out. “You didn’t answer me. Don’t you ever take a day off?”
She lifted one shoulder, still annoyed with him over what she’d heard at lunch. “I want to paint before I move in. Nick and Jordan don’t mind if I check out of my room this weekend. In fact, with all the out-of-state workers, they could use my room. And I’m ecstatic to get settled.”
“How come you didn’t hang around today at lunch? I saw you at the site. Why didn’t you stick around?”
“You were on the phone.”
“So? You could’ve waited until I finished my conversation, said hello. I could’ve shown you around.”
“I don’t think so. I don’t usually make a habit of listening to men’s conversations, especially when they’re in the middle of flirting with women so openly over the phone.”
For a moment his temper wanted to flare at the allegation. That is, until he caught the spurt of jealousy he saw in her hazel eyes. Logan’s own twinkled with amusement. “You overheard my conversation with Valerie?”
“I have no idea who it was,” she said as frost gathered in her voice.
“Valerie,” he concluded. He couldn’t say why picking up on the green-eyed monster thrilled him so much, only that it did. “Kinsey, Valerie Trace is my agent. I’ve known the woman for more than a dozen years.”
“What do I care? How you talk to other women is none of my business.” She’d almost added that he’d never talked to her like that with such warmth in his voice, but managed to hold her tongue from making the comparison.
“Even if the woman’s old enough to be my mother, has been happily married for thirty-five years to the same man, and has a couple of cute little grandkids to show for it?”
“Humph,” Kinsey muttered. “I know what I heard.”
He stepped closer, smeared the drop of paint spatter stuck to her cheek. “You heard me sweet-talking my first and only agent who happens to love my work and shows it by making galleries pay through the nose for it.”
Her eyes lifted to his. He saw the flush on her cheeks and heard the grudging admission, “I’m sorry then.”
“Don’t be. It’s a definite boon to my ego.” And how sick was that? he wondered.
“You certainly don’t need more of an advantage.”
“I have an advantage?”
“Oh be quiet.” She needed a change of subject. Putting her hands on her hips, she asked, “What do you think so far? This is such a cute little place I can’t wait to get moved in. By the way, good call on the color. It has enough orange in it to pop yet not enough to make it look pumpkin, which is not the look I’m going for. Gerald at Ferguson’s had to mix it five times to get the perfect shade. I think he got exasperated with me a couple of times.”
He let her go on as she scoffed at the mediocre hues Gerald had come up with. As soon as she bothered taking a breath he asked, “Want some help?”
“What? Of course not, you look beat. It’s been a grueling three days for you at the site. I’ve got this.”
He admired her sense of independence, the fact that she didn’t seem to expect him to pick up a brush just because she was elbow-deep in paint. Maybe that was why he wanted to be a part of finishing the job. Maybe that was why he wanted to see her moved in and her new place take shape. He wasn’t exactly sure the reason. But something about her pulled at him and had since the first time she’d walked up to his lighthouse. It could’ve been that he wanted to get her flat on her back in that urn top maple bed. Whatever it was had him offering, “Do you have an extra brush?”
She eyed him for at least half a minute. “Have you eaten dinner, Logan?”
“Not yet.”
“Jordan brought over chicken and pasta salad for me when she found out I intended to start this tonight. It’s in that basket on the counter. There’s plenty. Go sit over by the window and eat. That way you’ll get a bit of fresh air and not breathe in so many paint fumes.”
“I’m used to the smell of paint and chemicals,” Logan pointed out.
She tilted her head and smiled. “I’m pretty sure that’s in your bio somewhere. But it isn’t necessary to help me. I’ve painted walls before. In fact.” She turned back to her work. “One wall and I’m almost done.”
“I’ll eat on one condition.”
She grinned. “I guess I could eat another drumstick. That is what you were going to say, right?” She went over to the fridge, took out two Newcastle Ales, handed one off to Logan.
“Maybe.” He opened the basket and sniffed the food. “This looks fantastic.”
“Jordan’s a good cook. She makes fancy dishes though that I’ve never tried. Now me, I know how to fancy up tuna, make meatless spaghetti, fix a meal out of potatoes, and do wonders with ramen noodles.”
Logan stared at her. “I hear you on the noodles. I didn’t have much money when I first got to San Francisco. Those were lean times. My parents didn’t support the idea of their son becoming a ‘sissy artist.’ I believe those were the exact words my father used as I packed my bags to walk out of his house at eighteen. Anyway, once I got to the big city, my first job was a carpenter by day. Troy sort of reminds me of myself at that age. Raw talent. No one around to support your efforts knowing you’re on your own no matter what happens. That first year, I’m not sure how I made ends meet. But I’d buy ramen noodles and eat those until I couldn’t stand the sight of them. Where did you and your mother live in the Bay, Kinsey?”
“We called it the Tendernob. My mom worked for a Nob Hill family about twenty blocks from our house. For years she rode the bus back and forth. You wouldn’t believe the difference a couple of blocks can make though.”
“Oh yeah, I would. I used to live in a rundown two-hundred square-foot studio apartment half the size of this one near Sixth and Market.”
“You’re kidding? I lived off Golden Gate Avenue.”
“Neighbors and didn’t know it. We could have picked up our dry cleaning and rubbed elbows with each other.”
“Well, you have a few years on me,” she said with a glimmer in her eye. “It’s interesting we had to come to a tiny town like Pelican Pointe though to run into each other.”
While they finished the chicken he told her about his time at the arts institute. They reminisced about the Tenderloin National Forest, where Logan had helped paint one of the murals and Kinsey had volunteered in high school to plant some of the vegetation.
“That was back before my mother’s diagnosis. It’s still one of my favorite places in the neighborhood. That and Boeddeker Park. My mother used to take me there as a kid.”
“Love the mural there.”
“Oh yeah. That area, my area, is one of the best.”
“I’m surprised you left it.”
She moved a shoulder. “Too many memories maybe, time for a change of scenery to start fresh.”
“I felt like that. But after moving to L.A. it just didn’t seem to have the same ambiance as the Bay did.”
By the time they got down to cleaning up, he was tugging her out the door. “The smell of paint is overwhelming in here. Let’s take a walk down to the cove. I could use the fresh air.”
“But…I wanted to finish this tonight.”
“Take a walk with me and I’ll help you when we get back. Like you said, you’re almost done. One wall, two rollers, won’t take us all that long.”
If only she could resist those sharp green eyes, the little dimple on his chin, and all that long hair. How sad was it that she couldn’t or didn’t even want to try?
The full moon seemed so close they had only to reach up and give it one good yank for it to fall into their hands. Stars glittered and twinkled as she followed Logan along the trail to the familiar steps.
“Give me your hand,” Logan offered, reaching to take hers to guide her down the steep stairs.
Once they reached the sand, Kinsey had held her curiosity in check for too long
. She hadn’t even known who his agent was. And she’d considered sleeping with the guy. She might have given him the benefit of the doubt with the conversation she’d overheard if he ever bothered to open up about himself. Why couldn’t he talk to her like he did this Valerie person? Not knowing that much about him just led to misunderstandings. Even though his mood seemed lighter, she had to dig. She considered now as good a time as any. “Why did you come back here, Logan? To Pelican Pointe?”
He stalked off a few feet and she watched as he stomped back over to her as if judging whether or not he could trust her. He must have deemed her worthy because he said, “I need to know what happened to my sister, Megan. She died in this town. I want to find the person who killed her.”
Kinsey’s mouth gaped open. That was the last thing she expected him to say. All kinds of questions bombarded her brain. “When did this happen? Exactly? You’re certain the killer is still here in town? That’s why you were spooked at the cliffs the other night?”
“I’m convinced the killer is still here. Someone here, some everyday-looking guy walks around with a secret, walks among all of us every day without a backward glance or a thought of what he did to Megan.” All of a sudden he wanted to tell her all of it because there was so much more. But before he could, she was asking for details.
“Wait a minute. Back up. First tell me what happened to your sister?”
“I was fifteen at the time. It was August, nearing the end of our time here. My grandfather and I decided we’d go camping out to Yosemite to cap the summer. We did stuff like that together all the time. But Megan was two years older. She’d gotten to that age, a teenage girl, where she wanted to be around her friends, not her little brother and grandfather. Megan stayed behind. I wanted her to go. I begged her. Like any good kid brother, I made a nuisance and nagged on her about it for a week before we left. And like any older sister, Megan dug in her heels and said she was too old to go camp out in the woods like some little kid. The last words we said to each other were bitter, yelling, typical brother and sister stuff.”
“Logan, you had no way of knowing that would be the last time you’d speak to her. When did you learn that she’d died?”
He shook his head, stormed off again, came back. “She went missing, Kinsey. Megan disappeared, vanished into thin air. That June and July she’d been dating someone, sneaking around. I know because she came back home a couple of times late, way after curfew. I don’t even remember his name. My grandmother didn’t know who it was either. If we did, I’d hunt him down, get some answers from him. But when it happened, I was too overcome with grief to think clearly when she didn’t come back.”
“Of course you were. So wait…let me understand. During the summers you and Megan came here to stay in Pelican Pointe with your grandparents. Every summer?” There was a story there, Kinsey suspected.
“Pretty much every summer up until that last one. After Megan went missing, I didn’t come back at least not until it was too late.” When he saw her questioning look, he added, “My grandmother’s funeral. Up till then though, when I was a kid I spent all school year waiting for summer vacation. At one time, coming here was something to look forward to. But I was a kid then. I loved it here because I learned to swim here, learned to surf in the water off Smuggler’s Bay. So did Megan. We were inseparable back then. After she disappeared, it wasn’t the same. But at the same time I missed coming here, spending time with my grandparents. Does that make sense?”
“Sure. This place held good memories and then bad.”
“My grandparents were never the same after that either. I think they blamed themselves. I know my father blamed them. Maybe I just outgrew the place. I don’t know.” He ran a hand through his hair. “All I remember when it happened was that I hated the town. Someone here knows something. I can feel it. It may have been twenty years ago—”
“But you want answers. That’s completely understandable considering the circumstances.”
“Damn right I do. But you don’t understand, Kinsey. Pelican Pointe wasn’t exactly a big tourist destination, even back then. There was no hotel for tourists to book. Hell, the only hotel in the area had gone out of business and the Fannings had purchased the property so they could turn it into a marine rescue center. Most of the time the tourists bypassed Pelican Pointe altogether. If they wanted to stay in the area for any length of time they headed to Santa Cruz to do it. We didn’t get a lot of strangers in town. Get it? And if we did they stuck out like a sore thumb. That’s why I think whatever happened to Megan, happened at the hands of a local.”
“Sounds reasonable. So you look at everyone as a suspect.”
“Sounds pathetic I know. But I look at anyone over a certain age. Megan was seventeen. Anyone say around the same age as me up to five or ten years older. That’s a general range of thirty-five to forty-five and up now.”
“What was the town like back then?”
“Not much has changed. But back then kids pretty much had the beach all to themselves. The grownups did their thing. We had all day to do ours. All we had to do was hike down the cliff, carry our surfboards, hit the waves, spend the lazy days of June, July, and August on the beach. It was an idyllic place for two active kids to spend the summer. Back then Megan and I were close, two years apart and she was a bit of a tomboy. We did everything together. We had to be. Our parents weren’t that—visible, I guess you’d say. Our grandparents made it easy on us to just…be kids. They didn’t fight like Mom and Dad did. They had rules. We had chores. You went to church. You were at home by a certain time. That sort of thing.”
Her mind was on overload considering the options. “If it’s a local they had to own some type of business to stick around for so long.”
“Why do you say that? I’ve thought the same thing but I’d like to hear why you think so.”
“Well, for one, look around this town. It’s difficult to make a living here unless you have some type of stable income. Why stay around a place for twenty years if you don’t? Who has the most stable incomes in town? Business owners, especially ones that have been in the area over decades. That is, if your killer is still here.”
“Wow, that’s remarkably astute. Why is it you didn’t ask if I thought she just picked up and left?”
“Logan, I see it on your face. You wouldn’t have taken this huge step to come here if you didn’t think something bad happened to her. What do you think happened to Megan? Surely you have a theory?”
“That’s just it, Kinsey. I have no idea. The minute we got back from the camping trip, my grandmother told us Megan had gone out that Friday night on a date and never came home. We didn’t have cell phones back then. And even if we had, I doubt my grandmother could have gotten through to us.”
“How is it your grandmother didn’t know who Megan was dating?”
He shook his head. “I don’t even know that. But that summer was different than any other in a lot of ways. Megan and I had grown apart. Maybe it’s just one growing up faster than the other. And frankly, I didn’t pay much attention at the time. I didn’t know that nugget of info would ever come up.”
“I’m really sorry, Logan. But didn’t your grandparents file a missing persons report?”
He nodded. “Of course they did. They had to wait forty-eight hours though. Things were different back then. That was the rule. Anybody went missing you waited for an eternity before doing anything about it. I never thought she ran off, Kinsey. Megan didn’t pack any of her clothes. She didn’t take a single, goddamn thing with her. What teenage girl takes off without the money she’d been saving, or her makeup, or her best pair of jeans? If I tell you something you have to promise me you won’t tell another living soul.”
“Give me a dollar.”
“Huh?”
“Give me a dollar. It’s my retainer fee. You’re retaining me as your lawyer. That way what you tell me is in strict confidence, client to lawyer privilege.” When he gave her a strange look, she added, “It�
��s the law, Logan. I’m sworn to keep whatever you tell me confidential.”
He looked so relieved to hear that, he withdrew a dollar from his wallet, handed it off.
“That makes it official. Now, what is it you want me to promise I won’t tell anyone?”
“There have been at least ten young women, teens, girls really, who have vanished from this area without a trace.”
Again, Kinsey’s mouth dropped open. “Ten? That just vanished? Are you sure about that? From Pelican Pointe? Come on, Logan. That would make the papers. It would be on the Internet.”
He shook his head. “I don’t think anyone’s bothered connecting the dots. But I’ve discovered a lot.”
“The disappearances…they’re not a coincidence.” She found chills running up her arms. “Why have I never heard of this before? What does law enforcement say? What about Ethan?”
“Not much. They take reports, file them away, and they tell the families they’ll keep an eye out for their kids. That’s exactly what they did with Megan. I want to know what happened to her, Kinsey. I have to know. At this stage in my life, after all these years, I have to find the answers. I promised my grandmother I’d find out. My sister deserved better. She deserved a better brother than I turned out to be.”
“You were fifteen, Logan. What could you do?”
“I haven’t been fifteen forever, Kinsey. I haven’t been a very good brother or a grandson for that matter. Instead I did everything I could to put this town behind me and that means I put Megan out of my head.”
“Logan if you hadn’t concentrated on your work this might’ve made you go crazy with doubts.” And now so much more about his moods clicked into place.
“I got as far away from here as I could get so I wouldn’t think about Megan. Only to make a promise to my grandmother that I never had any intentions of keeping—I walked away from it—until now. It’s past time I kept that promise and looked into what really happened to Megan. I’m here to do that twenty years late.”
Lighthouse Reef (A Pelican Pointe Novel Book 4) Page 16