by Celia Ashley
“I told you, Paige, I don’t know much yet.” Impatience roughened his tone. “It wouldn’t be, though, if he wasn’t living here anymore.”
Paige lowered her lids, studying him from behind her lashes. “You’re not telling me everything. There’s more you know already.”
Dan finished off the water and lowered the empty bottle to his hip. He exhaled through his nose. “One of the older guys at the station remembered something…about your dad. Remembered going out to your house.” He jerked his head toward Paige’s old home next door. “Responding to a call about a domestic dispute. Not the first time. Things were…not pretty. Your mom refused to press charges, though, and the responding officers left.”
Paige stumbled over to the chair and lowered herself onto the hard wooden seat. Crap.
“And nothing else? Nothing about any other kind of trouble?”
Dan frowned, tilting his head. “What are you asking?”
Paige shrugged. “Bea Hunt implied my father was involved with people she referred to as ‘objectionable,’ so I just wondered.”
“I see.”
“Plus my mom…she said some things before she died. I only want answers, you know?”
“Sometime in the next couple of days, I’ll go down to the archived reports and see what I can find. If you want me to,” he added, taking a shuffling step toward the door.
Compressing her lips between her teeth, Paige gave a quick nod.
“You all right?”
She nodded again.
“I’m going to go. Lock the door behind me.”
Forcing herself to her feet, Paige followed him and threw the deadbolt once he’d stepped outside. Eyeing the rumpled rug, she went over to the bed and yanked the heavy iron frame a few inches at a time until she’d centered a leg over the trapdoor. She threw herself belly first on the mattress, ignoring the sand spattering from her jeans across the coverlet. Dropping her head onto her folded arms, she began to cry.
Chapter 7
The keyboard’s clatter filled the room. Liam kept his office sparse. No soft surfaces to deaden sound. No personal mementos. No tennis ball to bounce off the wall when thought processes had stalled. He had his desk, his laptop, an external hard drive for photos, and a stack of books on the floor near the window. He preferred the barren workspace to a place cluttered with distractions. Because the types of distraction he would have chosen would elicit memories, and memories could do nothing at this point but renew guilt and pain. He’d been learning to release in stages the scorching culpability haunting him. Avoidance helped. His unexpected attraction to Paige Waters did not.
In the monitor’s lower right-hand corner the digital clock read three-forty-five. Liam pushed his fingers through his hair and then rubbed his hand down the side of his face, feeling beneath his palm’s calloused flesh the raised cicatrix along his jaw. Paige had asked how he’d received it. Not one to hold back, that woman. Something on her mind, out it came from her mouth. Presumably unedited, but he could be wrong. She might have a lot more rolling around in interior dialogue she didn’t bother to voice.
Liam leaned back in his chair, stretching his arms above his head. When he brought them back down, he tapped through the shortcut on the keys to save his work and shut the laptop, waiting a moment for his eyes to adjust to darkness before rising and moving to the window.
The quarter moon had been a sickle in the sky late in the afternoon but had set some time ago, leaving the sky as black as a crow’s wing spangled with dew. The shipping lanes were empty, making it impossible to discern the sea from the dark dome above. Liam could barely make out the spume against the rocky shoreline. He pressed close to the windowpane, the glass cooling the healed, ridged skin, and recalled how he hadn’t known he’d been cut, how he hadn’t felt the pain, how he had mistaken the blood pouring from the wound to soak his shirt as salt water and sweat.
He thought of Paige then, wondering if her insomnia had worsened after the incident at her cottage two nights ago. He hadn’t seen her, not even a glimpse, and he’d been watching. Did she keep her door locked now? It might not even matter. Her curiosity and all she wanted to know could prove her undoing. The truth would destroy her. It might very well destroy him.
* * * *
Paige had taken to sleeping with the light on over the stove. Before dawn, she rose from bed and crossed the floor, smacking the switch to the off position in defiance. Whatever had taken place the other night, she didn’t understand it, but nothing had been stolen, nothing disturbed. She would much rather forget the whole thing, yet she didn’t plan to move the bed from its position over the trapdoor.
Returning to the mattress, she sat in the gloom with her feet tucked up and her arms around her knees, listening to the first stirrings of songbirds in the bushes outside. When the sun peeked over the horizon, they would be in full form. By that time, she hoped to be climbing into her car and heading north. Dan had called last night with the name of the harbor from which he believed her father’s boat had sailed on its last trip into the wide, blue sea.
Her stomach knotted as she thought about unearthing that part of the puzzle. After what she’d learned about the long ago visit of the police to her home, she wasn’t sure she should bother to try. The fact the authorities had been called only confirmed what she’d always understood about her father’s predilection toward violence. She would be better off not discovering any more. She had been better off not knowing him, hadn’t she?
She ground her teeth together. With effort, Paige relaxed her jaw, drawing and releasing several long breaths through her nose. Her eyes stung with unshed tears. She leapt from bed and snatched clean clothes from the tiny wardrobe. After dressing, she ran a hasty comb through her hair and pulled the curls back into a loose ponytail. No doubt by the time she reached her destination, she’d have to arrange it again since she liked driving with the windows open.
Deciding she would stop along the way for breakfast, Paige grabbed a granola bar and shoved it into the recesses of her purse. On the doorstep, she double-checked the lock three times. The action might be obsessive-compulsive, but the last thing she wanted to do was doubt herself an hour down the road.
In the car, Paige hesitated before turning the engine over, her fingers wrapped around the keys dangling from the ignition. Although it was light enough to see shapes in muted colors, the sun had not yet risen. Looking toward her father’s house, Paige realized she could see the structure from the cottage driveway. The second floor with its steeply pitched roof peeked above the rhododendrons and pines between. Beneath the soffit overhang, a rectangle of radiating light indicated that an upstairs lamp had been turned on.
Paige exited the car. She hadn’t seen Liam since the night she’d found him in her cottage. The hour was too early for visiting, but she found herself walking in the direction of the house anyway. She certainly wouldn’t knock on the door, but if he was up and about and noticed her, she’d make up some excuse for being there. She had wanted to talk to him, to measure his reaction to her since the “event.” Dan had implied Liam had lied to her, to both of them. She only wanted the truth…but perhaps only her version of the truth: the man who’d sparked her interest was a man she could trust.
Fat chance, she thought, coming to an abrupt halt. If she had an interest, that meant she’d already recognized a fatal flaw in him. Such was her modus operandi.
Pivoting on her heel to return to her car, movement in the window caught her attention and she ducked behind the evergreen branches. Illuminated from within, Liam passed the glass panes. From her vantage point, the view of his naked back and his tousled black hair caused an embarrassing flush to heat her skin. Still, she kept her eyes on him for a few seconds longer. Long enough to see a shadow pass along the wall behind him. He wasn’t alone.
Paige hurried back toward her car and slid into the driver’s seat, where she gripped the wheel with both hands and stared through the windshield at the clapbo
ard wall before her. What more fatal flaw could there be than a previous commitment? “You’re a fool, Paige Waters,” she muttered, and started the engine.
As she headed north on the main highway, Paige wondered if everything about her quest would prove to be a blunder. If she had any sense, she’d turn the car around and head back to Nashville. She had a life there. This…this was someone else’s life, not hers. Not anymore.
* * * *
By the time Paige reached her destination, she’d calmed down considerably. The first thing she noted about the town was the tourist factor. That made sense. If her father had earned a living by taking people out on his sailboat, no better place than where vacationers sought a thrill. After parking her car in a five-dollar lot, Paige smoothed her unruly hair back into the band and climbed out, intending to head first to the expansive dock. If she could get the boat owners to open up, they might be a source of decent information. She’d only gone a half-block, though, when she spotted a sign for a local newspaper above a shop door. She walked in expecting to purchase one, but instead found herself in the establishment itself. Through an open doorway in the back, she heard the clatter of printers and smelled the scent of ink.
“Well,” she said to the woman behind the counter, “this is a welcome sight.”
The woman arched her brows.
“So many papers have gone out of business,” Paige explained. “Most people want to read their news online. I like a paper in my hands.”
“Gotcha,” the woman said with a grin. “Can I help you with something?”
“I was planning to buy a paper to check out the local spots, but I have to ask, do you archive old editions anywhere? The library, maybe, or…?”
“Something in particular you’re interested in?”
“A charter boat went down. A sailboat. In high seas, I believe. In October, year before last.”
“A charter out in October?” The woman shook her head at what she obviously viewed as an imprudent undertaking. “What was the name of the ship?”
“I…I don’t know. But the owner, the captain, would have been Edwin Waters.”
With a nod, the clerk began to type something on the keyboard at her elbow. After several minutes, she shrugged apologetically. “Are you sure he operated out of this harbor?”
“That’s what I was told,” Paige said. “Or just sailed from here that day.”
“Wait one sec.” The woman resumed typing and read through the results that popped up after. “Here’s a charter went down. Not much of a story. Just a paragraph. The sailboat capsized in heavy seas during a storm. Never should have been out there, if you ask me,” she added in an aside. “A couple of commercial fishing boats made an attempt to aid the ship when the SOS came, but without success. It’s not even mentioned here how many went down with the ship. I would assume he had a crew, passengers? Doesn’t say. We picked this up from another paper. Not one of our stories.”
Paige craned her neck in an attempt to view the monitor. “Did the ship operate out of your harbor here?”
“Can’t tell from this, but I doubt it. We would have been all over that if it had. I’m sorry. Is this someone you knew?”
“Not well,” Paige said, and then left with a thank you and no gazette.
Locating a bench down the block, Paige confiscated it from a child with an ice cream cone whose parents were calling him anyway and planted her rear end in the middle. Masts with sails furled bobbed from side to side in the near distance against a bluebell sky. Between whitewashed buildings, Paige glimpsed sailing craft and motorized boats, but no commercial vessels. Not surprising, since the town appeared to be a playground of the moneyed crowd and sightseers. She would head toward the docks in a few minutes, though she didn’t anticipate receiving any hard facts. For now, she needed to think. Sit and think about what she had ever hoped to gain from her search.
“Excuse me, I think you dropped this.”
Paige glanced at the hand extended before her face. Calloused and hard. A working man’s hand. She looked up.
For a fleeting moment, she thought she knew him from somewhere, but then she realized he possessed what she and her friends at home had dubbed “the everyman face.” The high cheekbones and chiseled jaw advertisers used to grace ads by the hundreds in glossy magazines. The kind of man women wished they knew. The guy standing in front of her, however, hadn’t looked like that in a while. One too many battles had shattered his handsome countenance, and time had healed it in ways it shouldn’t have. The expression on his face made Paige draw back.
“I don’t know what that is,” she said with a nod at his hand, “but it’s not mine.”
“Are you sure? Take another look.”
She frowned at the folded cardstock printed with a colorful, wrinkled depiction on the inner side. “I’m positive.”
“Take it.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“It belongs to you.”
“I’m going to call the police.” Paige reached for her cell phone and pulled it from her purse. With a laugh, the man flung the object down at her feet and strode away. Clutching the phone in her fist, Paige watched until he was safely out of sight before bending to pick the article off the sidewalk. She grabbed the edge of paper with her fingernails, setting it down on the bench at her side, afraid something might fall out. After a moment, she used the edge of her phone to spread the cardstock flat. Her heart skipped a solid beat.
She hadn’t dropped this. Not here. The last time she had seen this particular item had been three nights ago, where it had marked her place in her book on the nightstand.
Chapter 8
Dan observed Paige’s entry into the diner with a clinical eye. She walked with an irate stride. He supposed that was good. When he’d spoken to her on the phone, she hadn’t been angry. She’d been afraid.
She stomped over to where he sat and dropped down into the booth on the opposite side of the table, plunking her purse onto the bench seat beside her. “Are you eating?”
“Waiting for you.”
“I just want a coffee.”
The waitress was already writing down the order. “And you, sir?” the girl asked.
“Same. And a piece of that blueberry pie.”
Dan waited until the girl left before speaking again. “Were they any help? The uniforms up there?”
“Not really,” said Paige. “I gave them a description. They took the damned bookmark.”
Dan grunted. “What’s the problem with that? Does it have some kind of sentimental value?”
“No. But I thought perhaps you could get fingerprints from it.”
“So can they, Paige. That’s probably why they kept it.”
She exhaled loudly and began tapping the fingers of her right hand in a rolling rhythm across the laminate before glancing in an agitated fashion over her shoulder. “Where’s that coffee?”
“Is it possible you’ve already had enough?”
She threw herself forward with a hiss like a steam locomotive. “Are you freaking kidding?” she demanded in a loud whisper. “How long was I back in Alcina Cove before some psycho broke into my place and stole a goddamned bookmark? Then he trails me two days later for an hour and a half without my ever noticing the same car in my rearview, only to give it back to me. Who the hell is this guy? What does he want?”
Dan shook his head. “And you didn’t recognize him?”
“No!”
“All right. Calm down.” Dan leaned back against the seat while the waitress deposited the coffee and his pie on the table. He was grateful for the interruption as Paige got a reign on her hysteria in the interim. He shoved a forkful of pastry into his mouth and took his time chewing while he mulled the situation over a little longer. “Did you piss somebody off?”
“In three and a half days?”
“Right. Although, I’ve seen you in action…” He rubbed the bruise on his forehead with a knuckle.
Paige choked on a mouthful of coffee. “Not funny.”
“Understood.”
“And I’m sorry.” She jerked her chin in the direction of his head. “About that.”
Dan released a discreet sigh, digging into his pie again. He’d looked her up in the high school yearbook and realized why he’d had difficulty remembering her. They hadn’t run in the same circles, and she’d been rather non-descript in both looks and mode of dress. It was a pity she’d turned out so damned good-looking all these years later. She wasn’t his type at all. He liked his women… well, he liked his women. But in particular, he liked them a wee bit more relaxed than Paige. He was fairly certain she could be a handful. For any man.
“You married?”
She straightened, lowering her coffee mug to the table. “Why? Do you think this is some estranged husband sending me a nasty-gram?”
Yeah. A handful. “Something like that,” he said.
Lifting her mug again, she tipped back her head and swallowed the remainder of her coffee. As if on cue the waitress appeared behind her shoulder, brandishing the pot. Dan shook his head. The girl retreated.
Paige shifted, reaching into her purse. She pulled out a tin of mints and offered him one. He declined. “The guy I saw today and the guy I saw on the beach the other night are not the same.”
“All right,” he said. “That’s…something, I guess.”
“I just thought I would mention that. Liam suggested the fellow on the beach might be a ghost.”
The blueberry pie withered from the sudden spurt of acid in Dan’s stomach. “Your neighbor said that, did he?”
“What do you think?”
“I think…I think I have no opinion on that matter.”
She eyed him from beneath lowered brows. “I don’t believe in ghosts, either.”
That’s not what I said, Dan thought, but kept his mouth shut. He had a reputation and a job to keep safe. “What I do think, though, is that you shouldn’t return to the cottage.”