by J. S. Marlo
Intent on confronting Ro with it, Bjorn had kept the letter in his shirt pocket, close to the ring he’d bought before she walked out of his life. He pulled the letter out. “The Dear John letter she wrote to me.”
Her stepfather snatched it from his hand. “I tried to like Iceland, but I can’t stay here any longer,” he read aloud. “I struggle with the language, I feel isolated, and I miss my family. You deserve a wife who shares your heritage, someone like Fridrika—” The wrinkles on Huxley’s forehead grew into deep furrows as he glared at him. “Who’s Fridrika?”
“She’s a spoiled rotten nineteen-year-old whose grandmother is best friends with mine. I can’t stand the kid. You have to believe me when I say your daughter is the only woman I’ve ever—”
“Hold your lava, Volcano Boy. There are things I’d rather not know about you and Little Shamrock.” Her stepfather’s voice had softened at the use of her nickname. “However, I do know Rowan would have boiled your sorry carcass in a hot spring if you’d cheated on her.” His gaze returned to the letter. “I’m moving on, Bjorn,” he read on, “and I wish you to be happy. Please, don’t try to contact me. I want to forget you, not hate you. Row.” A heavy sigh deflated her stepfather’s intimidating stance. “What happened in Iceland, Bjorn? When I picked Rowan up at the airport two months ago, she drenched my jacket, and it wasn’t raining.”
“I don’t know, Mr. Huxley. Honest. I was taking a group of tourists on a twelve-day excursion inside volcanic caves. It was right after Ro’s final exams, and she was supposed to come with me, but she caught the flu. I couldn’t take her, not with her fever, and it was too late to cancel the trip, so––”
“She was sick, and you left her alone in her apartment?”
If the glare in Huxley’s eyes could kill, he’d be lying dead in the dust. “No. Of course not.” He wasn’t that careless. “I asked my grandmother to take care of her, but when I finally got back, she was gone.”
“Gone? Just like that?” The sarcastic tone wasn’t lost on Bjorn.
“My grandmother told me Ro was miserable and wanted to go home, so she drove her to the airport…with all her stuff. All she left behind was that phony letter.” He pointed an angry finger at the letter in her stepfather’s hand. “It can’t be true, Mr. Huxley. Ro loved Iceland. She’d made tremendous progress with the language. She didn’t even need my help in the stores anymore. I was so proud of her.” His feelings for her hadn’t changed. If anything, they’d grown deeper. He loved her, and he wanted to marry her. “I know it’s her handwriting, but it’s not her. It’s not even her signature. She never signs Ro with a W. Did she say anything to you or her mother?”
“She said it was over between you two.” As he handed the letter back, her stepfather became pensive. “She didn’t give her mother or me any other explanation, and we didn’t press the issue. In retrospect, maybe we should have.”
Mother and daughter shared a close bond, and Bjorn would have expected Ro to open up, if not to her stepfather, at least to her mother. Another uncharacteristic behavior of Ro’s to add to my list. “Would you let me see Rowan, please?”
“She inherited a bed-and-breakfast on the East Coast from her father’s sister, and she moved there within a week of her return from Iceland.” Huxley lowered the foot he’d rested on the bumper to the ground. “I suppose I could give you her address, but if I learn she shed one more tear over you, there won’t be a cave deep enough or far enough on earth for you to hide from me. Do we understand each other?”
Chapter Sixteen
After spending way too much time preparing for her date with Chris while thinking about other men, Rowan entered the kitchen.
“What’s wrong, Miss Rowan?” As she spoke, Gail chopped vegetables at the kitchen counter. “You look like you’re about to attend your mother’s funeral.”
The comparison sounded about right and brought a faint smile to her lips. “I’m having dinner with Chris tonight.”
He’d called her back this morning while Gail was at church and rescheduled for tonight. Offhand, Rowan hadn’t been able to think of a valid excuse to refuse. The doctor was a little self-centered at times, but on many other levels, he was attentive and helpful, and she didn’t want to hurt his feelings. If only he could cure her heartache the same way he healed his patients.
The knife that Gail held in her right hand froze in midair. “And?”
Not the words of wisdom that Rowan had hoped to hear. “And he’s picking me up in ten minutes.”
Gail deposited the offensive weapon on the cutting board and wiped her hands on her apron. “And?”
Disheartened, Rowan sat at the table. “With all that’s going on, I don’t feel like going out.”
After finding the glass fragments yesterday, Avery had advised her to mention the act of vandalism to the police. With Winston dead, she failed to see the relevance. An argument had risen between them, abruptly ending with Bill’s impromptu arrival and Avery’s subsequent departure. Bill, on the other hand, had dismissed the incident as a tasteless prank and told her not to waste her time filling out a useless complaint.
She wasn’t going to stop by the police station until tomorrow, so it gave her another night to sleep on the decision.
“The good doctor fancies you, but you’re not returning the favor, are you?”
The blunt truth churned her stomach, and her gaze traveled to the ceiling. Two floors up, a grieving man had reminded her of everything she’d lost…of everything she wanted back.
“I’m in love with someone else, except it’s over. How do I forget about him, Gail?”
“Depends on the fellow, Miss Rowan. Would you like to talk about him?”
No, but I need to. “His name is Bjorn.”
***
Malcolm’s BMW zoomed away from Buccaneer in a cloud of red dust.
Avery dropped the living room curtains. The engine had drowned out the ring of his cell phone but not the vibrations in his pants pocket.
In no disposition for social conversation, he retrieved his phone and snapped at it. “Stone!”
“You need to work on your greeting, Avery, preferably before you burst someone’s eardrum.”
Lancaster had always had a knack for brushing off gruff replies.
“Sorry.” Rowan’s departure with the annoying doctor had rubbed him the wrong way.
“Wanna talk about it?”
“No.” Only fools believed “kiss” and “commitment” belonged in the same sentence. “What’s up?”
At the other end, Lancaster chuckled. “Didn’t you want info?”
“Hold that thought, and let me call you back in five minutes.”
Seeking privacy, Avery headed for his room, but in the hallway, he bumped into Bill.
“Mr. Stone? Have you seen Gail?”
The last time he’d seen the woman, she’d been collecting flowers for a bouquet. “She was in the garden half an hour ago.”
Bill’s thanks mixed with the sound of the doorbell. “I better answer that, not that we expect any new guests until Thursday night.”
The last unannounced guest had caused enough damage, and they didn’t need any more trouble.
Avery returned to the living room and peeked through the window. Parked outside was a white four-door sedan with a rear bumper sticker from Budget Rent-A-Car. No sign of any noisy kids. The first three letters of the PEI license plate caught his attention. RED. All was missing from the plate was EYE.
Male voices rose in the vestibule.
“I don’t want a room. I’m here to see Rowan O’Reilly.”
The strong accent in the visitor’s voice sounded familiar, but Avery couldn’t place where he’d heard it. His curiosity unleashed, he went to stand in the archway of the living room.
A tall, broad stranger with unruly blond hair towered over Bill.
“She’s not available, lad.” Bill stared the young man down. “What do you want?”
The confrontation between t
he two men, who seemed oblivious to his presence, fascinated Avery. This was one scene he could use in his book.
“I need to talk to Ro, and I won’t leave until I do.”
The nickname suggested he knew Rowan personally, unless he was another smooth talker like Winston…or the irritating doctor.
“You just missed her. She went on a date with a doctor in a yellow convertible.” Bill’s patience had gone home without him, leaving him stranded with the stranger. “Book a room or come back in the morning. You’re not waiting here for free.”
The visitor stiffened and put his hand on the doorknob. “Then I better go.”
Avery was surprised to see the young man bolt out the door. In light of his determination to hold his ground against Bill, Avery had expected more resistance.
“Nice way to turn customers away, Bill.” When she learned she’d lost a potential customer, Rowan wouldn’t be impressed, not with all those empty rooms upstairs.
“It’s a handy knack.” Showing no guilt or remorse over the incident, Bill pulled a keychain from his pants pocket. “I’m going home. Good night, Mr. Stone.”
***
In the privacy of his room, Avery created a new folder on his laptop in which to save the information that Lancaster would share with him. He then dialed his friend’s number. “I’m listening, Caster.”
“You still don’t waste any time, do you?”
His lack of small talk had been an ongoing source of teasing on Lancaster’s part. “I’m waiting, and I’m not getting any younger.”
“I dug up Rowan O’Reilly’s Alberta driver’s license. For a country girl, she’s kind of cute. I see your fascination for redheads hasn’t waned.”
The insinuation struck a tender chord. “She’s just a kid.”
“She’s twenty-one, Avery. Not a kid. In any case, she didn’t lie to you. She studied in Iceland for two years before inheriting her aunt’s bed-and-breakfast. Her mother, Riley Kendrick, is a writer, and her stepfather, Blythe Huxley, is a popular actor. He plays in Dusty Trails. My wife watches—”
“Forget about her immediate family. Did you find anything about Mattie O’Reilly, the dead aunt?”
“I found a rather large inconsistency but nothing that suggests murder.” To Avery’s relief, Lancaster resumed with a factual tone. “For four generations, the house had passed from mother to daughter, but when Mattie O’Reilly wrote her first will after opening her bed-and-breakfast, she left everything to her father, Wilmot O’Reilly.”
As Lancaster talked, Avery typed the information on his computer. “So she broke the family tradition. Did she have any children?”
“No, but a few years later, she amended the will in favor of Bill Smith, an employee in her service.”
Bill the handyman had stood to inherit Buccaneer? “Now that’s an interesting twist. Keep going.”
“Last spring, she changed her will again and named Rowan O’Reilly, her late brother’s only daughter, as her sole beneficiary.”
Perplexed, Avery tapped on the mouse of his laptop. “How sweet, but I still don’t see any inconsistency.”
At the other end, Lancaster laughed. “Mattie O’Reilly wrote her first will a year after her father’s death.”
“After?” A rather large inconsistency, indeed. “Didn’t she know he was dead?”
“Twenty years ago, Mattie O’Reilly’s parents were lost at sea during a bad storm that sunk more than a dozen boats. Only a few bodies were ever recovered. Among them was her mother’s but not her father’s. Maybe she’d hoped her father survived, only to realize years later that she needed a new beneficiary.”
Denial or memory lapse were an unlikely, though plausible, explanation. “But she chose Bill Smith before her niece? Why?”
“Maybe they had an affair, and when it ended, she wrote him off.”
And a few months later, Mattie mysteriously died. The coincidence didn’t sit well with Avery. “If that’s the case, it must have pissed Bill off. What do you have on him?”
“Not much. Did you know Smith is the second most common family name in the country?”
“Skip the trivia.” He only cared about one Bill Smith, not the other hundreds of thousands living in Canada.
“I found a valid PEI driver’s license, a truck registration, a standard vehicle insurance record, and a checking account with the credit union. I scanned his license picture. I’m emailing it to you as I speak. Tell me if we’re talking about the same guy.”
A box appeared in the top right corner of Avery’s computer screen.
You have 1 new message.
“Hold on. I’m downloading the attachment.” The copy of the driver’s license appeared on his desktop. “That’s him. Buccaneer’s handyman.”
“Glad to know I haven’t lost my touch. Unfortunately, that’s the extent of my results. No credit cards. No loans. No debts. No speeding or parking tickets. No arrests. Nothing.”
In Avery’s world, quiet guys leading boring lives often harbored dark secrets. “Did you get a hold of the report concerning Mattie’s death?”
“The officers questioned every member of the household before concluding it an accident. Bill Smith had an alibi for the afternoon of her death. He was at the cemetery visiting departed loved ones. A groundskeeper by the name of Terry Jordan confirmed his presence.”
“How convenient.” Avery typed Terry Jordan’s name in bold letters in his file. “What about Gail Maynard?”
“She has a past, but she also has an alibi and no motive.”
It surprised him to hear that the nice woman responsible for the five pounds he’d gained since his arrival at Buccaneer had a criminal past. “Elaborate on her past, please.”
“Her late husband died of internal bleeding. It was determined he’d ingested what the coroner termed ‘grinded glass.’”
The description sent chills between his shoulder blades. “You’re not telling me someone tainted his food with tiny shards of glass, are you?”
“Yes, and for weeks, Gail Maynard was the prime suspect in her husband’s death. She’d visited a shelter for battered women, and there were speculations she’d wanted to leave him.”
“Did she plead guilty to lesser charges?” Gail wouldn’t have been the first abused woman to seek justice on her own.
“No. The case was closed after Maynard’s daughter from a previous relationship confessed to the murder of her father in a suicide note. Gail Maynard was never charged.”
“Miscarriage of justice?”
“You tell me. Does she look like a murderer?”
No, but the same could have been said of Emma Monroe, and Rachel had still ended up dead. “Appearances can be deceptive.” He couldn’t ignore the glass dispersed under the gazebo. Maybe he’d been wrong to attribute the act of vandalism to Winston. Gail might be holding a grudge against Rowan for inheriting Buccaneer. “Did Gail stand to profit from Mattie’s death?”
“No. If anything, Mrs. Maynard lost the monthly contributions that Mattie O’Reilly made to her retiring fund. The will didn’t contain any provision to continue the payments after her death.”
So Gail had no reason to kill Mattie. “Who else had motive?”
“The only person who gained from Mattie O’Reilly’s death was her niece, but she was in Iceland when the accident occurred.”
Great. A wild goose chase.
Chapter Seventeen
Rowan had pictured a cozy little restaurant by the waterfront similar to the one Chris had treated her to before, not a candlelight dinner in a low cellar.
The hand pressed against the small of her back urged her to advance into the darkened room. “Lovely setting, isn’t it?”
Memories of secret caves and hot springs flooded into her mind and tightened the knot in her chest. She blinked the tears away. “Yes—lovely.”
“I knew you’d approve.” All smiles, he led her to a small oak table set between the wine barrels. A feast awaited on lacy place mats, alongside cryst
al glasses and wine bottles. He pulled out an antique high-backed chair.
In her haste to accept his silent invitation to sit, Rowan’s shoulder brushed against his hand. “Thank you,” she murmured, his proximity raising goose bumps on her skin. “How did you manage to convince your friend to let you use his wine cellar?”
The flames of the two candles contorted his smile into a grotesque grimace. “Jimmy is a romantic at heart.” Without consulting her, Chris selected a bottle of white wine from the assortment on the table and poured her a glass. “When I told him I wanted to surprise you tonight, he offered to help. It’s a preview of what is awaiting you at the private tasting on Saturday.”
“You booked a private tasting for Saturday night?” In the best of times, she disliked not being consulted, and this wasn’t the best of times. Annoyed, she unfolded the white napkin by her glass and dropped it on her lap.
“You’d sounded so excited the first time I mentioned a degustation that Jimmy and I decided to surprise you.” He filled his own glass to the rim. “You’ll love the evening, I promise.”
If you say so. “Will I get to meet Jimmy?” She was curious to know more about Cormoran’s owner.
“I’m afraid he departed rather abruptly this afternoon after a sick cousin called him to the rescue.” With a fork, he dug into his food. “Please, start eating before the food turns cold.”
Chunks of meat swam amid the greens in a marinara sauce. The creamy dish smelled wonderful and should have appealed to her senses, but she’d lost her appetite. She forked a small sample into her mouth. Her taste buds erupted in fire, and her good manners flew out the windowless room. She shoved a piece of bread into her mouth before downing a third of her drink.
“I should have warned you.” Again, he refilled her glass without asking. “Jimmy is renowned for his zesty creations.”
The burning on her palate subsided. “You mean he’s also a chef?”