B000FC1MHI EBOK (23 page)

“Tomorrow morning,” Julia said, thinking to print them tonight. “Am I giving them to you?”

“No. Give them to Noah. They’re just insurance, in case certain parties claim we’re making this up, if you know what I mean.”

Julia knew more than that. She knew, in that instant, why the men on the pier had been willing to talk with her. It had less to do with her clothing than it did with Noah Prine. Someone had seen them together the evening before—John Roman, certainly, perhaps others as well— and word had spread. She didn’t know what they imagined. But they did assume she would be seeing him again, and soon.

With Molly’s accusations still fresh, Julia almost denied it. Then she caught herself. She and Noah were friends in the most innocent of ways. She welcomed an excuse to see him.

Besides, she liked it when the lobstermen talked with her. It made her feel part of something. If her connection with Noah won her acceptance, it wasn’t such a bad thing.

The
Leila Sue
was nowhere in sight when Julia left the harbor. She returned to the house and had dinner with Zoe, then printed out the pictures she’d taken. Having been up since dawn, she was asleep by nine.

Noah hauled traps late to compensate for lost days and, without a sternman, slower work. By the time he tied up at the slip and scrubbed down the boat, it was nearly ten. A few late diners were on the Grill deck, but they were finishing up. No matter that it was Friday night, with more tourists around than had been there the weekend before, most locals were home in bed. Saturday was a lobstering day. Hauling began with the sun, and the sun didn’t sleep in. Acutely aware of that, Noah shouldered his things and started down the dock.

“About time,” said John Roman, meeting him before he had gone far. “I won’t ask why you’re so late, but I gotta warn you. If you were out there shooting, you’d best bury the gun. They filed a complaint.”

Noah paused. “Who filed a complaint?”

“The fruit guys. Someone’s taking potshots at the hull of their boat, right at the waterline.”

Noah smiled. “Did it sink?”

“Nah,” said John with a slanted smile of his own. “They plugged up the holes and reported it to my buddy Charlie Andress over on West Rock. Charlie isn’t stupid. He knows where Haber and Welk are dropping their lines, so he knows who’s annoyed.”

Noah started walking again. “What’s he want you to do about it?”

John fell into step. “Warn you, I guess.”

“Hey, it wasn’t me.”

“You were the one suggested it to the trap group.”

Noah had nothing to hide. “I suggested it and would have done it in a minute, but the others voted it down. They chose knots, so I’ve been knotting. That’s it. If there are holes in the hull, the bullet’s from someone else’s gun. Maybe it’s the same gun that shot Artie.”

“Uh, nope,” John said, scratching the back of his head just below the line of his cap. “Don’t think that’s so. The Coast Guard called this afternoon. They found
that
gun in the wreck of
The Beast
.”

H
aving fallen asleep so early, Julia awakened again at dawn. Tiptoeing to the bathroom, she cleaned her face and teeth and brushed her hair, and put on her wedding band. Pulling on a sweatshirt and jeans, she slipped out of the house and headed for town.

She parked at the pier and turned off her headlights. Camera and tripod in hand, she wandered from spot to spot before choosing the landing at the top of the stairs to the Grill. She disabled the flash and adjusted the settings for dim light, as the manual had suggested she should. Extending the legs of the tripod, she screwed on the camera, opened the monitor, and took a look.

The harbor was quiet, the water as gentle as she had ever seen it. Lobster boats rocked at their moorings; those in slips seemed simply to rise and fall with each breath of the sea. Without the range of color that daylight would bring, the world was simplified. In this predawn dark, with the headlights of pickups raking the dock, the shadows of sleepy lobstermen carrying their gear, and lights going on in one wheelhouse after another, Julia found her drama.

She photographed from the distance, then zoomed in—zoomed back out when another piece of the harbor caught her eye. She captured men rowing to their boats, and those boats motoring out to sea.

As the minutes passed, the light bled from purple to blue to pink. The sky wasn’t clear; clouds were strung out between bands of color.

The play between the two was a subject in itself, evolving as she watched.

When she refocused on the dock, she saw Noah. He stood with his hands on his hips and was looking directly up at her. She straightened and smiled, feeling inordinately pleased when he left his gear there and headed her way. He wore jeans, a sweatshirt, and clogs. His hair was messed, as though he had just come from bed, which she realized he had. It was actually a lovely thought. He was an exceedingly virile man.

He trotted up the stairs and slowed at the last turn. Stopping with several steps left to go, he held the rail on each side. His face was relaxed, mouth gently curved. “Rick says you’ve been here awhile.”

She was still smiling. Couldn’t help it. She liked Noah Prine. His presence was a nice touch to the day. “Rick, huh? I wondered how you knew to look up. No one else has. It’s like I’m hidden, which makes it even more fun taking pictures.”

“Get anything good?”

“I don’t know. I’m not taking the time to look.”

“Isn’t it early to be doing this kind of thing?”

“Not if you want to photograph the harbor coming to life.”

“Are you always up at dawn?”

“In New York, never. Here, it could become a habit.”

He paused and grew serious. “About the other night? I’m sorry if I caused a problem.”

“The problem’s not your doing.”

“Did you work it out?”

She sighed. “If you’re asking whether my daughter accepts that I’m a grown woman with a right to run
errands
with whomever I choose, I doubt it. In fairness, though, there are other issues involved.” Not caring to go into the whole business with Monte, she reached into her camera bag and pulled out the photos she had printed. “These are for you.”

“Thanks,” he said with an appreciative smile. “I was told to expect them.”

She smiled back, enjoying feeling useful. “The harbor grapevine?”

“Actually, the chief of police, who would love it if you could email these to him. Think you can?”

“Of course.”

“That’d be great. It seems yesterday was a day of complaints,” he tapped the photos against the rail, “like sabotaged traps. But John also got some news. They found a revolver in the wreck of
The Beast
. It was registered to Artie.”

Julia’s eyes widened in surprise. “To Artie? Was it the one that shot him?”

“They don’t know for sure. They know that one cartridge is missing out of six, and that the caliber is consistent with the hole in Artie’s shoulder. Problem is, if there was proof the gun was fired, the ocean washed it away. Short of finding a bullet lodged in debris from
The Beast
—something of a needle in a haystack—they can only speculate on whether he was shot by this gun. But there’s another twist. Artie was under investigation by INS agents for smuggling illegal immigrants ashore.”

“On
The Beast
?” Julia asked in disbelief. Forget stealth; a boat like that would announce itself everywhere it went.

But Noah said, “Artie has another boat. It’s less pretentious, but it can handle itself a ways out from shore, where the transfer would be made. It has a cuddy cabin that could hold sixteen in a pinch. The INS isn’t so much suspecting him of using that boat as of arranging for other boats to do the work.”

“Illegal immigrants.”

“Some used as mules.”

Julia knew the term. “Carrying drugs?”

“Allegedly, enough to make it worth Artie’s while. It’d go a long way toward explaining why he kept flying high after the market bombed.”

“Could the shooting have been related to that?”

“They’re assuming it. Problem is, they can’t find a shooter. There’s no other body with the wreck. There’s no sign that anyone was with Artie at the house. A long-range rifle might do it, but not in that fog.”

Julia was oddly relieved. In a voice barely above a whisper, she said, “At least the gun wasn’t Kim’s. That would have pointed a finger at her.” More hesitantly, she asked, “Is anyone suggesting she was involved?”

Noah, too, spoke quietly. “I didn’t ask. Didn’t want to put a bug in someone’s ear. Far as I know, no one but us knows she wasn’t on the
Amelia Celeste
.”

“We don’t
know,
really,” Julia hedged, but Noah’s eyes chided her, and she trusted those eyes. “Amazing, if she was on
The Beast,
that she survived the crash.”

“Not so amazing,” he remarked. “She could have been on the sun platform at the very back of the boat. Those platforms are flat. There’s no railing around them. Sitting there, she’d have gone flying off at the first impact, even before the explosion.”

“But how could she allow him to drive if he was shot?”

“He might have insisted.”

“But surely when his heart gave out…?”

“She wouldn’t have known it unless she was watching him. What if she was facing the stern?”

“Would she have been able to drive
The Beast
herself?”

“Technically,” Noah confirmed. “She grew up here. She knows boats.
The Beast
would have been bigger and louder, but the mechanics are the same.”

“Do you think she was involved with the smuggling?”

He was slow in answering, clearly reluctant. “The guilt’s so bad, she’s not talking. Would a girl that young, with her whole life ahead of her, go totally mute because she survived an accident and others didn’t? Maybe. But I keep thinking there has to be more to the story to explain the guilt she feels.”

Julia thought what he said made total sense, which put her in a bind. Forget smuggling; she kept trying to muster hatred toward Kim for helping a married man cheat on his wife. Monte had had any number of Kims in his life. Julia and she should be worlds apart.

Still, she felt drawn to the girl. “Maybe it’s time I visit the bluff again.”

By the time she got there, it was late morning and the weather had turned. After those strips of color at dawn, the clouds had spread and thickened, bringing cool air and rain. Until Julia saw the small blue Honda by the ruins of the keeper’s house, she wasn’t even sure Kim would be there, and even then she had to search. She finally spotted the girl tucked in beside the porch of the house, where she was sheltered from vertical rain, though not the more slanted rain blown in on gusts of wind. She wore a yellow slicker, but the hood was down. Red hair, pale face, small hands—everything exposed was wet.

Tugging up the hood of her own slicker, Julia took an insulated bag from the seat of the car. The surf pounded and the wind had a bite, but the rain dampened both.

“Hi,” she called, though she had no fear of startling Kim this time. The girl had been watching her from the moment she pulled in, and continued to watch as she approached. “I figured something warm was called for on a day like this.” Several feet from Kim, she set down the bag, unzipped it, and pulled out a bag of cookies. “Fresh from my oven,” she said, digging back into the pack and extracting, this time, two travel mugs filled with coffee. She offered one to Kim. “I figured if you were anything like my daughter, you’d take it with cream and sugar.”

Kim said nothing. But she did take the mug. Opening the top, she took a drink. She held it in both hands, seeming to welcome its warmth.

Ignoring the rain, Julia sat down on the ground and opened the bag of cookies. “Still warm,” she announced, cradling the bag in her palm and holding it out.

Kim took one, bit into it, and closed her eyes for an instant while she chewed. There was no mistaking pleasure on a face that was otherwise drawn. Julia wondered if she was eating anything at home. Huddled inside the slicker, she looked smaller than ever.

“Don’t you want your hood up?” Julia asked and, of course, didn’t get an answer. So she ate a cookie herself, between sips of her own coffee, and sat quietly for a time with her legs folded under her slicker.

Kim finished one cookie and took a second, and still Julia didn’t speak—and not by conscious design. Speaking seemed unnecessary. It was beautiful there on the bluff in the rain.

After a time, quite spontaneously, she said, “This is a special place. It’s kind of like you’re away from everything up here.”

Kim nodded. When Julia passed her the bag of cookies, she took another.

“Have you been eating meals?” Julia asked.

Kim shrugged with her mouth.

“Not hungry?”

She shook her head.

“Keep thinking about the accident, huh?”

Kim took a drink of the coffee and tucked the mug in her lap.

For a time, Julia drank her own coffee and let the sound of the surf and the spatter of rain on the rocks fill the void. Then she said, “I don’t know what it is about this island. I’ve felt something since the first time I was here. I was twelve then.” When Kim seemed surprised, she said, “I was. Twelve. Zoe had just moved here, and my parents thought it’d be a good summer vacation place for my brothers and me. We used to come for a week or two at a time.”

There had been rainy days then, too, and she hadn’t minded at all. She remembered once sitting at the end of the town dock—a smaller dock, with fewer arms—and letting the rain soak her. She was wearing a bathing suit and must have been sixteen at the time, because she was a late bloomer yet remembered feeling sexy.

“Sixteen was a big summer for me,” she reminisced. “That was when I became aware of men. Boys, actually, but they did look like men to me. Big Sawyer grows them rugged. I remember sitting in the rain in my wet bathing suit and wondering what the boys could see or if they even cared to look. I didn’t have the nerve to look and see. I looked at them plenty at other times. Even took pictures of them. Boy, did I love those tattoos. Do they still do that, the local boys—have that rope tattooed around their biceps?”

Kim nodded.

“That was a turn-on,” Julia mused. “Where I grew up, only bad boys had tattoos. I thought they were the coolest thing.” She lowered her voice—not that anyone was around to hear, but it just seemed like too personal a confession not to guard it somehow. “I kept the pictures all those years. The guys in them spawned many a fantasy.”

She was embarrassed to think how recently she had indulged. Over the years, those fantasies had become a haven when things were rocky with Monte. In her dreams, Big Sawyer men embodied everything he didn’t—honesty, loyalty, faithfulness. And muscles.
And
big-time sexuality. With Big Sawyer men, there would be no going through the motions. They would make love like they meant it. At least, she imagined they would.

She sighed, realized what she’d done, and looked quickly at Kim. The girl was watching her closely. She tried to recall if she had said the sex part aloud. That would have been embarrassing.

More neutrally, she said, “I actually brought the pictures with me. They were in my shoulder bag when the ferry went down. I got the bag back—they recovered it from the crash site—but I can’t get myself to open it.”

She had a thought. “Did you have anything with you that they might have recovered?”

Kim gave her head a quick shake.

“Just as well,” Julia said. “Those things are from before. Everything after feels like a different life.” She paused. “You don’t feel that, do you.” It wasn’t exactly a question.

Kim’s head shake was barely a spasm, but it told Julia what she wanted to know.

“If you could go anywhere,” Julia tried, “anywhere in the world, where would you go?” She knew Kim wouldn’t answer, but the question seemed important. “I think about that a lot.”

Sipping her coffee, now only lukewarm, she looked out at the rain. Drips fell from the rim of her hood, but they weren’t bothersome. Rather, they seemed part of this very separate piece of the world.