Carolina Dreaming: A Dare Island Novel (6 page)

I always do
, she thought bleakly.

She turned and marched inside, leaving the danger outside. Putting temptation behind her.

H
ENRY
L
EE
C
LARK
propped his feet on his desk, leaning back in his swivel chair. The sight of his size twelves on the furniture usually got a rise out of Marta Lopez, the police department’s administrative assistant. But today she ignored him, her bright coral nails tapping briskly on her computer keyboard.

Damn it.

Luke Fletcher was out on patrol, Jack Rossi behind the closed door with its cheap metal POLICE CHIEF sign. Hank wanted to annoy
somebody
.

Being at work usually relaxed him—the familiar file cabinets, the wanted posters, the rack of locked-up rifles in the gun closet, even the smell of coffee sitting until it turned to sludge. He’d always been more comfortable with men than women, always better suited to the job than things at home. Which was why—even after his retirement from the county sheriff’s office, even after he’d supported the hiring of outsider Jack Rossi as Dare Island’s police chief—Hank had hired on as backup relief officer. Let the younger man worry
about writing grants and kissing the town council’s asses. As long as Hank could report to work every day, he wasn’t dead yet.

Most of the calls that came in were parking or noise complaints, reports of vandalism and petty theft, a little drugs, an occasional domestic, negotiating disputes between neighbors. Not even much of that in the off-season. Islanders were an independent lot, used to settling their own problems. After years of big busts, gang-related crime, and high-speed car chases, working for a small police department sometimes made Hank feel like a meter maid with a gun.

And that suited him, too. He was fifty-goddamn-nine years old. Too old for excitement. Or a change.

But today he couldn’t get comfortable in his chair or in his skin.

Hank dropped his feet, prowling restlessly between the three desks to the coffeepot.

“You don’t need more coffee,” Marta said without pausing a beat in her typing. “You’re like a long-tailed cat in a room full of rocking chairs as it is.”

He set down his mug, happy to have someone to vent his frustrations on. “It’s that Murphy fellow. I don’t like having some transient on the island, sponging off the Fletchers.”

“The Fletchers are very capable of looking after themselves. You worry too much. And you drink too much coffee. No wonder your blood pressure is so high.”

“What are you, my mother?”

“I have four boys already. I don’t need another one.”

“Wife, then.”

Their eyes met. For no reason at all, Hank’s heart started pounding.

“If I were your wife, you would take better care of yourself.”

“Or kill myself.”

Marta pursed bright lips. “Either way, your blood pressure wouldn’t be a problem anymore.”

A laugh escaped him. Hank did his best to turn it into a cough.

Marta turned slightly from her computer screen. “Tell me what is bothering you.”

“Gary Wilson took his grandson Ethan fishing this morning. He saw that Murphy fellow at Jane’s.”

“And this worries you because . . . ?”

“He was raking her yard,” Hank growled.

Marta raised dark, arched brows. “I am sure her grass will recover.”

“People are talking.”

“People always talk. He’s new in town. And handsome.”

“He’s a jailbird.”

“He’s a friend of Luke’s.”

“Then what’s he doing hanging around my daughter?”

“I don’t know. But I do know if you go over there and protest, Jane will think you do not trust her judgment.”

Hank scowled. “So now you’re an expert on what my daughter is thinking.”

“Of course not. She is your daughter. But I am a woman. It is what any woman would think.”

He knew Marta was a woman, damn it. He’d been made aware of it every day since Jack hired her, her perfume and her earrings and the way she crossed and uncrossed her legs when she got out of her damn chair.

When Hank started with the sheriff’s department almost forty years ago, law enforcement was all male and almost all-white. Marta stirred things up, stirred him up, in ways he didn’t like to acknowledge. Even to himself.

“Well, I know how guys think,” Hank said. “And I’m telling you, this Murphy bum is after more than Jane’s cupcakes.”

“And what makes you think she will give it to him?”

“She did before.”

Marta’s dark brows drew together. “They knew each other before?”

“No, damn it. She hooked up with some loser before.”

And he hadn’t stopped her.

The guilt of that would be with him always. His baby girl still hadn’t recovered.

Hank had known that Travis was trouble. He’d warned her. But all his warning had done was gloss the bastard with the shine of forbidden fruit.

Maybe Jane would have listened to a mother’s advice. But Hank couldn’t be her mother. And when it counted, he hadn’t been the father she deserved, either. A father’s job was to protect.

Old, impotent fury stirred. He should have killed the son of a bitch when he had the chance.

The chief’s door opened and Jack came out. “If you two are done bickering like an old married couple, I could use those reports. I’m going out to check on Dora Abrams.”

Dora Abrams was eighty-four years old and called in for everything from suspicious noises to a stopped-up toilet.

“I’ll take it,” Hank said. “Her house is on my way anyway. Aidan will be home from school in forty minutes.”

Marta smiled at him. “You’re a good grandfather.”

He didn’t deserve her praise. “Boys are easy.”

Her smile broadened. “You say that because you have only raised a girl. Wait until he gets older.”

*   *   *

“T
HAT
’
S
FORTY
-
NINE
DOLLARS
a night,” said the clerk at the Fishermen’s Motel, middle-aged and wiry, sporting a paunch and a walrus mustache. He looked past Gabe toward the parking lot. “That your dog?”

Gabe glanced over his shoulder. The mutt sat panting gently in the sunshine on the other side of the glass door. “Is that a problem?”

“I’ll need a ten-dollar damage deposit a day. Nonrefundable,” he added before Gabe could speak.

“He’s not my dog,” Gabe said.

“Whatever, buddy. Fifty-nine dollars. Unless you want
me to call the cops to get him. I don’t allow strays on my property.”

He paid. It was easier than explaining to Luke or that hard-ass Clark what he was doing with a dog.

There was a rack of fly-specked postcards standing on the counter—grass waving on the dunes, the fishing pier—and he bought one of those, too. As long as he was here, he might as well follow routine. “You got a washing machine in the building?”

“End of the hall. You’ll need quarters.”

“You make change?”

“Sure.”

Gabe stopped by the laundry room on his way down the hall, tossing a load of clothes into a washer, using leftover laundry soap from the shelf above. He grabbed a half-empty bottle of detergent to take to his room. The Fishermen’s Motel didn’t seem like the kind of place that provided complimentary toiletries.

The dog sniffed the edges of the motel room door before slinking inside.

Gabe dumped his seabag on the quilted bedspread and looked around at the paneled walls and dirty blue carpet, the faded poster of the harbor over the TV.

He grinned. Compared to some of the places he had slept on deployment, and some of the places he had slept since, the Fishermen’s Motel was the fucking Baghdad royal palace.

He turned on the hot water in the tiny bathroom, regarding his reflection in the spotted mirror over the sink.

He wasn’t meeting Luke’s wife and daughter looking like a homeless drifter. Too late for a haircut. But he could shave.

When he got in the shower, the dog, who had been padding around investigating the carpet smells, stuck its nose past the curtain and whined.

“Oh, hell, no,” Gabe said.

The mutt dropped its head, staring up at him with those hopeful cartoon eyes, its tail waving slowly back and forth.

Gabe sighed. He hadn’t caught fleas last night. That didn’t mean he’d get lucky two nights in a row. Anyway, the beast was filthy. He couldn’t keep it in his motel room in its current condition, nonrefundable damage deposit or not.

“Fine.” He pushed back the shower curtain. “But remember, you asked for this.”

Catching the dog under the elbows, he dragged it under the water with him.

*   *   *

“Y
OU
’
RE
ASKI
NG
FOR
trouble,” Hank said to Jane when she got home that night. “Letting that no-account jailbird hang around your shop.”

Jane looked around automatically for Aidan, who was doing his homework at the kitchen table. “Dad, can we not use that word, please?” she asked in a lowered voice.

Hank’s bushy eyebrows shot down. “Are you defending him now, too?”

Too
? Who was defending Gabe to her father? Not that it mattered to Jane.

“No, I’m trying to protect . . .” Her gaze went to her son.
Aidan
.

She had talked to him, tried to talk to him, about his father in prison.

It’s a place where grownups go when they break the rules
, she had explained to his down-bent head.

Lauren and all the books had advised her to be honest, to talk to him about his feelings.

You know you’re safe now, don’t you, Boo?
His baby name, shortened from Pooh Bear.
I talked to a lawyer to make sure he can never try to see you, never try to take you away, again.

Aidan had looked up at that, his eyes gleaming through his lashes.
He
never tried to see me before.

It was true. Travis had left them before Aidan’s first birthday. Until eight months ago, Aidan had had no contact with his father.

Now Aidan slid out of his seat, his straight brown bangs hiding his expression. “I’m done with my homework. Can I go to Christopher’s house to play Legos?”

She rubbed his arm gently, as if she could smooth away some invisible hurt. “Why don’t you invite Christopher to come here?”

“But, Mom, he has the new Avengers set.”

Jane regarded her son’s split lip. His mouth was still swollen from yesterday’s fight, but his aggrieved tone sounded reassuringly normal. She didn’t want to let Aidan out of her sight. But he needed friends, and the Pooles lived right down the street. Gail Poole was a math teacher at the high school. Nothing bad would happen under her supervision.

“Okay,” Jane said as cheerfully as she could. “We’re having dinner in an hour. Be home by six thirty.”

Aidan ran for the door.

“And watch out for cars!” she called after him.

The screen door banged shut.

“You want to protect him, you’ll keep away from that Murphy fellow.” Hank’s craggy face was fierce, his tone gruff.

In his own way, he worried about her as much as she worried about Aidan.

She smiled at him affectionately. “I wasn’t planning on bringing him home for supper, Daddy.”

Although I did make him breakfast
. Okay, not a thought she could share with her father.

Hank grunted. “Gary Wilson saw him raking your yard.”

Jane resisted rolling her eyes. She should have known the island gossips would pass along that little detail. “I gave him a sandwich. He wanted to pay me back. I thought it was actually pretty nice of him. Helpful.”
Responsible
.

“That’s what he wants you to think. Back when I was with the sheriff’s department, there was a guy in this neighborhood went around knocking on doors asking for yard work. Some fool woman says yes and convinces all her neighbors he’s really a good guy down on his luck, just needs a chance.” Hank stuck his thumbs into his belt loops. “Course it was all
a scam so he could case out the neighborhood. Six weeks later, all their houses are broken into and Mr. Helpful is gone. Along with their TVs, laptops, power tools, and anything else he could get his hands on.”

Jane knew her dad was only trying to look out for her. But his almost forty years in law enforcement had given him a pretty cynical view of human nature.

Jane had fed Gabe as a kindness. Paying it forward, because she had needed kindness in the past, too, and because he had been kind to that dog.

Not because she was softhearted or softheaded or because she was letting herself be taken advantage of by some hot drifter with hard muscles. Nope. Not this time. Never again.

“I don’t think Gabe Murphy was casing out the bakery, Dad.”

I was arrested for murder
, he’d said.
Not robbery.