In the Waning Light (5 page)

He hadn’t realized she truly wanted him.

CHAPTER 4

Meg woke abruptly and listened for a moment, trying to determine what had roused her. The wind had died. All had gone quiet. She could still hear the plaintive moan of the foghorn, but now she could also discern the distant crunch of waves against the man-made breakers at the mouth of the bay. She climbed down from her bed. The clock above the stove read 3:00 a.m.

Wrapping a sweater around her shoulders, she peered through the camper blinds. Clouds scudded up high, revealing glimpses of a gibbous moon that silvered the water and cast a ghostly glow on the sand dunes along the opposite shore. The spit. The dunes behind which they’d found Sherry. She shivered and rubbed her arms, caught for a moment between past and present, snared between the horror of that memory and the beauty of this bay that was once her home. This little marina that appeared to have been trapped in time. Returning here was like stepping right back into it all.

It made her think of Blake. He’d defined this bay for her.

She turned up the thermostat, lit the stove, and put the kettle on to brew tea. If she couldn’t sleep, she might as well get started with an action plan. Better than lying here thinking. And in the morning, she’d visit her aunt’s assisted care facility first thing. From Irene she’d get the keys to the chain across the gate, and the keys to the house. She’d check out the old place, get cracking on a list of repairs. She’d also drop by a real estate office. All this she could juggle while working on the story, setting up interviews, obtaining police, court, and autopsy records.

Meg seated herself at her small camper table. Sipping her tea, she opened her laptop and began to type a list of “primaries”—people
who’d been directly involved with her sister’s case. Her goal was to find ou
t
which of them still resided in Shelter Bay. If they no longer lived here, she’d get contact details and chase them down further afield. But right now, this was ground zero. And while emotionally challenging, the story itself should be simple—she knew it, had lived it. All she had to do was tell it in the voices of all the players.

Top of her list was Sheriff Ike Kovacs, who’d handled the investigation. The medical examiner. The old DA. Tyson Mack’s defense attorney. She’d also love to score an interview with Keevan Mack, Tyson Mack’s father. The image of Mason Mack from the convenience store suddenly filled her mind. The hostility in his eyes. A chill whispered over her skin. The words of her old mentor filled her mind.

. . .
make no mistake, if you want to write true crime, you are going to have to talk to people who have suffered something awful.

She typed in both Keevan and Mason’s names.

She’d also want to interview Bull Sutton, who’d led the initial search for the Brogan girls that fateful day. And Dave Kovacs, Ike’s son, the young deputy who was among the first on the scene of the murder. Plus someone from the sheriff’s search and rescue team, plus the doctor who’d treated her concussion. The female cop who’d interviewed her in the hospital. And Father John McKinnon, who’d tried to help her devoutly Catholic parents navigate the aftermath, to no avail, because an
eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth
had clearly trumped
thou shalt not kill
. . . She paused, then typed in Blake’s name. She’d get his army contact details from Bull. She didn’t really want to speak to Blake, but on another level she knew she had to, if she wanted to do this properly. Blake was the one who’d found her. Saved her life. In more ways than one.

She reached for her mug of tea and sipped as she watched her blinking cursor, listening to the familiar crunch of waves. Emma Williams, Sherry’s best friend, went down next on the list. Sherry had told Emma on the phone that day that she was going with Tyson Mack to the spit for an “illicit” liaison. Tommy Kessinger, of course. Her sister’s boyfriend at the time had also been a close family friend. The whole Kessinger family had been close with the Brogan bunch. Everyone had believed the Kessingers would eventually become in-laws. Meg inhaled deeply at the possibility of seeing Tommy again. She rubbed her brow. This was going to be hard. But she’d started down this path now. She would not turn back until she was done.

She began to type notes in rough, from memory, starting with things she’d learned from Blake about that fateful day she and Sherry went missing.

THE STRANGER AMONG US

By Meg Brogan

BLAKE

Two hours pass and Meg is still not back. The marina guests return in their boat with a bucket full of fair-sized male Dungeness crabs. Blake keeps casting an eye out over the bay as he helps them moor and disembark, all smiles and sunburned faces. It’s turning cool on the water, a band of thick fog blowing slowly across the spit, where Meg had headed. Dusk begins to steal insidiously out of the shadows, and the light wanes.

Blake’s curiosity edges into worry. He’s been not-so-secretly in love with Meg Brogan all summer, and probably long before that in a kid-soulmate-friendship kind of way. Young love is complex. It’s fervent and fierce and spins on a dime. To Blake, Meg
is
summer. She’s the ocean. She’s crabbing. She’s the heartbeat of this bay. She gives him the zest to bite into life with full-bore zeal, to throw back his head and laugh with a mouthful of purple berries. She makes him lie awake in his bed at night, watching the arc of the moon, listening to the electric beat of his own heart.

He’s sixteen. She’s almost fourteen. And their relationship is headed into trickier, headier, darker territory. This summer has been complicated by a kiss that tasted of salt, and watermelon. By a touch of his hand to bare breasts.

Back on the mainland, across the coast road, in a subdivision abutting the forest, stands the Brogan residence, a classic vinyl-sided double-story that speaks of love and detailed attention. Mowed lawn. Happy little flower beds. A birdbath cloaked in moss and homemade birdhouses hammered into a giant chestnut that offers shade in hot summers, and a twisted monkey bar of a climb up to a second-story bedroom window.

Smoke wafts from the BBQ out back. Meg’s father, Jack Brogan, has a ginger beer at his side in a mug frosted from the freezer. He tends the flames, sips his drink, relishes the sweet scent of freshly mowed grass. A sprinkler throws staccato arcs at the end of the garden near the woods. It’s a last summer get-together. In just over one week he and Tara, Meg’s mother, will be driving Sherry down to Stanford.

Tara Brogan is busy making burger patties. She glances up at any sound; the crackle of tires on the street, a call out front, laughter . . . she’s beginning to wonder where her daughters are. They’d gone to see that new movie at the cinema in town. The sky clouds over, and rain begins to spit. A sudden wind teases, tests, swirls, calling in a wall of dense sea fog that fingers with dark glee up from the marina and along the streets and into the village and subdivision. The fickle vagaries of coast weather.

Jack pulls the BBQ in under the eaves. It’s getting dark. Rain comes down more insistently.

Tara begins to make a few phone calls, checking in first with Sherry’s best friend, Emma. She’s not home. Tara finds someone who was at the movies. No one saw Sherry or her little sister, Megan. Worry edges into anxiety. A storm starts to lash against the Oregon seaside town. The foghorn begins to sound from Shelter Head. The radio says it’s supposed to get worse.

The phone circle widens, friends calling friends. Panic blackens Tara’s eyes and chalks her face. Neighbors come around. The kettle is boiled and tea is poured. Voices are low murmurs as Jack Brogan finally calls his good friend, Sheriff Kovacs.

Kovacs immediately activates Search and Rescue. They start to put a search party together, but have no clues yet where to start. The woods? Town? Around the movie theater? The beaches? This place is between ocean, miles of dunes, and a state forest that reaches all the way into the mountains. And there is no “point last seen.”

It’s almost full dark when a call comes from Bull Sutton’s Marina. Sutton’s son, B
lake, saw Meg Brogan taking the Brogan family crab boat out late that afternoon. The boat is still not back.

“Where? Which way? Did you see?” Jack Brogan demands when he gets down to the marina, grabbing Blake’s collar, shaking the boy, wind, rain lashing at his face. His eyes are wild and his words hard, angry, full with a father’s fear. “Why in the hell didn’t you tell someone!”

“I didn’t know she was missing! I was busy with the crab boil.”

“What direction?”

“There. Across the bay, to the spit.” Blake points. “I . . . I didn’t think it was a problem. Meg knows this water—”

“She’s only thirteen, goddammit!”

Blake doesn’t remind her father Meg will be fourteen next week. He doesn’t tell Jack Brogan how sweet his daughter’s mouth tastes, and how he’d like to do things with her, like he does in his dreams.

“How could you not know there was a storm blowing in!”

“Jack.” Sheriff Kovacs places his big hand on Jack’s arm. “Easy now. Let me talk to Blake.”

The fire engine arrives, and an ambulance, and a SAR incident van. More cops. Lights pulse red and blue in the storm. Men and women in heavy weather gear gather around the SAR van. A klieg light spits on. A rescue boat starts across the bay.

The sheriff takes Blake aside. The big cop’s face is now white with worry.

“Was Sherry with her?”

“No.”

“Did she talk to you before she left?”

Blake swallows. Looks at his feet. His face, too, is bloodless, his jaw tight, his arm and neck muscles corded wire. He should have done something, told someone earlier, left the tourists and gone to see for himself . . .

The sheriff’s eyes darken and a frown begins to cut across his brow as the questions enter his mind.

“Were you the last one who saw her, Blake? Anyone else see her leaving the marina?”

“How would I know if someone else saw her after I did?” he snaps. “She took the boat, and she was being weird. I asked her where she was headed and she told me it was none of my business.”

“She take crab bait? Was she going fishing?”

“No. It didn’t look like she was going fishing. She . . . she appeared to be on a . . . mission. She looked worried. Was moving fast. Went right across the bay to Sunny Beach.”

“You like the Brogan girl, don’t you, Blake? Pretty little redhead. You know her well.” A beat of silence. The foghorn blares. “Very well.”

Blake Sutton’s eyes flash up to meet the sheriff’s. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Nothing, son, nothing. Just trying to figure out whether we should be looking for those Brogan girls in two separate places, or one.”

Search beams dance in the mist over the black water. Calls carry in snatches of wind. Bull Sutton marches fast down the gangplank in heavy rubber boots, a strident figure in his sou’wester. He climbs into his boat with the big engines.

The sheriff moves fast down the gangway to join him. The engines rumble to life. A powerful spotlight flares on, turning rain into a silvery sideways sheet.

“I’m coming!” Blake charges down the gangway and along the wobbling wooden dock after the sheriff and his dad.

“You stay right there.” Bull Sutton tosses free the lines, and the boat churns backward, away from the dock.

“What do you think I am?!
A kid?
I can handle this water, this bay, the storm better than half the men out there!”

“Stay there,” his father calls. “Man the fort, Blake. Keep the radio on. Need you on communications.”

Blake clenches his jaw, hands fisting at his sides. Rain drenches him. The horns moan. Wind slaps waves against the dock and he can hear the thunder of surf against rocks at the mouth. His dad’s boat is swallowed by dark and mist. Adrenaline thumps through him, as does the image of Meg, heading off in her little boat, bare legs, hair snapping in the wind. Small against the world.

You know her well . . . Very well . . .

CHAPTER 5

Blake watched Noah scrambling up the sandy trail behind the house, little red backpack bobbing, his towhead tousling in the breeze. When his son reached the road up top, he hesitated, but did not look back.

“Later, champ!” Blake called from the bottom, taking the gap before his kid vanished without a good-bye. “Don’t forget, it’s bus home today!”

Noah turned, gave a quick wave, then disappeared between the scrub, heading down the road to join the other kids waiting for the school bus.

Blake stuffed his hands in his pockets. He felt strange, a hollowness as he stood there in the wet grass in his gum boots. The morning was chilly, but the wind had died and the skies were clearing. In a few minutes the sun would crest above the east ridge and spool some warmth into the bay. Yet everything was dead. The tail end of winter was always the ugliest time of year, a time when it seemed that summer might never come. But he had work to do if he was to ready the marina and campsites and cabins before the annual influx of tourists. He also wanted to have Crabby Jack’s Cafe renovated in time for a grand spring opening. He sucked in a deep breath and made for the office, boots crunching over gravel.

Who’d have thought he’d be like his dad, running this marina alone? A single father. After trying so hard to go another way, to find another route, just to circle all the way back as if destiny ordained it.

Focus on the routine. Check off the chores. Open the marina up. Even in winter there was the odd diehard fisherman who still wanted to go crabbing. Soon it would be spring—then the summer holidays, the busy season. His kid might grow to love it yet. Blake was forming a vision of the way it could be—Noah helping him with the campsite, and the boats, and the tourists, and the more serious crabbers and clammers and fisher folk.

While the marina life had not been for his older brother, Geoff, Blake had deep down always loved it, living by the push and pull of the tides, the seasons, the sea. If it hadn’t been for Meg, for what had happened to her and Sherry . . . he probably would have stayed, taken over from his dad. Married Meg if she’d have had him. Instead she’d cut them all out of her life, excised this place like a cancerous tumor in order to survive. And he’d been too close to the lesion she’d needed to separate out. Collateral damage.

Sherry’s murder had pitched some serious curveballs.

Blake unlocked the office, put on coffee. He glanced out the window at the camper. Still there. Last night, from his upstairs window, he’d seen the light go on inside, around 3:00 a.m. He couldn’t say what had roused him and made him look. Perhaps the sudden quiet of the storm.

He ran through his list of chores, setting things up for the day, then checked his watch again before making his way over to the camper, Lucy in tow.

Blake knocked lightly on the camper door. “Hello? Anyone home?”

Peggy Millar cracked an egg and dropped it into the pan. It hit with a sizzle, the white lacing into a crisp curl along the edges.

“You’ll never guess who came into the gas station last night,” she said, reaching for another egg. She raised her voice to be heard over the stove fan. The scent of coffee mingled with the aroma of a loaf fresh from the bread maker that had been working its magic during the night. Outside, the day was clear, heavy conifers bejeweled with droplets shimmering in the early morning sun. The sound of traffic on the coast road grew steadily as the day got started.

Her husband, Ryan, just back from dropping Jamie and Alex at school, grunted at the breakfast table, reading his newspaper.

“Meg Brogan.”

He glanced up sharply. “What?”

“Meg Brogan is back in town.”

He stared at his wife. “Where? When?”

“I just told you. She came in to fill up her truck last night. She had a camper shell on top. Washington plates. She bought some food in the store.”

“Meg Brogan is
back
? What in the hell is she doing back here? Did you ask her?”

“Just passing through, I think. Looking for a place to stay the night.
I only registered it was her
after
she’d left the store. Her face was famil
iar, but I couldn’t place it. Then as she got back into her truck, I sud
denly remembered the poster in Rose’s bookstore. Meg Brogan’s book
is right there in the front window. Her face plastered on the jackets.”

She popped up the toast, placed a slice on each plate. Taking bacon
off the paper towel on which it had been draining, she positioned two
pieces neatly beside each slice of toast, then flipped the eggs before sliding them atop the toast. She brought the plates to the table, set one in front of Ryan. His attention remained fixed on her face.

“She wouldn’t have remembered me,” Peggy said. “I was in a grade above her. Didn’t really have anything to do with either her or Sherry. Besides, I look different than I did back then.” She went back into the kitchen, fetched the coffeepot. “Did you know Rose’s book club is reading that latest novel of hers? Something about an old woman who remembered a crime from like fifty years ago.” She held up the pot. “Top up?”

But Ryan just stared.

“You okay?” She set the pot down, slowly seating herself in front of her plate.

Ryan cleared his throat. “Yeah. Yeah, I’m good.” He lifted his knife and fork, ate distractedly.

She sliced into her egg. Yolk spilled onto the plate. “I’ve been meaning to read that book,” she said, delivering a forkful to her mouth. “I wonder if she’d ever write about the Shelter Bay murder.”

“You mean her own sister’s killing?” He stared, bloodless. “Why would she do that?”

“Maybe her memory might come back if she did, like that woman in her latest book.”

He drained his mug, plunked it hard on the table, reached for his napkin, and wiped his mouth. “Got to get to work.” He pushed himself to his feet.

“I think I’ll join that book club.”

“What about the gas station?”

Irritation flushed hot through her chest. “I could get Brady to work an extra hour or two a week. I think we owe ourselves some time off now and then. Now that the business is finally taking off in this new location. You could do with some downtime, too.”

Ryan regarded his wife a moment. “We’re only as good as the Kessinger-Sproatt contract. If we lose that, we’re back to square one. Tommy saved our asses.”

“Book club is not going to kill us, for Pete’s sake, Ryan.” She lurched to her feet, snagged her half-eaten plate, and angrily scraped the contents into the trash.

“We’ll talk later.” He exited the kitchen door.

“Later,” she muttered to herself. “Always ‘later.’ Like I can’t do a damn thing without
permission
.” Peggy went to the window, dirty dish still in hand. She watched her husband lumbering over to his
mechanic shop, where he spent seven days a week tinkering with
vehicles. And most nights, too, a couple of beers at his side. He was getting
heavy. What had once made him a handsome, square-jawed football
force to be reckoned with in high school was now turning him into a shambling giant of a man. He carried his beer and her cooking
in
his paunch. Taking some time off, getting some exercise, maybe
going
fishing again, camping, was not only a dream, it was going to become
a health necessity. If she could put it to him that way . . .

Maybe she should make oatmeal for breakfast tomorrow, instead of dishing up the cholesterol and fat in eggs and bacon. She could lose about twenty pounds herself, the doctor had said. As she stacked the dishwasher, a memory snaked up . . . Meg Brogan returning to school for the first time after the murder. It had been a cold January. Over twenty years ago.

Peggy stilled. Poor kid. She’d been a mere shadow of herself. Skin so pale and translucent her freckles had stood out like floating stars. In the following months she’d begun to cover her freckles with chalky makeup, and she’d cut her hair brutally short, dyed it punk black. As if somehow needing to wear her own aura of death. Or stamp it out, or something.

Peggy had ached to say something to Meg in the school hallway—her locker had been just near Meg’s—but she’d never known what to say. And as the months wore on, Meg had begun to project a keep-the-shit-away-from-me hostility. So Peggy had just looked away. Like all the other kids had. Leaving Meg Brogan to walk and sit and eat in the cafeteria alongside them all like a silent specter, a shadow somehow removed from their own real, comfortable world, untouched by what had touched her.

Blake Sutton was the only person who’d persevered long enough to ever get through to her. Just about every girl in her class had at one time or another crushed on Blake. He’d wasted it all on Meg.

And then she’d gone and broken the boy’s heart clean in two when she left. He’d never have married Allison if he could’ve had his Meg. And now look at him, a single father with a son he never wanted.

Peggy inhaled, glanced at the kitchen clock. This stuff was drawing her back. She needed to get ready, go help in the store.

With the base of his fist, Blake banged louder on the camper door. “Hello? Anyone home?”

No answer. He noted the Washington plates. Either the occupant was dead asleep, or out on a morning walk or . . . fishing? He frowned, turned slowly around, taking in the bay, and then he caught sight of a lone figure in the distance, on the Crabby Jack deck.

A woman.

She stood at the railing cradling a travel mug, looking out over the bay. Hair long and wild in the breeze. Chestnut-red, the color catching the gold in the dawn sun. Something snared like a bramble in his chest. With it came a hot rush of adrenaline. He shook it off. Disarmed by the coincidence, he crossed the vacant camper sites and made his way through the covered area in front of his office, and around the building to the front deck of the cafe. As he turned the corner, Lucy bounded ahead and nudged the woman’s jeans in search of a greeting. The woman stiffened in surprise at the dog’s touch, then she laughed when she saw it was a black Lab. She set her mug on the railing and crouched down to pet Lucy, revealing her profile. Blake’s heart stilled. His breath, his whole body stopped dead in his tracks.

“Oh, hello, girl, who are you?” she said to his wiggly Lab as she examined the tag on her collar. “Lucy? Aren’t you a pretty thing.” She glanced up and froze. Paled. Her mouth opened, but words seemed to elude her. Slowly, she rose to her feet, reached for the railing, as if to steady herself.

Blake felt as though he was seeing a ghost. His world spun and tilted in a dizzying distortion of time. She’d matured—the lines of her features had refined. She was slender under that bulky brown coat. Almost a little too thin. Wan complexion. Same soft brush of freckles. Wide mouth. Light honey-brown eyes, almost amber in this light. Big eyes, dark lashes. Those eyes that had always sucked him in with their mystery, into the depths where Meggie’s imagination lurked, the place he knew she hid the real girl, the vulnerable teen, the maturing woman. The place he knew hurt. And how he’d tried to help her out, but never could fully lure her into his light. Yes, for selfish reasons of his own, he’d tried. Meg had been his first love. Real love. The kind of feeling that went beyond sexual lust and attempts at gratification. The kind of feeling that delved deep into the realm of friendship, kinship. Soul mate, as trite as that might seem to some.

The woman who’d left this town, and him, because he reminded her of bad shit.

He knew what she’d become. He’d read her books. In tabloid rags at supermarket checkouts he’d glimpsed photos of her with that filthy-rich, celebrity-shrink fiancé of hers, him with his James Bond looks. He’d known every moment what Meg Brogan was making of her life.

And not for one of those moments had he ever expected to see her back here. Home. Standing on the deck of his marina. Petting his dog. And in the distance behind her, across the water, the spit where he’d found her lying unconscious and close to dead.