The Widow (12 page)

Ellis appealed to Owen. “Perhaps you and Abigail—”

“Relax,” she said. “I’m off to tea before the waiter gives away my table.”

She headed over to the sunny lawn, and Owen watched her a moment, then said to Jason, “Linc did well today. He’s got guts. If you’ll excuse me…”

“Of course. Thank you for showing an interest in Linc.” Jason made a face. “Abigail isn’t herself. I think something happened.”

Owen nodded. “On my way.”

Jason returned to his chair, watching Owen sit across from Abigail at one of the sturdy wooden lawn tables. Ellis could feel his brother’s relief. He’d managed to get rid of both his sweaty son and Abigail before his guests arrived.

Ellis noticed a well-dressed couple in their fifties walk out onto the terrace.

The potential buyers, he thought. Did they have the look of garden lovers?

It doesn’t matter.

He’d dig up the plants that were most special to him and plant them at his new place, or in his gardens at his main house in Washington.

The rest of the plants—what did he care?

“Here they are,” Jason said, then turned to his younger brother. “Ellis? You’ll be okay, won’t you?”

He nodded. “Yes, of course. I’m with you on this deal, Jason. All the way.”

He could see his brother’s relief. “I knew you would be.”

Grace, Ellis noticed, seemed hardly to notice what her father and uncle were saying, her attention fixed instead on Owen and Abigail at their table, as if they might be talking about her, as if they held the keys to her future. Ellis reached across the table and took her hand. “It’ll all work out, Grace.”

“Yes.” She pulled her gaze from the table out on the lawn and managed a quick, fake smile. “Of course it will. I’m letting this background check get to me, and I know it shouldn’t. I just feel so exposed.”

“And you’re worried about Abigail.”

“Yes.” She nodded, as if to convince herself. “Aren’t we all?”

“Maybe Owen can find out if anything’s happened. In the meantime, just try to relax and enjoy lunch.”

By the time their lunch guests got to their table, Grace was on her feet, smiling, and Ellis knew he’d succeeded. His niece would sail through the background check—no matter what Abigail Browning was up to, and the constant reminder her presence was of a man Grace had wanted for herself.

A
bigail broke open a browned, steaming popover, aware of Owen’s probing gaze on her. “Do you have my number here in Maine?” she asked him.

“Your phone number? Of course. It’s the same number it’s always been. Why?”

“Because I had a strange call this morning. It was on the heels of another strange call Saturday night.”

Owen lifted a popover out of the basket her waiter had brought and set it on his plate. But he had no visible reaction to what she’d just told him. “First things first,” he said. “I didn’t call you on Saturday or this morning.”

“Could someone have used your phone?”

“I doubt it, but if you’d told me Sean and Ian Alden would manage to sneak out a window without my knowing, I’d have said that was impossible. Do you have any reason to believe the calls were made from my house?”

“None.”

She dipped her knife into the softened butter, which she spread liberally on one half of her popover. Owen’s steady calm did not have a soothing effect on her. She had an urge to reach across the table and slather butter on his popover, just to penetrate his self-control. She could dump a tub of strawberry jam in his lap. Grab him by the shoulders and kiss him. Why the hell not?

“Can you tell me about these calls?”

She nodded. “Lieutenant Beeler gave the okay to tell you. He’s not giving a press conference or anything, but you deserve to know, in case this guy’s a threat. If you value your quiet spot on the water, you’ll want to keep the information to yourself.” She reached for the strawberry jam. “FBI Director’s widowed cop daughter gets anonymous tips—well, you can imagine the media reaction.”

“I can, indeed. And unleashing reporters out here would only muddy the waters of finding this caller.”

“Correct,” she said, then gave him a rundown of the two calls. When she finished, she ate a piece of her popover and gazed out at Jordan Pond, a lone bird of some kind soaring overhead. A hawk? She didn’t know her birds that well. Finally, she looked back at Owen. “I know you’re not the caller. I don’t think you could disguise that mix of Boston and Texas in your voice.”

But he didn’t smile, his gray eyes narrowed, intense. “Do you think it’s Mattie?”

“Lou and Doyle are talking to him. So far, there’s no reason to believe it’s him—or anyone on the island.”

“What are you doing out here?” Owen asked.

“I followed Jason and Grace. Ellis came in a separate car. I was out on the road, and there they were—and I figured, why not? Sometimes if you stick your fingers in enough eyes, things happen.”

“That’s one way to look at it.” He ate part of his popover, without butter or jam. “The Coopers looked as if they wanted to choke you. All three of them.”

“They did, didn’t they? They’re too repressed to admit as much.”

“Or too polite.”

She shrugged. “That, too. Do you see them during the off-season, when you’re not in Maine?”

“No.”

“I thought you and Grace were betrothed in the cradle.”

“Her father might like to think so, but, no, we weren’t betrothed in the cradle. We knew each other growing up. We see each other here from time to time. That’s about it.” His mouth twitched with unexpected amusement. “Satisfied?”

“What about Linc?”

“I put him through his paces today. We did the pond hike at a fast clip. It’s not a difficult trail, although it’s rough in spots, but I made him hoof it. He kept up. He’s walking back to his place now. It’s a trek—it’ll do him good.”

“Think he’s seriously interested in search-and-rescue?”

“We’re offering different levels of courses at the field academy, from basic instruction for the novice through advanced coursework for specialists who could end up on a Fast Rescue team.”

“Like yourself,” Abigail said. “Except you’re probably past coursework at this point.”

“Not in this field. There’s always something new to learn.” He finished off his popover. “I hope Linc will apply at least for a weekend course.”

“How did you get into search-and-rescue?”

“I took a first-aid class in high school. I was hooked after that. Abigail—”

“I’ve told you what I can about the calls. The first one was easy to dismiss. I get crank calls from time to time. Lou Beeler does, too. Doyle, less so. We all took this one seriously, but the odds are it was nothing.”

“This second call this morning changes things.”

She nodded. “Whoever’s calling wants to manipulate me. I was married on the second Saturday in July. Chris was found—” She didn’t finish, simply added, “The timing of the call is deliberate.”

“Why would someone who claims to want to help you try to get under your skin?” Owen asked.

“To be in the middle of the drama. To feel important.” She shrugged. “Or maybe to mislead me. Obviously it’s not someone who wants to come forward.”

“Why not?”

“Your guess is as good as mine.”

Owen pushed his plate aside and leaned over the wooden table. “You’ll be careful, won’t you, Abigail? This isn’t an investigation in Boston. It’s not part of your job. You’re personally involved.”

She smiled. “Now you sound like Doyle and Lou. They told me to leave the heavy lifting to them.”

“Will you?”

“Of course.”

He gave her a skeptical look, grabbing the tab when the waiter dropped it off. “My treat. I haven’t had tea and popovers in ages. I’d forgotten how good they are.”

“Owen?” She tried to keep her gaze on him but found she couldn’t. “About last night…”

“About Mattie, you mean?”

She heard the humor in his tone and scowled at him. “Very funny. I meant about—you know.”

“The fire in my woodstove. It was too damn hot.”

“You’re making fun of me, Owen Garrison, and if you think I’m going to sit here and take it, you can think again.” She finished the last of her popover, doused in butter and jam, and brushed off her fingers with her napkin, but he didn’t take the hint. “You’re going to make me say it, aren’t you? Okay. The kiss. I have no regrets.”

“I would hope not.” He smiled. “It was a damn good kiss.”

“We did get a bit carried away. As I said, I have no regrets, but it can’t happen again.”

“Why not?”

“You’re looking for distractions, I’m looking for distractions. I’m getting strange calls. MattieYoung’s acting weird. Doyle Alden’s in a sour mood. The Coopers are in the middle of an FBI background check that might not be as routine as they want us all to believe. Jason’s selling his brother’s house.” Abigail paused, catching her breath, wondering what her litany of goings-on was all about, why she’d rattled them off. “I can’t be sneaking kisses in the dark.”

“Hands off, then?”

She didn’t answer right away, which surprised her.

Owen seized on the delay. “Not as easy as you thought, is it? Abigail, we’ve been thinking about kissing each other for a long time. I know I thought about it that time I caught you in Austin pestering my grandmother. Last night was meant to happen.” He laid a few bills on the table and placed the check over them. “It’s going to happen again.”

“Not today,” she whispered, her chest clamping down on itself, until she thought she wouldn’t be able to breathe.

His eyes darkened, and he nodded. “No, not today.”

He had the grace to let her get out of there first. She picked up her pace, moving in a half run by the time she reached her car. She drove out to the entrance to the Park Loop Road and paid for a pass, joining a car from Colorado and an SUV from West Virginia on the quiet, scenic drive.

“Chris…don’t go. We can run errands another time.”

He touched her cheek. “I won’t be long.”

She smiled, falling back onto the couch in the front room. “Good. I’ll read for a little while and take a nap.”

“Yes.” He laughed, kissing her softly. “Rest up for later.”

After he left, she read a few pages and fell asleep, wishing he’d stayed with her.

The breathtaking, classic Maine coast beauty steadied her even as it conjured up memories, the whisper of long-ago kisses, the shudder of long-ago orgasms. She could see Chris’s eyes, as dark a green as the fir trees around her, as he’d watched her in the night.

To ease the pain, she would tell herself she was a different person now, but she wasn’t. Sure she’d changed—she didn’t know if Chris would recognize her anymore. She wasn’t a twenty-five-year-old law student who’d never endured serious loss, who’d never been called to a scene of a triple homicide or looked into the eyes of someone who’d killed in a fit of rage and now couldn’t go back and undo what he’d done. Yet with all she’d done in the past seven years, she wasn’t a different person. Deep down she was the same woman who’d fallen in love with her guy from Maine, her FBI agent.

He’d been her first proper lover, and he’d relished that role in their eighteen months together.

That their life together was over didn’t mean it had never happened.

Or that she needed to pretend that she didn’t want to fall in love again. It wouldn’t be the same—it couldn’t be the same. And it didn’t have to be.

She wanted it, she realized. She wanted to love a man, to be in love with a man—not out of desperation, not just to have someone in her life, but to let it happen if it was meant to, to be open to the possibility of it.

She made no stops on the winding drive.

When she arrived back at her house, the air was still, only the distant cries of seagulls to disturb the silence. Inside, she smelled plaster dust and the faint odor of fresh paint.

She dialed Lou Beeler’s pager. When he returned her call, she was in the back room, shaking open a black trash bag, standing up to her mid-calves in debris from her gutted walls. Any more frustrations, and she’d have all the walls in the house ripped out.

“I don’t have anything for you,” Lou said.

“Did you talk to Mattie Young?”

“I did. He wants to get a restraining order against you.”

Abigail snorted. “Let him try.”

“Doyle doesn’t have anything, either. Abigail—you know these calls could be B.S. You must have made your share of enemies over the past few years. One of them could have dug around on the Internet and figured out just enough to push your buttons.”

“Is that what you believe happened?”

“I don’t believe anything. I just follow the facts.” He paused. “So should you.”

She sat on a chair covered in white plaster dust. She’d meant to throw sheets over the furniture, but hadn’t gotten around to it. Now, she had a bigger mess to clean up—and Lou Beeler doubting her objectivity.

She didn’t blame him. In his place, she’d do no different.

She smiled to herself as she continued over the phone, “Does that mean I still have a green light to look into the calls myself?”

“As if you need a green light from me. You know what I’m saying, Abigail.”

“You’d like for me to go back to Boston.”

“Your caller could be there.”

“Or not,” she said.

Lou sighed. “Or not.”

“What about the FBI guys doing the background check on Grace Cooper?”

“What about them?”

“Come on, Lou. You know what I’m asking. Did you talk to them about the calls?”

“Yes.”

She waited, but he didn’t go on. “All right. I can take a hint.”

The Maine CID detective broke into laughter. “No, you can’t,” he said, still chuckling as he hung up.

Abigail scowled at the dead phone and debated driving out to the local police station and finding Doyle Alden, but what good would that do?

Instead, using an ancient dustpan and brush—and her hands—she swept up the chunks of plaster, bent nails, mice skeletons and yellowed drywall tape, shoving the debris into her heavy-duty trash bag.

She needed answers. But how could she get them with such an elusive caller? Without the law enforcement resources she usually had at her disposal?

“You’re the only person the killer fears.”

Was it true? If so, what leverage did it give her?

She could hardly breathe in the thick dust she’d stirred up. She tied up the overstuffed bag and dragged it out to the back porch, down the steps and around to the side of the house, coughing as she shoved it into the garbage bin.

She knew what she had to do.

Before she could change her mind, she ran back into the house and grabbed the phone, dialing her father’s private number.

“Abigail,” he said when he picked up. “I thought you might call. Where are you?”

She was sure he knew where she was. “Maine,” she said.

He took an audible breath. She pictured him in his office or in his car, taking her call because he was between meetings. He was a busy man with an important, high-pressure job, but he was like any father with a daughter whose life had taken a hairpin turn from what he’d wanted for her.