The Widow

When she arrived at her house, Abigail pulled on shorts, a T-shirt and her good running shoes and jogged up the private drive and out onto the main road, finding her pace, telling herself she needed stay in shape. But she could feel her restlessness building into frustration, questions and threads of conversations, new possibilities, coming at her all at once.

And memories. They jumped at her with every stride-and not just her own memories, of her short-lived marriage, of her widowhood, filled with seven years of prodding and pushing for answers to her husband’s unsolved murder. Chris’s memories came at her, too. The stories he’d told of his childhood on the island that had taken shape in her mind over the years, until they were as real to her as the images of her own past.

Chris and Doyle Alden…Mattie Young…the three of them going off on a lobster boat with Chris’s grandfather, the old man teaching them what he knew about tides, currents, hidden dangers, good stewardship of the land and sea that had sustained their families for generations.

Abigail could picture them on Will Browning’s lobster boat when they’d realized a girl was in the water. Doe Garrison, a wealthy summer resident. A pretty girl, by all accounts. Happy. A nature lover like her great- grandfather.

The local boys were just teenagers themselves. At seventeen, Mattie was the oldest. Doyle, fifteen. Chris was fourteen, like Doe.

They’d pulled her out of the water, but it was too late.

“I could see her brother up on the cliffs watching us try to save her. I’ll never forget his face, Abigail. Never.”

Will Browning raced to the harbor, an ambulance waiting.

“The Garrisons and the Coopers were on the dock. Polly Garrison, Doe’s parents, Owen. They were in shock. They knew that she was gone. Jason Cooper, Ellis. They tried to stay out of the way. But Grace-she was thirteen years old, and her best friend had just drowned.”

As she maintained her steady pace, Abigail pictured the horror of that beautiful summer afternoon and wondered how much of it Owen remembered.

Every second, probably.

She could understand how he could keep coming to Maine, build a house a few hundred yards from where his sister had drowned. It wasn’t just out of a stubborn need to appreciate what Doe had loved but out of a knowledge that, in order to be whole, he had to embrace that loss and make it a part of him, not run from it, cut it out of him or drag it behind him.

But was she really thinking about Owen’s behavior…or her own? What, really, did she understand about Owen Garrison?

When she trotted back up her driveway, Abigail was almost relieved to find a black government car and a well-dressed, straight-backed man and woman knocking on her front door.

FBI agents.

They introduced themselves as Special Agent Ray Capozza and Special Agent Mary Steele and declined Abigail’s invitation to go inside, instead joining her on the driveway. Capozza, a compact, no-nonsense man, insisted on showing her his credentials. “We’re here on routine business, Mrs. Browning.”

“You’re running a background check on Grace Cooper, yes, I know. And, please, call me Abigail. Did my father tell you I was here?”

“No.” Capozza wasn’t going any further.

Steele, a sharp-featured brunette who looked as if she expected a bear to jump out of the trees, nodded vaguely out toward the water. “Pretty spot. I can see now why you hung on to this place. Your husband-” She broke off, looking awkward, then plunged ahead. “We’re aware of what happened to him, Mrs. Browning-Abigail. No one’s forgotten. No one will forget.”

Capozza nodded in agreement, even if he wasn’t ready to be that frank. “We’re not here to investigate his murder, but we’re in close touch with Maine CID. If we learn anything new, we’ll let them know.”

“Of course. Thanks.” A courtesy call, Abigail realized. That was what this visit was. “Thanks for stopping by.”

“We’ll want to talk to you about your relationship with Grace Cooper at some point,” Capozza said.

And Chris’s relationship with her, no doubt. He and Grace had known each other most of their lives. If he’d died of natural causes seven years ago, he’d be a footnote, if that, in the two FBI agents’ investigation. Now, they’d be prepared for anything-they’d hope, if not expect, to run across some new, telling tidbit. Abigail could see it in Capozza’s and Steele’s faces. They would love to stumble on the one missed fact that would solve the cold case of Chris’s murder and turn their routine background investigation into something more.

“Anytime,” she said. “I’ll be here for the rest of the week and through the weekend, at least.”

Special Agent Steele opened up the driver’s door of their car and glanced back at Abigail. “Why are you up here this week? Vacation?”

Capozza toed a loose rock in the driveway. “Funny coincidence, isn’t it?”

“You’ve talked to Lieutenant Beeler and Chief Alden,” Abigail said.

They nodded. Leaning against the open car door, Steele said, “We know about the call.”

“You want me to take you through it?”

“You don’t mind?”

“Not at all.” Abigail smiled, watching her fellow law enforcement officers slap at mosquitoes at almost the exact same moment. “Now would you care to come inside?”

Abigail sank into the old leather chair in her catch-all back room and felt the cold air off the water blow in through the open door. The wind had picked up with the incoming tide. She liked the sound of it, the taste of the ocean on it, but she’d have to get up and close the door eventually. The temperature was supposed to drop down into the forties overnight.

Would Mattie sneak into the old foundation tonight for a secret party?

The FBI agents had listened carefully to her story about the call. They’d asked the same follow-up questions that Lucas, Bob, Scoop and Lou had also asked-that she’d asked herself. She’d half hoped answering them again would bring new insight, but it hadn’t.

After Capozza and Steele left, Abigail had gone into the musty cellar and dragged tools up to the back room and laid them out on the floor. A set of screwdrivers and a set of wrenches, two different kinds of hammers, chisels, scrapers, level, a crowbar, a utility knife, a drywall saw, a sledgehammer.

The Browning men had taken good care of their tools. She’d left the electric drill and saw in the cellar, and other tools that were either unfamiliar to her or looked dubious. Chris and his grandfather weren’t big on throwing things away. They’d recycle broken bits of one thing and use them to fix something else.

The back room needed more than a fresh coat of paint. It needed gutting. New wallboard, new wiring, new flooring. Abigail had collected do-it-yourself books over the years. Surely there was a chapter on gutting a room. How hard could it be? She just had to be careful not to drop anything on her head or electrocute herself.

The wind picked up, gusting through the open door. A light plastic chair scraped across the porch floor and fell over backward, landing with a bang that, although she’d seen it coming, startled her.

She shot out of her chair and grabbed the sledgehammer, lifting it with both hands, remembering Chris grinning at her as he’d held it himself so long ago. What had he been doing? She couldn’t even remember.

She saw the section of wall where they’d fixed the leak on their last morning together. The job had never been finished properly. She could see the edges of tape and dried spackling, and the paint over the repair work didn’t match the white of the rest of the wall.

Abigail could do the work herself, or ask friends, or hire it out, but she simply hadn’t gotten around to it.

“Oh, Chris.”

Her voice caught on the wind and seemed to echo out on the darkening rocks.

She drew the sledgehammer back and, on an exhale, smashed it not into the haphazardly repaired wall, but the narrower wall next to the porch door.

The plaster cracked. White dust puffed out from where the sledgehammer had struck.

She smashed the wall again. This time, the head of the massive hammer broke through the plaster.

Tears mixed with plaster dust in her eyes.

“I owe you, my friend.”