Abigail wanted to make love to him.
But not here, he thought. Not in the same house where she’d spent her short-lived honeymoon.
“Owen…”
“It was a very nice kiss, Abigail. We’re not just distractions for each other. We both know that much now, don’t we? But let’s leave it at that.”
He could see the relief wash over her.
After their lobster bisque, he walked back to his house and started a fire in the woodstove to take the chill out of the air, to hear the crackle of a fire and feel its warmth and coziness. DidAbigail worry about staying in her house alone tonight? He reasoned she was a police officer, and a widow, and she’d spent more nights alone than not.
Once he got the fire going, he walked outside, the stars and the moon guiding him out to the far end of the point, waves crashing on three sides of him.
He looked back toward the old foundation of his family’s original house and saw a solitary silhouette.
No way was she out there contemplating life. She was checking to make sure Mattie Young hadn’t returned to his party spot.
Owen gave a loud whistle and waved to her.
She waved back.
But he thought he heard her call him a jackass, presumably for startling her but who knew-who cared? It made him laugh, which, he decided, was a good way to end such a day.
CHAPTER 19
Abigail woke before dawn and drove out to Cadillac Mountain and up the twisting access road to its pink granite summit. She jumped out of her car, the wind brisk at almost sixteen hundred feet, the sky awash in the lavenders, pinks and oranges of the Maine sunrise.
Below her, ocean, bay and islands came into view, and she could hear murmurs of pleasure from other early risers. She emptied her mind as she walked along the well-traveled granite trails, enjoying her surroundings and the feel of the crisp mountain air. But thoughts of last night crept in. Lou Beeler had stopped by her house before heading home. Mattie had declined to tell the state police anything, either, and denied all knowledge of the pictures or how they’d ended up on Owen’s and Abigail’s doorsteps.
On Lou’s way out, Mattie asked him to demand Abigail stay away from him.
She had sensed the senior detective’s frustration-and his misgivings. The calls could have come from a faraway crank with nothing better to do. The pictures were another story. They’d come from someone on the island. Lou admitted he’d never seen any of the shots taken at Ellis’s party, nor the one of her and Owen at the murder scene.
He definitely had never seen the shot of Dorothy Garrison’s body.
That picture, even more than the others, clearly troubled the older detective.
Abigail had dreamed about the drowned teenager. She’d awakened with a start, unable to breathe. She’d been a little kid getting ready to move to Boston twenty-five years ago, but the scene she’d created in her nightmare of the Brownings, the Coopers and the Garrisons on the dock that awful day was so vivid, so real, that she might have been there herself.
Why leave such a photograph for Owen? To get under his skin?
On her way back from Cadillac, Abigail stopped at a popular roadside restaurant on impulse and took herself out to breakfast. Wild blueberry pancakes, pure maple syrup, bacon, far too much coffee. She was wired on caffeine and sugar by the time she turned onto her shared driveway.
She parked at her house, debating how she’d tackle Mattie Young today. Unless ordered to do so, she had no intention of staying away from him-and Lou had all but given her the green light to get under his skin a little more. Get out of him whatever it was he knew and wasn’t telling.
She thought of the cash in the envelope. Did it mean anything? Had to. Mattie wasn’t one for saving his money.
As she climbed out of her car, she noticed a robin perched on a high branch of the spruce tree at the corner of her driveway. Why couldn’t she sit on her porch and watch the birds?
“You could,” she said aloud. “You absolutely could.”
No one would blame her if she did.
The spruce branches rustled in a strong breeze off the water. The robin fluttered off.
Abigail unlocked her front door, immediately feeling the fresh breeze off the water blowing through the house. She’d left the windows open all night. It’d gotten chilly, but she didn’t care. She wanted to get rid of the last of the paint fumes, any mustiness, anything that would slow her down and clog her mind.
In the entry, she remembered that she’d left the porch door open, too.
Not much point locking the front door and leaving the back door unlocked, but she hadn’t given it a second’s thought before heading up to Cadillac.
With no pockets in her lightweight hiking pants, she dropped her keys on the stepladder, still set up in the entry, and headed to the back room. She could see specks of plaster dust suspended in the sunlit air.
The smell of the room was off. Different.
She heard a sound behind her, in the short hall leading from the back room to the cellar door and kitchen. But even as she reacted, the blow came to the outside of her right thigh. She went with it, didn’t fight it, putting out her arms as she dropped forward, allowing them to absorb the force of her fall. She hit hard, the rough floorboards scraping her left forearm, then rolled instantly to her feet.
But no one was there.
She heard her front door bang open and shut.
Her thigh ached, stinging, slowing her pace as she grabbed a crowbar and charged through the front room. She realized whatever she’d been struck with had managed to rip through her pants and bloody her. It wasn’t her sledgehammer. A knife? Hell, had she been stabbed?
She reached the front door, tore it open.
No one. Nothing.
She turned to get her car keys off the stepladder, but they were gone. She shot outside, hobbling as fast as possible down the steps and out to her car.
No one was there, either.
She shuddered at the pain in her thigh and felt warm blood oozing down her leg. She’d never catch up with her intruder, even if he was on foot.
That was his sweat she’d smelled.
“Damn.” Abigail gulped in a breath and cupped a hand over her injured leg. “Damn, damn, damn.”
What killed her wasn’t that she’d been caught off guard or that she’d been cut. She’d had no reason to suspect anyone was in the house until it was too late. And if her assailant had sliced at her again, she’d have tackled him.
No, she thought. What killed her was having to explain her stolen car keys to Owen Garrison, Doyle Alden, Lou Beeler, the FBI agents in town, Bob, Scoop, her father and whoever the hell else would find out about them.
Owen had worked with enough victims of accidents, violence and disaster to recognize those who found their sudden vulnerability more difficult to deal with than the pain of their injuries.
Abigail was one who hated her vulnerability. Hated having to ask for help.
She leaned over his stainless-steel sink with her sweater on the floor in a heap as she stuck her scraped arm
