dignified Arthur, the Ivy-League boys with their arrogance and outward devotion to their jobs and the cancer cause.
“I just can’t figure out the why. If there was a murder, it was logically to cover up the theft. Only there’s no sane reason for the theft.” He socked a fist into the other hand. “If greed were the motivation, I’d get it. Power, I’d get it. But neither of those make sense. The man was already going to get money-big money-when the medicine hit the market. He was already going to be part of the massive credit, the satisfaction, for finding a cure for this uniquely destructive cancer. So why steal it? Why try selling it elsewhere, where the instant the sale came to light, the thief would be identified? None of it makes any sense.”
“Harm?”
“What?”
“Sit down. Calm down.”
Nobody told him to sit down and calm down. Ever.
He sat down. Calmed down.
“You’re taking me seriously,” she said quietly, as if she were still having trouble believing it.
“Of course. Why wouldn’t I?”
“Because it’s not going to sound credible to anyone. Death by peppermint? You know it sounds silly.”
“Yeah, it does. In fact, it sounds so downright ridiculous that I can’t imagine why the two of us aren’t laughing our heads off.”
He watched her take in a massive breath. The way she looked at him. He couldn’t read it, but there was something there. Something both warm and wary, as if he’d done something that mattered to her.
“You know,” she said quietly, “I didn’t expect to like you. It’s awkward.”
“Your liking another human being is awkward?”
“You joke. But you feel it, too. We’re going to have to watch it,” she said gently. “Watch what?”
“Harm. Don’t be obtuse. There’s something really, really weird happening here.”
“You’re telling me? Murder, theft-”
“Those are just…problems. The weird thing I mean is between you and me.” She leaned over, close enough to kiss him. He thought she was going to. Her lips parted. Her eyes seemed to darken. She was so close he could smell her sweet skin, feel her warm breath, see her impossibly soft lips. “Don’t you tempt me, Connolly. I can’t possibly belong in your life. You can’t possibly imagine me in yours. So you just quit it.”
My God, the woman was batty. She told him she was going up to talk to the captain and left. Harm was willing to admit he was feeling on the batty side himself. His key financial guy murdered? He needed to head upstairs, radio Juneau, somehow ask for the pathologist to make sure they examined Fiske’s throat and esophagus without sounding like a nutcase. This whole mess just kept getting worse.
And Cate was somehow… He didn’t know what she was doing. Implying they were a pair in some way. Implying they were in this together somehow. Implying they had some kind of kindred spirit, man-woman, serious connection going on.
Implying he knew it.
The real helluva a thing was…he
Cate jumped when she heard a footstep behind her…but it was just Ivan, popping in the galley for a raid on the first-aid kit. “Connolly’s up in the pilothouse, calling in authorities again. I don’t know whether this is turning into the trip from hell or a hell of an interesting cruise. But I’m taking an ibuprofen while I’m deciding.”
He shook a couple pills from the container. Cate handed him a cup of water. “I was hoping to catch you alone for a minute or two.”
“Honey, I’ve been trying to catch you alone since I hired you on.”
For once, Cate wasn’t annoyed by his flirting. At least it was normal, and right now, anything normal had an incredible appeal. “I just think I should tell you something, Ivan.”
“Oh, good. Anything of an intimate or personal nature would be preferable.” Ivan set the cup back on the counter after he’d downed the pills, shot her a lascivious grin.
She ignored it. “I think Fiske died from peppermint.”
“Huh?”
She expected the comical expression on his face. Still, she showed him the vial of peppermint, how it had been left, all the things she’d told Harm. Only Ivan responded by cocking his hands on his hips and letting out a good belly laugh.
“Cate, you doofus, we all had tons of your peppermint cookies the first night out-”
“You don’t understand. This isn’t peppermint, as in the dose that goes into candy or cookies or baking. It’s the whole-” But abruptly she stopped talking when she saw Yale leaning in the doorway.
“I apologize. I didn’t want to interrupt a serious conversation. But I was up on deck. Hans came out of the pilothouse, asked if I’d mind seeing if you were in the galley, said to tell you there was salmon.” Yale gave a boyish shrug, as if to say he knew the message didn’t make sense.
Apparently, it did to Ivan, though. Cate heard the boat engine suddenly slow, then the boat changed direction and circled, then stopped. Ivan turned to her with an exuberant grin. “So there’ll be a delay before reaching Baranof Springs, my gorgeous, adorable chef, for a spot of fishing. Is there a prayer you could alter the dinner menu to do a little something with fresh salmon?”
Murders and mayhem and poison by peppermint aside, Cate gave him the rhetorical answer. “Is the Pope Catholic? Is a rabbi Jewish? You get me fresh salmon, I’ll give you nectar.”
“Attagirl.”
Because she was too distracted to duck, the captain managed to squeeze her behind before she could elbow him away. Yale scratched his whiskery chin, looking as innocent as a child. “Did I accidentally sabotage a private conversation?”
“No, not at all,” she said, but she was rattled times ten. She hadn’t expected Ivan to take her seriously, to believe her. But she still wished no one had overheard. There was enough worry and suspicion floating around the boat without someone being in a position to add fuel to it…not even counting that Yale was one of the three who could have been the thief-and murderer.
A shiver chased up her spine. Cate, her sisters always said, was the fearless one. Nothing shook her. Nothing made her back down. She always raced ahead as if she had nothing to lose.
But that was the thing. All her life, she’d really never felt she did have anything to lose.
But Harm did. And out of the blue, she seemed hopelessly connected to a man who should have been, and by any definition still was, a relative stranger. And risk suddenly had a different flavor. The flavor of fear.
Four hours later she heard the men laughing in the dining room. “Don’t get near Cate. You should see that knife she’s got.”
“I don’t need knives to make you men behave,” Cate called out and then showed up in the doorway with the first platter. She was still wearing her old Kmart jacket with the tear, the same frayed sweatshirt underneath, while the guys had just pushed off their fancy-dancy rain outfits. Rain hadn’t stopped any of them from fishing, though, not once the first salmon was reeled in.
“Under the salmon is an Agrodolce sauce, boys. Nothing to scare you, trust me.” True fresh salmon-Alaskan salmon-didn’t need any fancying up, but she couldn’t resist the bed of Agrodolce sauce to pretty it up. The salmon itself just had the slightest sprinkling of butcher’s salt and fresh pepper. She carted the individual platters to each man. For the extras, she added a plate of Georgian cheese bread, a bowl of zucchini ribbons-just barely sprinkled with tarragon-and then plain old baked potatoes.
For over twenty minutes, there wasn’t a word. She glanced at Harm now and then. He glanced right back. She hadn’t regained any sense of safety since that morning, but damnation. Watching the guys fish-it had all been so normal. Yelling at each other, screaming when they got a fighter on the line, Ivan netting their loot, her laying claim to the booty for dinner. And now. The way they gobbled up the food like children raised in caves, hooking their arms around their plates as if fearful of interlopers, shoveling it down, making orgasmic sounds right at the table.
After a while, she just cupped her chin in a hand and watched. Killers? How can any of them possibly be killers?
“This isn’t really salmon,” Arthur said at one point. “I don’t care for fish, to tell you the truth.”
“Alaskan fish aren’t like anything you get in the Lower 48,” Ivan explained.
