While Adam was preoccupied, my thoughts turned to the letter. Maybe this was the time to clear the air. I felt especially close to Adam after the day we’d spent together, and especially after the night. It felt as if nothing could tear us apart, not even a secret. Even if this was a bigger secret, even if Adam wasn’t ready to tell me, nothing could tear us apart. Our relationship had already been tested. And we’d made it through, together. To hell with Ami and her commands to keep things from the man I love. Why should I keep from Adam that Ami had contacted me? Why not tell him that she wanted me to go to Willow Point to talk to her? She was supposed to give me a piece of some puzzle. A puzzle that I assumed led to this nefarious secret Adam was supposedly keeping.
I opened my mouth to spill it all, but then I snapped it shut. The timing just felt wrong. Before I could give it more thought or reconsider, Adam exclaimed, “Here it is! I knew I had one.”
He brandished the CD as if he was holding the winning ticket to some really great prize. And in a moment of clarity I realized that, in a way, he was. Adam had told me earlier that he wanted our time together to be special. And that was what these things—cutting down the tree in the forest, decorating it together, the warm eggnog, the frantic quest to find Christmas music—were all about. These were attempts by Adam to make this, our first Christmas together, the best it could be. Adam was enjoying all of this—as was I—because we were doing these things together. I certainly didn’t want to ruin it. I suddenly knew it was the right decision to wait until after Christmas to say anything about Ami, to bring up stuff about secrets.
So instead of telling Adam about Ami’s weird letter, instead of asking him if the insider-trading article was a decoy designed to throw me off the trail to the truth, I kept my mouth shut. Adam and I listened to Christmas music, drank spiked eggnog until we were buzzed, and snuggled by the fire in the glow of twinkling lights from the tree.
I thought about how we probably looked like a Christmas card come to life. Too bad it was all an illusion about to be shattered.
Chapter Three
Christmas Day arrived, and Adam and I took the ferry over to the mainland so we could spend the day with my father. The ferry service between Fade Island and Cove Beach in Harbour Falls was currently being operated single-handedly by Brody Weston. The responsibility fell to him since his cousin, Jennifer, was no longer with us, and the other owner of the service, J.T. O’Brien, was still in rehab over in Bangor.
I was worried that Brody would hold it against me that Jennifer had ended up dead, but he remained the courteous and quiet guy he’d always been. He seemed to get along especially well with Adam and was more than eager to check out Adam’s newest automotive acquisition, a black Cadillac Escalade, when we docked at Cove Beach.
Adam had bought the SUV for tooling around over on the mainland, and he kept it in the same place I stored my BMW, the garages by the dock. When Adam backed the vehicle out, Brody, who was beside me, shouted, “Awesome!”
Adam got out of the Escalade. “Nice, man,” Brody continued, while I fussed to keep my skirt down in the wind. “This is really sweet. What kind of horsepower it got?”
Brody and Adam fell into car-speak for a few minutes, boring me to tears, and then we were off. After a short drive into town, we turned onto my dad’s road and parked in front of the stately, white frame house in which I’d grown up. My dad was apparently anxious for our arrival; the front door swung open before we even got out of the car. Dad stepped out onto the porch. My much-older brother, Brent, and his family were staying in Chicago this year, so it appeared the mayor was happier than usual to see us. I just hoped it went well.
Not that I didn’t get along great with my dad, I did, but he and Adam had gotten off to a rocky start…to put it mildly. Back when my father suspected Adam of foul play in Chelsea’s disappearance, he had repeatedly warned me to stay away from him. But since the truth had come to light, my dad was slowly warming up to the man I loved. Of course, Adam’s role in saving my life had gone a long way in softening up the sometimes stubborn William V. Fitch.
But I had no need to worry; everything went much better than expected. While I set about the task of preparing Christmas dinner, Adam and my dad cracked open a bottle of scotch, the good stuff. And then they got down to drinking as they sat in the living room and analyzed the upcoming football playoff picture. Their voices lilted into the kitchen as I opened the oven to baste the hens I was cooking, and I had to smile.
“I’m telling you,” my dad said enthusiastically, “I can see the Pats going all the way to the Super Bowl this year.”
My dad was a diehard fan to the end—in his eyes the New England Patriots could do no wrong.
“Not if that pass rush doesn’t improve, Bill,” Adam countered jovially.
“Bah, where’s your faith, son?” the mayor asked. “Who needs a pass rush with Brady at the helm? We can outscore anyone.”
The conversation continued into a deeper analysis of football in general, and I tuned them out, concentrating instead on getting dinner together. Not too much later we sat down to a feast of roasted Cornish hens, old-fashioned oyster and
