Will your husband be coming back with you, Mrs. Slade?
Fog was even worse but she kept the gas wide open, straining her ears for the tolling of Number Nine. Her heart was pounding again and she felt rivulets of moisture running down between her breasts, the fog wrapped like a cold wet cloak round her shoulders. The blood was pounding so loudly in her ears now she almost missed it. There. A muffled clang. Then, another. She waited until she judged herself to be just abeam of the buoy and then shoved the tiller hard to starboard. She was trying to shave it close, maybe gain a few seconds.
She’d shaved it too close. The bow of the little boat shuddered as it struck and then glanced off the big buoy. She was thrown forward, into the bottom of the boat, and the motor sputtered and died. Her shoulder was screaming with pain, but she climbed back up onto the wooden bench seat and yanked the cord. Shit. She tried twice more and the third time it caught. She was still cursing herself for misjudging the buoy’s location when the hazy yellow lights of the big house up on the rocks loomed before her.
She ran up the curving rock steps leading to the house. All the lights were on downstairs and nothing looked amiss, thank God. Still, she took off her heels when she got to wide steps of the verandah. The front door would be unlocked. You didn’t have to lock doors when you lived on an island. That’s why you lived on an island.
She pushed open the front door and stepped into the foyer. All the lights off upstairs. There was a fire in the library fireplace. She could hear it crackling, the flickering yellow light visible beneath the doors. One of the double mahogany doors was slightly ajar. She crossed quickly and pulled it open.
Siri was on the floor. She was sitting cross-legged on a pillow, staring into the roaring fire, the flames silhouetting her long dark hair and shoulders. Siri didn’t turn around at the sound of the door being opened.
“Siri?”
No answer.
“Siri!” She screamed it this time, loud enough to wake the dead.
“My name isn’t Siri,” the girl said in a flat monotone. She still didn’t turn around. “It’s Iris, like the flowers I brought you. Siri is just Iris spelled backwards.”
“Look at me, goddamn you, whoever you are!” Deirdre felt for the switch on the wall that turned on the big crystal chandelier, but her hand was shaking so badly she couldn’t find it. “I said look at me!”
Siri, Iris, whatever, turned around, a white smile in the middle of her dark face. Her face, the whole front of her body looked odd. It was all black and—her fingers finally found the switch and flipped the lights on. Suddenly, the black on the girl’s face wasn’t black anymore; that was just a trick of the firelight making it look black: no, it was bright red. It was red on her arms and hands, too. Red was—
“Oh, my God, what have you done?”
She was staggering backwards against the door. Iris got to her feet, hands behind her back now, and started coming towards her. One hand was coming up and Deirdre didn’t wait to see the knife she instinctively knew was in it. But it wasn’t a knife. No, it was a…what…video camera! A blinking red eye! Filming her and—
“Get away from me! Leave me alone! I’ve got to go up and see my babies!” Deirdre turned in the doorway, stumbling through it.
“I wouldn’t go up there, Mrs. Slade. Definitely not a good idea,” she heard Iris say behind her.
Deirdre’s mind broke apart then. She ran for the stairs.
“Oh, my God! Oh, no! What have you done to—”
She never made it to the top of the stairs. The last thing she heard before she died was someone saying, “… like two little angels, I told you, Mrs. Slade.”
Chief Ellen Ainslie of the Dark Harbor Police Department and her young deputy Nikos Savalas found Mrs. Slade next morning, sprawled halfway up the main staircase, dead of multiple stab wounds. A bunch of long- stemmed blue flowers had been strewn over the corpse. Chief Ainslie bent down and looked closely at the victim’s face and the blood-caked handle of a large kitchen knife protruding from under her right shoulder.
“It’s Dee-Dee Slade, all right.”
“She’s got two little ones, doesn’t she?” Deputy Savalas said, bending down to get a closer look.
“She did have, anyway, yep,” the chief said. “Let’s go take a look.”
“Her husband’s somebody pretty important down in Washington, right?” Savalas asked. “A big-shot senator or something?”
“Ambassador to Spain,” the chief said, looking at the baby-faced young deputy with the full black moustache. He’d only been with the force three months and he’d certainly never seen anything remotely as horrific as what he was about to encounter. “Let’s go,” she said, stepping carefully over Mrs. Slade’s body and climbing the stairs up to the second floor, even though it was the very last thing on earth she wanted to do.
Chapter Nine
Nantucket Island
ONE WEEK. THAT’S ALL HAWKE WANTED. A WEEK AT SEA would be best. The tang of salt air and the unceasing roll of the sea had never failed to rejuvenate him. Even as a boy, and now as a man, Alex Hawke was keenly attuned to both his mind and body. It went with the territory. As anyone accustomed to the fine art of living dangerously could tell you: ignore a strong signal from body or mind at your peril. Your next stop could be a backstreet morgue with a tag on your big toe.
Right now, the signals Alex Hawke was receiving were coming in loud and clear.
Listen up, old boy. You’re running on empty. Your physical, mental, and emotional systems are seriously depleted, and you damn well better see to yourself before you wander once more into the fray or rejoin any battles. Stow away your old cloak and dagger and get yourself in fighting shape; or the next fight may very well not go your way.
Vicky’s tragic death had left him both unnerved and unbalanced. Devastated. He had finally allowed himself to fall in love and had loved her truly and deeply. Her loss was a constant, keening pain; it was as if he’d been split right down the chines.
Give me a week, he’d told Stokely and Ambrose. Same thing as he’d told Conch’s head of security, Jack Patterson at DSS. His first thought was to get away somewhere on his boat, Blackhawke, all by himself. He’d fleetingly considered Conch’s offer of the little fishing cabin in the Keys and rejected it. Didn’t want to be beholden. So. A strict regimen of strenuous physical exercise, diet, meditation, and rest ought to do it. But, that very night, when Ambrose Congreve had called with an update from London, the two of them had hatched a much better scheme.
The idea was for Alex to get out of Washington. First he would fly up to Boston’s Logan. There, he would meet Ambrose, Stokely, and Sutherland in the first-class lounge when their BA flight from Heathrow landed. The four of them would then make the short hop over to the island of Nantucket. Alex had decided to position Blackhawke there for her summer mooring.
Originally, it had been part of his honeymoon plans.
But now the three men could use her as a base of operations, cruising up along the northeast coastline, dipping in and out of interesting ports. Alex could spend the days working out the kinks in the yacht’s fitness room, swimming in the ocean, running on the beach (running on soft sand always got him in shape faster than anything else) and reducing his current alcohol intake by at least half. If he could cut it entirely, fine, but Alex believed a couple of glasses of red wine didn’t hurt. Helped him sleep, actually, until the nightmares kicked in.
In the evening, they could all gather in the ship’s library and sort through the facts of Vicky’s case. They could continue the conversation over an early supper and still have Alex in bed by nine each night.
That was the plan anyway.
“We’re beginning our final descent into Logan, sir,” his captain, Charley Flynn, said over the intercom. “I’ll have you on the ground in ten minutes.”
“All buckled in, young Pelham?” Alex asked the aged fellow seated just across the aisle. Pelham Grenville, upon learning of Alex’s impending voyage, had insisted on tagging along. He said he’d been caring for Alex since the boy had been in diapers and he wasn’t about to stop now. What the old family retainer didn’t say was that he felt
