Carla Neggers: Night’s Landing

Ethan was invariably polite and deferential. She suspected he was a country-western musician looking for his big break in Nashville. She’d heard him playing acoustic guitar on the cottage porch early in the morning and late in the evening.

“Ma’am?”

“Rob-he’s been shot.”

The words felt no less surreal now that she’d said them herself.

Biting back tears, trying to breathe normally, she told Ethan about her brother’s call from New York, Nate Winter, his promise to call her as soon as possible.

“What a shame, Miss Sarah. What a crying shame.” He shook his head and exhaled forcefully, as if it would ease his own tension. “Who’d want to shoot two people like that?”

“Rob’s a deputy U.S. marshal. They’re called deputies. I didn’t know that when he first started. A U.S. marshal heads up each district-they’re not deputies. They’re appointed by the president. I-” She didn’t know what she was saying. “I don’t know what Rob was doing.”

“The marshals must have an office in Nashville. They’ll send someone out here. You just sit tight.” Ethan spoke with confidence as he withdrew a faded red bandanna from his back pocket and wiped away the dirt and grease stuck between his fingers and under his fingernails. “You’re your brother’s closest kin in the country, aren’t you? The marshals will take good care of you.”

Sarah’s stomach twisted. “My parents. They’re in Amsterdam. Oh, God. Who’s going to tell them?”

“Let the marshals do it. You don’t have enough information yet. If you try calling now, you’ll just scare them, maybe unnecessarily.”

Ethan’s steady manner helped her to regain her composure. She felt as if someone were standing on her chest-she couldn’t get air-and made herself breathe from the diaphragm, counting to four as she inhaled through her nose, then to eight as she exhaled through her mouth.

“Rob was able to talk,” she said. “That’s a good sign, don’t you think?”

“Don’t get ahead of yourself. Why don’t you go inside and throw some cold water on your face? That always helps me when I’ve had the rug pulled out from under me.”

Cold water. She wondered if she looked as if she was going to pass out.

“Go on,” Ethan said calmly. “I’ll go down to the cottage and get cleaned up, then come back here and stay with you until the marshals get here or this deputy you talked to calls back.”

“You don’t think he will, do you?”

“Not if he was shot, too, ma’am. Doctors and FBI will have him sewn up. Now, go on. One step at a time, okay?”

Sarah nodded. “Thank you. Rob and I are twins. Did you know that?”

“I think your mother told me that, yes, ma’am.”

“She almost died when she had us.”

Supposedly. It could have been another in a long string of Dunnemore enhancements. Although not a blood Dunnemore, Betsy Quinlan had fallen right in line with that particular Dunnemore tradition. Even letters and diaries from the nineteenth century that Sarah had uncovered in her Poe research had mentioned the Dunnemores and their zest for drama and adventure. They’d made so many bad, romantic, impractical decisions that had led to disaster-which was exactly how their father had viewed Rob’s decision to become a marshal. A bad decision that would lead to disaster.

But Sarah didn’t know why she’d mentioned that their mother had almost died in childbirth-why she’d even thought of it.

Ethan didn’t comment and walked back down the porch steps with the same deliberateness as he’d mounted them. He paused, glancing up at Sarah as if to make sure she hadn’t fallen apart in the few seconds he’d had his back turned. She couldn’t smile. She couldn’t do anything to reassure him.

“A splash of cold water, Miss Sarah,” he repeated. “It’ll help. I’ll be back in a few minutes.”

She managed to pull open the screen door and step into the front room with its walls of squared logs and thick, white caulking, with its old furnishings and frayed knitted afghans, its threadbare rugs, its wall of framed photographs. Her gaze landed on an oval portrait of Granny Dunnemore at eighty, in her pink sweater and cameo pin, a woman who’d endured so much sorrow and tragedy, who’d nonetheless stayed strong and kept her spirit, her faith.

Sarah ran back to the kitchen and turned on the faucet in the old sink.

“I’ve been shot. I’ll be okay.”

Crying, she splashed her face with cold water and prayed those wouldn’t be her brother’s last words to her.

An hour after Sarah’s brother took a bullet in Central Park, two deputy marshals arrived at the Dunnemore house in a black government car. They came all the way around to the front porch, which afforded Ethan Brooker the opportunity to wish her luck, ask her to give her brother his best and slip out the back door.

He didn’t need to be introducing himself to a couple of feds.

As pretty as she was, Sarah looked like hell. Pale, frightened, splotchy-faced from shock and tears. The other fed shot with her brother-Nate Winter-hadn’t called her back. Understandable. The cable news channels reported that both he and Rob Dunnemore were in surgery. Winter was stable. Rob Dunnemore was critical and unstable.

If the reporters got it right. There was a lot of confusion, and the feds weren’t releasing much information.

Ethan had talked Sarah into shutting off the television. CNN, MSNBC and FOX were all carrying the story live, with helicopter shots of Central Park and the manhunt for the sniper. They’d brought in experts to talk about what kind of person would do such a thing and explain what the U.S. Marshals Service was.

They repeated footage from the news conference that had preceded the shooting and showed Nate Winter and Rob Dunnemore standing behind the mayor, the U.S. marshal from their district, the chief deputy marshal, the assistant director in charge of the FBI, the NYPD commissioner-an impressive gathering of state, federal and local law enforcement types.

Winter was tall, rangy and all business.

Dunnemore looked like a frat boy.

Every time she saw the footage of her brother, Sarah went a little paler.

A joint FBI, NYPD and U.S. Marshal’s Service news conference was scheduled for later that night and would, Ethan suspected, tell people nothing. The feds would be playing it close to the vest when two of their own had just been picked off in Central Park in broad daylight.

The all-news networks promised to carry, live, any briefings from the hospital where the two deputies were being treated.

As he made his way down to his cottage, Ethan stayed out of sight of the porch and any windows that could offer the feds a view of him. The breeze had strengthened into a stiff wind, damp and earthy smelling.

He entered through the back door, not making a sound. The cottage was made of the same rough logs as the main house and had an old-lady feel to it. Hand-crocheted afghans in bright, wear-ever yarns, doilies on the end tables, pink tile in the bathroom. When she’d shown him the place, Betsy Dunnemore had explained that her mother-in-law had built the cottage for herself after insisting her son live in the main house when he returned to Night’s Landing with his dying first wife. Even after her daughter-in-law died, Granny Dunnemore, as she was known by everyone, had stayed on in the cottage until her own death fifteen years ago.

The place had a small kitchen, two tiny bedrooms and a front room and small porch that looked out at the river.

It could have been a tent for all Ethan cared.

A fishing boat with two old men talking loudly at each other puttered upstream, and Ethan had to fight an urge to find a boat and get the hell away from Night’s Landing.