Carla Neggers - Breakwater

The FBI agent’s expression softened. “The local police are looking for her car. You don’t need to worry about it.”

“Alicia was fixated on ospreys. There’s a nest out here in the cove-she could have wanted to avoid getting too close to it.” Quinn shook her head, sinking deeper, if possible, into her wicker chair. “I just don’t know.”

“Did she have her own key to your cottage?”

“Yes. I gave her one in March.”

“Is there a spare?”

“It’s outside on the kitchen windowsill. I haven’t checked to see if it’s there.”

Without a word, Kowalski headed down the stone walk and across the yard to the side entrance. Quinn didn’t move, didn’t think. The cove was quiet, nothing like it must have been yesterday at the height of the storms.

The FBI agent returned. “Key’s still there. What about your kayak? Where do you keep it?”

“I have two. One red, one green. I keep them in the garden shed out back. The door’s padlocked.”

“Did Ms. Miller have that key?”

“Yes-it’s here in the kitchen.”

“And you didn’t notice one of your kayaks was missing?”

“No, I didn’t. I never looked. There’d been storms…”

Kowalski waited a moment for her to continue, and when she didn’t, he rubbed the back of his neck and looked out at the glistening bay. “Was Alicia an experienced kayaker?”

“Not very, but she could handle quiet water-”

“Not big waves?”

“I’m not sure. We haven’t gone kayaking together in a long time.” Her stomach clenched at her automatic use of the present tense. Taking a quick breath, she continued. “She might have improved.”

“You’re a pretty good kayaker?”

Quinn nodded without looking at him.

“Would you have gone out yesterday?”

“No,” she said almost inaudibly.

He turned, facing the water. “Wish I had a friend who owned a cottage on the bay. You and Ms. Miller were good friends?”

“We were.”

“Were?” the FBI agent prodded her.

Unable to sit any longer, Quinn shot to her feet. “We haven’t been as close in recent months, especially after I left the Justice Department.”

“You didn’t like your job?”

“I wanted something else.”

Kowalski managed a quick grin. “A life?”

“Something like that.”

“Do you have one?”

She gave him a sharp look, not deluded into thinking any of his questions were idle or friendly. “I work hard, Agent Kowalski, but what I do now is on my terms. I saved aggressively when I was at Justice and could afford-” Quinn broke off. “It doesn’t matter. I have no regrets.”

“Alicia was a spendthrift? Did she have a lot of debt?”

“I didn’t say that. We spent our money on different things.” There it was, she thought. The past tense. Her eyes filled with tears, but she didn’t explain them to T.J. Kowalski. “Money was never a serious issue between us as friends, if that’s what you’re getting at.”

“She have enough money to do what she wanted to?”

“Do any of us?”

He shifted his gaze from the water and settled it on Quinn. “You don’t have to defend her, Ms. Harlowe.”

“Please, just call me Quinn. And I’m not defending her. She was upset yesterday. Frightened, paranoid. She didn’t say anything about wanting to kill herself. In fact, the opposite. She was afraid of being killed.”

“By an osprey,” Kowalski said.

Quinn didn’t respond.

“The local police are in charge of the investigation into her death, but it’s still too early to make a judgment about what exactly happened.” The FBI agent sounded almost sympathetic. “Are you going back to Washington tonight?”

“No, I can’t imagine making the drive.” She glanced at the pot of cheerful yellow pansies that Alicia had left for her. “This place is supposed to be my refuge. I love it here.”

“You have any friends around here who can stay with you?”

“No, I-” When she realized what he was implying, Quinn groaned. “Oh, come on, Agent Kowalski. I am not afraid to stay here by myself.”

His eyebrows went up.

“I’m not!”

“I’d be scared if I found a friend of mine-”

“No, you wouldn’t be. You’d be sad.”

He didn’t argue with her. “What about your neighbors?”

“We get along. Why? Are you going to talk to them?”

“After I finish up here.” But she could tell that wasn’t what he was getting at. “Are the Scanlons the kind of neighbors who will take you in if you get creeped out in the middle of the night?”

Quinn looked at him with what she hoped was a measure of resolve. “I’m not going to get creeped out. Alicia’s drowning was almost certainly an accident. There’s no evidence that she-of anything else, is there?” But when he raised his eyebrows again, as if she should know better than to ask such a question, she sighed. “Right, you wouldn’t tell me if there were.”

He reached into an inner pocket of his crisp dark gray jacket and withdrew a card, setting it on the small painted table next to her wicker chair. “Call me if anything else comes to you. Anything at all. About what you saw this morning, what your friend said yesterday. Don’t dismiss anything as unimportant. Call me.”

“All right, I will. What about the guy this morning-Huck Boone?”

“What about him?”

“Is there anything I should know about him?”

“He seems legit, but next time he runs past your cottage, I’d let him keep running.” Kowalski pointed to his card. “If for some reason you decide you don’t feel safe, you’ll call me, right?”

“As opposed to Breakwater Security?”

He didn’t smile. “As opposed to anyone.”

Quinn tried not to let his serious tone affect her. If he had information she didn’t, or if he had any suspicions, he wasn’t sharing them with her. She had never met him before today, but FBI agent or not, T.J. Kowalski was obviously closemouthed by nature.

She glanced at his card. “It says T.J. there, too. What do the T and the J stand for?”

Now he smiled. “T.J.”

After he left, Quinn sank against a porch post and gazed out at the water, watching a fishing boat make its way into shore just to the south of her cove. Seagulls hovered over it. In the bright late-afternoon sun, the osprey nest sprawled undisturbed on its buoy, no sign of the birds that had so preoccupied Alicia in her last hours.

When Quinn started to sob, she pulled herself from the peaceful scene and dashed inside, putting on a kettle for tea. As the water came to a boil and the kettle whistled and rattled, she almost missed the quiet knock on her side door. She saw her neighbors in its window and turned off the heat under the kettle, then let them in.

Maura Scanlon sniffled, tears in her eyes. She was in her early sixties, a sturdy, five-foot-tall retired nurse with more energy than most people half her age. “Oh, Quinn. We’re so sorry.”

Don, her husband, a retired accountant, nodded in agreement. “We know it’s an awful day for you. Alicia was a good girl. We enjoyed seeing her.”

Maura tried to smile. “She was so proud of those yellow pansies she put out on your porch.”

“They’re beautiful.” Quinn could feel the steam from her tea kettle warming the small kitchen. “Alicia…”

“We’ll miss her.” Maura held up a steaming covered pot. “We brought you dinner. We couldn’t think of what else to do.” She walked straight to the stove and set the pot on a gas burner. “Crab stew. Nothing fancy. It’ll stay hot for a while, but if you need to reheat it, just don’t let it come to a boil.”

“Thank you so much. I love crab stew.”

“Well, you could hardly have a cottage on the Chesapeake and not love crab, could you?” But Maura’s lightheartedness was forced, and she shook her head sadly, her amiable face drawn and pale. “What an awful day.”