Carla Neggers - Breakwater

“Did the FBI talk to you?”

“Oh, yes. Special Agent Kowalski.”

Don, a lanky man at least a foot taller than his wife, remained by the side door. “We weren’t around much yesterday. We saw Alicia leave in the morning-”

“In her car?”

“That’s right.” He paused, glancing over at his wife as he scratched the back of his neck. “We knew she’d had an emotional weekend.”

“We could hear her crying out on the front porch,” Maura added. She shook her head again, as if she was still trying to absorb the reality of what had happened. “We thought she just needed a good cry. You know, sometimes people do.”

Her husband sighed with a palpable sadness but said nothing. Quinn grabbed the old cookie tin where she kept tea bags. “I was just making tea. Would you like to join me?”

But they declined, and she understood. If they stayed, they would end up either rehashing everything or avoiding the topic altogether and staring awkwardly at each other, talking about anything but the events of the past two days.

Quinn followed the couple out the side door and down the driveway to the road, the air still, the tide going out again. “I met a man from Breakwater this morning,” she said abruptly. “Huck Boone. He was out here jogging just before I found Alicia.”

Don shook his head. “We didn’t see anyone this morning. To be honest, Maura and I didn’t realize anything had happened until we heard the police sirens.”

His wife took his hand, her eyes shining with fresh tears. “I wish we’d been able to help.”

“I don’t know there was anything any of us could have done,” Quinn said quietly.

Maura stood up straighter, dabbed her eyes. “The Breakwater Security people are out this way from time to time. Jogging, boating. It wouldn’t be unusual to see one. They’re generally polite.”

“Do they happen to drive black Lincoln Town Cars with tinted back windows?”

“Black SUVs for the most part,” Don replied. “Why?”

“Alicia came to see me in Washington yesterday. She was upset. Before she could tell me what was wrong, with any clarity, a black sedan picked her up and whisked her off. I have no idea who it was.”

The Scanlons exchanged glances with each other. After more than forty years together, they were on each other’s wavelength. Maura said, “I don’t know whose car it was, Quinn, but I don’t mind saying that we don’t approve of Oliver Crawford turning his estate into the headquarters and training facility for this private security firm. Too much can happen. It’s not his field of expertise. I know he went through a terrible ordeal, but how is having a bunch of guys with guns on his place out here going to help him feel safe?”

“It seems to us he’s leaped without looking,” Don said. “A lot of people in town feel that way, even if they’re sympathetic to his situation.”

Quinn could understand that sentiment. She had felt something similar ever since Alicia had blazed onto the coffee-shop patio in her semicoherent frenzy. “Did Alicia go out to the Crawford compound that you know of?”

“No,” Maura said quickly. “Not that we know of.”

Don dropped his wife’s hand and slung an arm over her shoulder. “We should go. We’re so sorry about Alicia, Quinn. If you need anything, let us know. Knock on the door or give us a call.”

“Thank you.” Quinn smiled at the couple. “And thank you for the crab stew.”

After they left, she smelled the rich stew, grateful to have such decent people as neighbors, even if she had the feeling they had held back something, if only out of respect for her friendship with Alicia.

If they knew anything important-anything that would help people understand what had happened to Alicia-Quinn was positive that Maura and Don would tell the authorities.

She couldn’t eat.

Quinn finally gave up trying and put the crab stew in the refrigerator and made herself a pot of chamomile tea, hoping it would help soothe her. She used a flowered teapot she’d found at a flea market and a mismatched, cheerful cup and saucer, sitting at her little kitchen table with its view of the bay. She opened a box of saltine crackers, eating a stack, like a little kid, with her tea.

And crying, silently at first, tears dripping into her tea until, finally, she was sobbing. She couldn’t stop. She stood up, knocking over her chair, then gave it a good kick as if somehow that would make her feel better.

She cried until she couldn’t stand up any longer.

Then she pulled a quilt, another flea-market find, off her bed, wrapped it around her shoulders and went for a walk.

Yesterday at dusk, after the storms, when she’d stood on the water’s edge, Alicia was almost certainly already dead. Quinn kept picturing herself by the cove after she’d arrived in Yorkville, but she couldn’t remember seeing anything out of the ordinary. Her red kayak. Gulls. Anything in the water.

She tightened her quilt around her, passing the Scanlon cottage, continuing along the waterfront on the loop road. There were more cottages, people working out in their yards on the cool but pretty spring evening. She smelled charcoal and barbecue sauce, and she heard children laughing.

She caught sight of an osprey high in the sky.

“The osprey will kill me.”

Had Alicia had a premonition of her own death?

Or had her fears and delusions lured her out onto the bay at a dangerous time and become a self-fulfilling prophecy?

Quinn forced herself to pull her gaze from the osprey.

She could feel where the frigid, wet sand had rubbed her winter-tender feet raw, but at least they were warm now. After the police had arrived, Huck Boone had taken her back to her cottage and insisted she find dry socks.

She came to the small local motel that marked the halfway point of her usual waterfront walk. Instead of continuing, she sat on a bench, listening to the steady rhythm of the tide. A lone gull perched on a post of the motel’s rickety dock and turned to her, staring at her. Quinn shivered, wondering if it was one of the gulls from that morning, if it recognized her somehow.

It flew off, and its cry into the empty sky seemed to echo her mix of sadness and loneliness.

Alicia had come to her for help, and now she was dead.

A shadow fell over her, and a dark, drop-dead-handsome man handed her a tissue. “Thank you,” she mumbled, wiping her eyes.

“Aren’t you going to ask me how I happened to have a tissue?”

She managed a smile. “How?”

“My mother. She said a man should carry tissues in case a pretty woman needs one.”

“That’s very old-fashioned, isn’t it?”

“It was her way of getting a fourteen-year-old to be prepared. If she said I should keep tissues in case I needed them for myself-” He shrugged. “I’d have told her that’s what shirtsleeves are for.”

Quinn laughed, sniffling. “I’m Quinn Harlowe, by the way.”

“Diego Clemente. I’m staying here at the motel.”

“I hear they serve good breakfast.”

He made a face. “Two kinds of sugary cereal, stale Danish and bananas a monkey would throw back.”

“How can you screw up a banana?”

“I don’t know. Ask them.” He nodded toward the hotel. “It’s not a picky clientele. How’re you doing? Feeling better?”

She nodded. “Thanks.” When she rose, her knees wobbled under her, but Diego Clemente had the grace to give her a moment to steady herself. “Have the police been by here?”

“The police?”

“A woman-there was-” Not normally at a loss for words, Quinn couldn’t seem to focus. “A woman drowned. She was probably out on a kayak yesterday. A red kayak. I was wondering if the police asked anyone out here if they saw her.”