Carla Neggers - Breakwater

Diego had narrowed his dark eyes on her. “I didn’t see anything.”

“I wasn’t suggesting-” She pulled up her quilt, which had drooped to the ground. “I don’t know what I’m saying.”

“The woman was your friend?”

“Yes.”

“Stinks, losing a friend that way.” He tugged on an edge of her quilt. “What, you don’t own a coat?”

“I just grabbed the quilt…”

He frowned at her. “Your cottage is on that dead-end road out by the cove? You’re not going to make it that far.”

“The walk will do me good. Thanks for the tissue.”

“Sure.”

Quinn took a few steps back down the road, but stopped and turned back to him. “By the way, have you seen an abandoned dark blue BMW around here anywhere? Alicia-my friend who died this morning. Her car’s missing.”

His gaze held hers. “I’ll keep an eye out for it.”

“Thanks.”

Twenty yards from the motel, Quinn tripped over her quilt and almost went flying, but rearranged it quickly, glancing back toward the dock in case Diego Clemente wanted to say he’d told her so. But he’d disappeared, and she wondered if he’d already forgotten their conversation.

She made it the rest of her way back to her cottage without tripping or crying. The walk and the chilly air had helped her appetite, and she got the crab stew out of the refrigerator and set it on the stove. While it heated, she checked her cell phone for messages. Gerard Lattimore and Steve Eisenhardt had called. Lattimore asked her to call him back. Steve left it up to her. He seemed to understand that they didn’t know each other well enough for her to want to talk to him after such a day.

When she tried Lattimore’s number, she got his assistant. He was in a meeting.

Thank God, Quinn thought, dipping up a bowl of the steaming crab stew and taking it into the living room with her. She wrapped back up in her quilt and sat on the sofa, a yard-sale find that she’d covered in a sea-green plaid herself.

The Scanlons were good cooks, and the stew was wonderful.

But Quinn took two bites and set the bowl down on a side table, assaulted by images of Alicia paddling in the storm, trying to keep her kayak from overturning in the swells and failing, capsizing, drowning.

And no life vest, no emergency whistle in case she got into trouble.

Either might have saved her life.

Quinn sank back against the soft couch and could almost feel Huck Boone’s arm around her as he’d walked with her back to the cottage.

Heck of a name, Huck Boone. Was it real? How many guys working private security changed their names?

Probably a lot.

She thought of Diego Clemente and his tissue, and his neutral expression when she’d mentioned Alicia’s car. Maybe too neutral? Had he seen something yesterday and didn’t want to get involved?

You’re exhausted.

A sudden gust of wind rattled the windows, so startling her that she almost fell off the couch.

She got up and ran through the cottage, making sure all the windows were locked, checking the porch door and the side door. If she felt unsafe, she could call Kowalski. But what would he do? And he’d meant truly unsafe, as in killers were on her doorstep, not the wind rattling the windows and unnerving her.

Again, Quinn thought of Huck Boone’s thick arm around her.

Not good.

She collapsed back on the couch, rolling up in her quilt and listening to another gust of wind come at the cottage, concentrating on it, trying to push back more images.

But there she was at the University of Virginia, on a warm spring day among the dogwood, she and Alicia falling onto their backs in the soft grass and laughing hysterically over something that had just happened. Quinn couldn’t remember what, but the laughter was clear in her mind and all she wanted was to reach back in time and warn Alicia not ever to move to Washington, tell her that a job at the Justice Department wasn’t worth the cost-wasn’t worth her life. Even if her work-her friendship with Quinn-hadn’t caused her death, if Alicia had taken a different route and stayed in Chicago, maybe she’d still be alive.

Despite her many years as a nurse, Maura Scanlon couldn’t stop thinking about what pretty Alicia Miller must have looked like when Quinn had found her dead, drowned, on the beach.

Thank heavens I didn’t have to see her.

Maura rubbed lotion into her hands, rough from her work in the garden. Unable to eat supper, she’d gone into the backyard and divided daylilies, not wearing gloves, relishing the feel of the dirt-letting it remind her of life, not death. She’d had to use a brush to get the dirt out from under her nails. She hadn’t gotten all of it.

“Quinn Harlowe hasn’t gone back to Washington yet,” Don said, joining his wife in the kitchen. “I thought she might head back tonight, but her car’s still in the driveway.”

“She’ll probably rest tonight and leave in the morning. She should go back to her work, her friends. There’s nothing for her here.”

Maura sat at the round oak table that had belonged to her mother. Alexandria, where she and Don had lived their entire lives, suddenly seemed so far away. She rubbed a long-existing crack in the table as if it were some kind of genie lamp. Three wishes. If only I’d be granted three wishes. Right here, right now, I’d bring that poor girl back to life.

“Can I get you anything?” Don asked.

“No, thanks.”

They had cleaned up the supper dishes. Don had eaten very little, his appetite, too, curtailed by the trauma of the day. Maura looked out the window by the table, but it was dark now and she only saw her reflection. She and her husband enjoyed the simplicity of their lives in Yorkville. They didn’t care about riches or a jam-packed social life. Taking their coffee onto the porch on a warm morning and watching the bay was enough to satisfy them.

“Do you suppose it’ll ever be the same here?” Maura asked, hearing the haunted tone in her voice.

“Of course it will.”

“The FBI-Don, we were interrogated by the FBI.”

He tried to smile. “‘Interrogated’ is a bit strong, don’t you think? It’ll get better with time, Maura. The shock of what happened today will ease.”

“If only we’d been here-”

“There still might have been nothing we could have done. The water’s cold. Even if we’d seen Alicia out on the bay in the storm, once she fell in, she wouldn’t have lasted long. As a nurse, you know that.”

“No one’s suggested she died of hypothermia-she drowned.” Although, as Maura well knew, hypothermia could have contributed to her drowning.

“We weren’t there. We couldn’t have saved her.” Don pulled out a chair and sat down heavily, his gentle eyes troubled. “And if she was intent upon killing herself…”

“You don’t believe her death was an accident?”

“I don’t know what to believe.”

Maura pumped out more of the pink lotion she’d bought on sale in a bottle big enough to last through summer. “Should we have told the authorities about her and Oliver Crawford?”

“Special Agent Kowalski never asked-”

“He asked us if there was anything we could think of that might help them understand what happened. So did the local police.”

Don shook his head. “I see no reasonable purpose served by spreading gossip. We don’t know for a fact that Oliver Crawford and Alicia Miller were having an affair.”

“We know he visited her at the cottage.”

“We don’t know if he ever stayed the night.”

Maura squirted another dab of lotion into her palm and rubbed it in, then pushed the bottle into the center of the table. “Neither of us likes spying on the neighbors.”