Carla Neggers - The Widow

“We weren’t married to him,” Owen said, making a face. “Hell.”

She gave him a small smile. “Fair enough. I have got on with my life, but-I want to find his killer. I want answers. I know I probably should have sold this place that first year after Chris’s death, but-” She shrugged. “I didn’t.”

“The pictures.” He sighed. “They’re tough to look at.”

“If we’d gone to Ellis’s party that day…” She shook her head, making it almost a shudder. “We were invited, but we didn’t go.”

“You were on your honeymoon.”

“When I saw those pictures, I felt the breeze off the water and smelled the salt and the roses in the air as I went into the back room and got my head bashed in. It all came back.” She switched the heat off under the pan. “Was that what it was like for you, seeing the photo of your sister?”

He nodded.

“At least I was an adult when Chris was killed. Twenty-five.” She kept her tone even as she dipped the ladle into the bisque. “You were a little kid when your sister drowned. I can’t imagine. Or maybe I can, somewhat. When you’ve lost someone close to you that young, that tragically-people treat you differently. It’s like all of a sudden there’s a circle around you that people have to step into before they get close to you. Where before there was no circle.”

“Abigail, don’t-”

She swore, dropping the ladle, and spun around at him, into him. His mouth found hers, and if he was tentative, she wasn’t. She took his hand and placed it on her breast, and he found her nipple with his thumb, even as their kiss deepened. Her urgency fired his own. She lifted his shirt, and he felt her fingers cool on his back, inside his belt.

But he felt her tears, dripping onto his cheek, hot, and pulled back, his heart breaking for her. “Abigail-I’m sorry.”

“It’s not you.”

He knew it wasn’t. But he was sorry, anyway, and didn’t know how to explain it even to himself.

Without a word, she fled from the kitchen.

Owen stared at the simmering bisque. What the hell was wrong with him? Why not carry her upstairs and make love to her? He wouldn’t be taking advantage of her. It was what she wanted as much as he did.

He walked into the front room and stood in the doorway of the torn-apart back room where she’d been attacked so long ago. “Bisque’s going to get cold.”

She kicked at the debris on her floor. “I don’t know what the hell I was thinking, making this mess. I should get Bob and Scoop up here.” She smiled over her shoulder at Owen. Self-deprecating. Tears dried. “Have you met Bob and Scoop?”

“Cops?”

She nodded. “My upstairs neighbors.” She gestured to her pile of debris. “They’d be like Doyle and want me to stay out of trouble, to keep knocking out walls. Well, maybe I will. I’ll head to the hardware store in the morning and order some wallboard. Buy a new hammer.”

As if she wasn’t going to think about the call, the articles, the pictures. Mattie Young. As if she would just switch off her cop mind, her sense of obligation to her murdered husband.

Owen kept his expression neutral. “Sounds like a plan.”

She blew out a breath and angled a look at him. “I was this close-” she held up two fingers, a quarter inch apart “-to throwing you over my shoulder and carrying you upstairs. You know that?”

He laughed. “It would have been a fight, then, for who carried whom.”

“Nah. I’d have let you win.”

But when she hooked her arm into his and walked him back into the kitchen, Owen realized what had just happened.

Abigail wanted to make love to him.

But not here, he thought. Not in the same house where she’d spent her short-lived honeymoon.

“Owen…”

“It was a very nice kiss, Abigail. We’re not just distractions for each other. We both know that much now, don’t we? But let’s leave it at that.”

He could see the relief wash over her.

After their lobster bisque, he walked back to his house and started a fire in the woodstove to take the chill out of the air, to hear the crackle of a fire and feel its warmth and coziness. DidAbigail worry about staying in her house alone tonight? He reasoned she was a police officer, and a widow, and she’d spent more nights alone than not.

Once he got the fire going, he walked outside, the stars and the moon guiding him out to the far end of the point, waves crashing on three sides of him.

He looked back toward the old foundation of his family’s original house and saw a solitary silhouette.

Abigail.

No way was she out there contemplating life. She was checking to make sure Mattie Young hadn’t returned to his party spot.

Owen gave a loud whistle and waved to her.

She waved back.

But he thought he heard her call him a jackass, presumably for startling her but who knew-who cared? It made him laugh, which, he decided, was a good way to end such a day.

Abigail woke before dawn and drove out to Cadillac Mountain and up the twisting access road to its pink granite summit. She jumped out of her car, the wind brisk at almost sixteen hundred feet, the sky awash in the lavenders, pinks and oranges of the Maine sunrise.

Below her, ocean, bay and islands came into view, and she could hear murmurs of pleasure from other early risers. She emptied her mind as she walked along the well-traveled granite trails, enjoying her surroundings and the feel of the crisp mountain air. But thoughts of last night crept in. Lou Beeler had stopped by her house before heading home. Mattie had declined to tell the state police anything, either, and denied all knowledge of the pictures or how they’d ended up on Owen’s and Abigail’s doorsteps.

On Lou’s way out, Mattie asked him to demand Abigail stay away from him.

She had sensed the senior detective’s frustration-and his misgivings. The calls could have come from a faraway crank with nothing better to do. The pictures were another story. They’d come from someone on the island. Lou admitted he’d never seen any of the shots taken at Ellis’s party, nor the one of her and Owen at the murder scene.

He definitely had never seen the shot of Dorothy Garrison’s body.

That picture, even more than the others, clearly troubled the older detective.

Abigail had dreamed about the drowned teenager. She’d awakened with a start, unable to breathe. She’d been a little kid getting ready to move to Boston twenty-five years ago, but the scene she’d created in her nightmare of the Brownings, the Coopers and the Garrisons on the dock that awful day was so vivid, so real, that she might have been there herself.

Why leave such a photograph for Owen? To get under his skin?

Why?

On her way back from Cadillac, Abigail stopped at a popular roadside restaurant on impulse and took herself out to breakfast. Wild blueberry pancakes, pure maple syrup, bacon, far too much coffee. She was wired on caffeine and sugar by the time she turned onto her shared driveway.

She parked at her house, debating how she’d tackle Mattie Young today. Unless ordered to do so, she had no intention of staying away from him-and Lou had all but given her the green light to get under his skin a little more. Get out of him whatever it was he knew and wasn’t telling.

She thought of the cash in the envelope. Did it mean anything? Had to. Mattie wasn’t one for saving his money.

As she climbed out of her car, she noticed a robin perched on a high branch of the spruce tree at the corner of her driveway. Why couldn’t she sit on her porch and watch the birds?

“You could,” she said aloud. “You absolutely could.”

No one would blame her if she did.