Buch lesen: «The Harbor»

For my mother, M. Florine (Harrell) Neggers

Contents

Cover

Back Cover Text

Praise for Carla Neggers and her novels

Also by Carla Neggers

Title Page

Dedication

Prologue

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

Seven

Eight

Nine

Ten

Eleven

Twelve

Thirteen

Fourteen

Fifteen

Sixteen

Seventeen

Eighteen

Nineteen

Twenty

Twenty-One

Twenty-Two

Twenty-Three

Twenty-Four

Twenty-Five

Twenty-Six

Twenty-Seven

Twenty-Eight

Twenty-Nine

Thirty

Thirty-One

Thirty-Two

Thirty-Three

Thirty-Four

Thirty-Five

Extract from Keeper’s Reach by Carla Neggers

Copyright

Prologue

The long days of summer had come to an end, and as Olivia West sat at her kitchen table on the dark, cold October morning, she knew she wouldn’t live to see another Maine summer. Tomorrow she would turn one hundred and one. But it wasn’t just the odds catching up with her that led to her quiet certainty that she’d reached her sunset—she just knew. She had months, perhaps only days. Hours.

Her nephew, Patrick, wasn’t deterred by autumn’s shorter days. He poured himself a cup of coffee and sat across from her. He always stopped by before his walk in the nature preserve, which was just northeast of the brown-shingled 1890s house at the mouth of Goose Harbor where Olivia had lived her entire hundred years. She and Patrick both liked to be up to see the sunrise. It was one thing they had in common. Perhaps the only thing.

He was in uniform. That was unusual. Olivia licked her lips. “Patrick—”

“I can’t talk about it, Olivia.”

She understood. He had a job to do, but this time it hit close to home. He’d been preoccupied for some time but hadn’t told her everything, not that he needed to. She knew him, and she knew Goose Harbor.

She wondered what her brother would think if he could see his only child now. Patrick West, chief of police. He’d never known his father, also a Patrick. Olivia remembered seeing her baby brother off to war, knowing he wouldn’t come back, just as she knew, now, she wouldn’t see another summer.

Patrick nodded at her typewriter, an IBM Selectric II. She’d given up her Olivetti manual years ago, under protest, and had no intention of switching to a computer. “What’re you doing?” he asked.

“I’m revising my obituary.”

“Aunt Olivia, for God’s sake—”

“It’s not morbid, Patrick. Not at my age. I intend to have my affairs in order. I don’t want to leave that burden to you and the girls.”

Patrick had two daughters, Zoe, a law enforcement officer like him but with her grandfather’s zest for adventure, and Christina, who was just as rooted on Maine’s southern coast as her father and great-aunt. Their mother had died when they were little girls. Patrick had done a good job raising them. Olivia hadn’t bothered trying to replace their mother—she’d never married and didn’t really trust her maternal instincts. She thought she was a fairly good great-aunt, though.

“You’ve had your affairs in order for thirty years,” Patrick grumbled.

She glanced at the paper in her typewriter. Olivia West, 101, the author of seventy-two Jennifer Periwinkle novels, died today at her home in Goose Harbor, Maine. It was a sensible first sentence. People tended to think she was already dead. The University of Maine and Bates, Bowdoin and Colby Colleges all offered classes on her work. Her house was on the Goose Harbor walking tour. The town library had an Olivia West Room. In her mind, those were honors more suited to dead people. She knew the local paper kept an obituary of her on file. She’d asked Patrick to get her a copy of it, but he’d refused.

He got up and looked over her shoulder. She was shrunken and white-haired, her fingers gnarled, her veins prominent, her skin brown with age spots—yet she could sit here at her table, where she’d written all her books, and wonder that any time had passed at all. She glanced out at the harbor, the first of the lobster boats chugging across the quiet water in the murky predawn light. Patrick kissed the top of her head. He was paunchy and gray-haired himself, and as good a man as Olivia had ever known. “You’re morbid, Aunt Olivia. I’m talking to your doctor about antidepressants to smooth out your moods.”

“There’s nothing wrong with my moods.”

He laughed and winked at her on his way out, as if he didn’t have a care in the world. Olivia knew better.

She abandoned her obituary and rolled a fresh sheet of paper into her IBM. Even slowed by arthritis and age, she managed to type quickly. Chapter One. She scrolled down a few lines.

And stopped.

She knew she’d go no further.

She couldn’t kill off Jen Periwinkle.

Olivia had watched herself wither and wrinkle, but Jen remained forever sixteen, always ready to solve her next mystery. She was timeless. She used her wits—never violence—to solve crimes. That was Olivia’s pact with her readers—Jen Periwinkle wouldn’t have to resort to violence to achieve her results. She occasionally brandished a gun and once a sword, but she never drew blood.

To kill her off, Olivia meant to have her die saving someone, probably a child. Mr. Lester McGrath, Jen’s evil nemesis through all seventy-two books, would have to die, too, but as a result of her intelligence and bravery, not at her hands.

“Aunt Olivia...Aunt Olivia!”

Zoe rushed into the kitchen from the side entrance. Olivia hadn’t noticed the sun had come up, and she didn’t have a good sense of how much time had passed since Patrick was here. An hour? The sun sparkled on the harbor waters and reflected the stunning fall foliage. Boats were out. Olivia tried to focus on Zoe, but realized something was terribly wrong and wanted to dive back into Jen Periwinkle’s fictional world.

“Oh, Aunt Olivia.” Zoe seemed to be trying to pull herself together. She was clearly shaken, her face pale, her running clothes matted with sweat and—and something else. Dark stains. Her running shoes were soaked. “I didn’t want you to hear the news from someone else—I...God...” Her eyes, blue with gray flecks like Olivia’s baby brother’s, filled with tears. “Dad’s dead.”

Olivia saw now that the dark stains were blood. It had spattered on Zoe’s gray shirt and shorts. She tried to speak, but nothing came out.

“He was shot. I found him on my run.”

“But he was just here! He stopped in to see me, like he always does. Where? Where did you find him?”

“In the nature preserve. Stewart’s Cove.” Zoe raked a shaking hand through her short blond curls, her experience as a Maine State Police detective, accustomed to dealing with crime scenes, facts and evidence, not helping her now. But this was different. This was her father. “The marine patrol, state police and local police are there now. I—I have to go back.”

“Of course. Christina—”

“She’s meeting me there.” The tears spilled down her pale cheeks, and when she wiped them with her fingertips, they mixed with her father’s blood. “Is Betsy here? I don’t want to leave you alone.”

Olivia nodded. Betsy O’Keefe was her live-in caregiver, a concession Olivia had made two years ago in order to be able to continue living in her house. Betsy had learned to leave Olivia alone as much as possible in the morning.

The nature preserve was her own doing, Olivia thought. She’d bought up the land with earnings from her books and created a nonprofit organization to maintain it. And now Patrick had been killed there.

Murdered.

Olivia raised one hand, and Zoe took it, squeezed back gently and sobbed. She looked like a young woman who’d just lost her father, not the young woman Olivia had seen only yesterday, so confident and determined, preparing to head to Quantico for her sixteen weeks of training at the FBI Academy. Patrick was proud of her but worried about her zest for adventure, her need to push herself. His father was the same way and died young in the line of duty. He was afraid Zoe would, too. Instead, he had.

“I’ll see you later, okay?” Zoe whispered.

“Yes, dear. Of course. I love you.”

“I love you, too.”

“And Patrick—oh, Zoe, I loved him so.”

But Zoe was gone, and Betsy O’Keefe bustled into the kitchen, her own face smeared with tears. She was a stout woman in her late forties, a registered nurse who’d moved to Goose Harbor with her widowed mother at four. Hard workers, both of them. The mother had died a few years ago. Sometimes it seemed to Olivia everyone she knew was dead.

“You’ve had a terrible shock,” Betsy said. “Come, let’s get you to bed and have you lie down a bit.”

“I don’t want to lie down. Betsy...” Olivia stopped. What had she meant to say? She couldn’t remember. It didn’t happen often, but sometimes she’d forget things. What she’d eaten for breakfast, names—she’d lose track of what she was saying. She frowned at Betsy. “I can’t—”

Olivia gasped, grabbing her chest, the jolt of adrenaline and awareness—knowledge—so sudden and forceful, it hurt. Patrick in his uniform, the job he had to do—the arrest he was making—

Betsy leaped to her side. “Miss West!”

“Betsy—I know who did it.”

“What, love?”

“I know who killed Patrick.”

Betsy was pale now, sobbing. “I—I bought a hundred and one candles for your birthday tomorrow. I hope we can fit them all on your cake. Zoe and Christina will come by—”

“Betsy—Betsy, why can’t I remember?”

“Remember what, love?”

“The murderer’s name. The bastard—”

“Maybe I should call the doctor.”

“No, don’t.” Olivia’s voice was firm. “I’ll sit here a while and think. I’ll remember. I know I will.”

Betsy made tea and babbled about birthday cakes and the leaf-peepers and whatever pleasantries she thought would distract her elderly charge—and they did. Olivia couldn’t form a coherent thought, much less call up the name of the murderer.

My God. I do know who did it.

She stared at the first line of her obituary and felt a rare tug of regret at her mortality. If only this once she could be Jen Periwinkle and forever sixteen.

One

Zoe West sat at the cluttered farmhouse kitchen table and stared out at the beautiful northwest Connecticut landscape, the hills dotted with brightly colored leaves, and she tried to piece together how she’d ended up here. It was as if one day she was headed to Quantico, and the next, she was here, canning beets and milking goats with Bea Jericho.

She knew she should be grateful. Charlie and Bea were incredible people, hardworking, determined to hang on to their land instead of chopping it up into mini-estates and making a fortune.

But Zoe didn’t belong in Bluefield, Connecticut, and she knew it. She’d known it the day she’d arrived in town almost a year ago.

She needed to go home. It was just a matter of when. Goose Harbor hovered on the horizon of her life, like a fog bank she knew would engulf her in due time. Better to deal with it. Get it over with. The status quo was untenable, increasingly impossible to endure.

She’d had three calls in three days. Bruce Young, a lobsterman who’d graduated high school with her; her sister, Christina; and Greg Sampson, the one friend Zoe had left in the Maine State Police. They all wanted to tell her that an FBI agent was on the loose in Goose Harbor.

At least they said he was an FBI agent. Apparently he didn’t want to advertise it but had slipped up with Bruce Young. His name was J. B. McGrath—Jesse Benjamin McGrath. It went right over Sampson’s head but struck Bruce and Christina as suspicious, since Jen Periwinkle’s evil nemesis was also named McGrath. Mr. Lester McGrath, a fictional character, but still. To them it was at best a weird coincidence.

Greg Sampson said he was at Perry’s waterfront bar the night Special Agent McGrath had beaten all comers at darts. Greg had no reason to check out this McGrath character’s story but thought it was legit. He reminded Zoe that a person, an FBI agent or no FBI agent, didn’t make friends in Goose Harbor by beating all comers at darts.

Deep into her second month of unemployment, Zoe was determined to resist the idea that J. B. McGrath was her problem. He was on vacation. FBI agents deserved to take vacations. Goose Harbor was a great place for a vacation, with its strips of sand beaches, its picturesque harbor, its historic houses and quaint shops and inns. That he’d arrived almost to the day of the one-year anniversary of the chief of police’s unsolved murder didn’t necessarily mean a thing.

Even in her self-imposed exile in Connecticut, Zoe would have known if the Maine State Police’s Criminal Investigations Division had asked for FBI assistance in her father’s murder investigation. The truth was, there were no new leads. They had his body, they had the two bullets that had struck him and they had very little else. No footprints in the sand, no DNA evidence left behind, no witnesses. For all anyone knew, Patrick West, Goose Harbor’s beloved chief of police, could have stumbled onto out-of-town drug dealers who shot him and made off for parts unknown.

In the weeks after his death, although she was no longer a state police detective herself and was supposed to be on her way to Quantico, Zoe had done everything she could to find her father’s killer. She’d stepped on toes of people who got in her way and toes of people who didn’t—she didn’t care. She just wanted answers. Why had a good man died that early October morning? Why had she been the one to find him?

And Olivia. Her great-aunt had died the next day, on the morning of her one hundred and first birthday. The doctor said she just gave out, but Zoe blamed herself, the shock of the news of her father’s death. She and Betsy O’Keefe—the entire town—could have conspired to keep her great-aunt from finding out what had happened. They could have tried.

“I know who killed your father. Oh, Zoe, I know...”

The ramblings of a dying woman. Zoe should have realized Olivia was in trouble, but she and Betsy had coaxed her to bed for a nap. She never got up again.

After weeks of trying to find her father’s killer, it was Stick Monroe who’d finally pulled Zoe aside and told her she had to ease off. Calm down. Let her colleagues in CID do their jobs. Stick was a retired federal judge and her mentor, her friend, and everyone knew he was the one person she might listen to. He reminded her that her class at the FBI Academy was set to start. All she had to do was drive to Washington, D.C., and get on with her new life.

Instead she withdrew from the academy and took off, ending up as the sole detective in Bluefield, Connecticut, a small town in the northwest part of the state. Nothing much had happened until the past summer, when the governor of Connecticut drowned in his own swimming pool in her town. It wasn’t an accident. Then a Texas Ranger and a Texas lawyer showed up, the new governor and her kids were nearly killed, and basically all hell broke loose.

And when it was all over, Zoe was fired. Her chief accused her of letting the Texas Ranger “run amok,” which was ridiculous—Sam Temple was a total professional. But the real reason she got the ax was that she’d stopped wearing a gun on duty in the weeks before the governor’s death. It was basic U.S. law enforcement. She was supposed to carry a weapon on duty.

After she lost her job, Charlie and Bea Jericho had offered Zoe their son’s room now that he’d married the new governor and moved out. She helped Bea can and freeze a ton of fruits and vegetables, and Bea was teaching her how to milk goats and knit.

But Zoe really knew she’d put law enforcement behind her last week when she got her tattoo—not because it was a tattoo, but because it was a tattoo of a beach rose. She’d designed it herself.

Cops didn’t have beach roses tattooed on their hips. As far as Zoe was concerned, that was another rule, right up there with carrying a gun.

She sank back in her chair. She was losing her damn mind. At least she’d quit smoking. She’d let a pack-a-day habit creep up on her this past year but had finally kicked it.

What she needed to do now was say goodbye to Bea and Charlie, the sheep, the chickens and the goats and go home.

When her cell phone rang, Zoe assumed it was someone else from Goose Harbor calling to tell her about Special Agent J. B. McGrath.

But it was Christina, her voice shaking, her words coming out tight and fast. “Zoe—Zoe, the police just left. Someone broke into my house. Can you believe it? Who’d do something like that?”

They’d both inherited their father’s house when he died, and since Christina was already living at home, she’d simply stayed there. Their great-aunt had left Zoe her 1890s house overlooking the harbor, and Christina enough money to open a breakfast-and-lunch café on the town docks. By all accounts, the café was doing well, but Zoe had yet to go there. She hadn’t stepped foot in Goose Harbor since she’d fled for Connecticut.

“Are you okay?” she asked her sister.

Christina sniffled. “Yes. I wasn’t here. I close up the café at three, and today I did cleanup as fast as I could—I was done by four. Kyle and I came back here to work on his documentary on Aunt Olivia—” She took a breath, and Zoe could hear her sister’s hesitation. Kyle Castellane wasn’t one of Zoe’s favorite people. He was young, rich, arrogant and determined to do this documentary on Olivia despite the grief Christina and Zoe both still felt at her death. To him, it was a matter of “strike while the iron’s hot.” Christina didn’t share Zoe’s frustrations—she thought Kyle was brilliant.

“Go on, Chris,” Zoe said softly, reining in her own tension. No one had ever broken into their house. Not ever.

“The house—it wasn’t torn up, but you can tell someone’s been through here. They came in through the side door. Bruce is bringing a new one by tonight.”

“Anything taken?”

“No. Not that I can see. The police think they were looking for cash, maybe because I run a café, and when they didn’t find any, just ran off.”

It happened all the time. Still, the timing felt odd on top of the calls about the vacationing FBI agent. Zoe sighed. “I’m sorry, Chris. What can I do?”

“Come home. Zoe, I—I don’t like this. I’ll admit it, I’m scared. What if this FBI agent is stirring up trouble? What if—”

Zoe stopped her—they were on the same wavelength. “I can leave here in thirty minutes and be there in about four hours.”

“Really? You’re sure? I don’t want to wimp out. I’m not making mountains out of molehills, am I?”

“Let’s hope so, Chris. I’d rather have molehills to deal with than mountains, wouldn’t you?” Zoe tried to lighten her sister’s mood. “By the way, do you know how to knit?”

“Sure. Aunt Olivia taught me.”

“Good. You can help me finish this scarf I’m knitting. It looks like a dead snake. Wait until you see it. I think I’ve dropped a million stitches—”

“Zoe!”

But Christina managed a laugh, although Zoe felt only marginally better when she hung up. She didn’t have a lot of stuff. She’d never owned much. It wouldn’t take her a half hour to pack—it’d take her fifteen minutes.