by Lisa Harris
She nodded and took a sip of water. There was definitely a kick.
“So here’s the thing,” he said, gripping his mug with lean fingers that had a rugged quality to them. “I still don’t get it. I understand Cody’s got an issue with you, but it’s been…what…fifteen years?”
She smiled faintly. It was always nice when people underestimated your age. “Eighteen.”
“Okay, eighteen. How could he possibly hold that against you in this situation, and this long after? If you say you saw a body, why wouldn’t he take you seriously?”
She stabbed a pasta bowtie and lifted the fork to her mouth, the olive oil, vinegar and cilantro tangy on her tongue. She swallowed. “Because there’s more you don’t know,” she said, hearing the trepidation in her voice.
As soon as she said it, suspicion flared within her. Why didn’t he know the rest of it? He had been in Seaglass Cove long enough for the town’s legendary gossip mill to reach him. In fact, why didn’t he know everything already?
“Hold on,” she said, setting her fork down, now wondering if he was taking her for a ride—persuading her to tell him things he already knew. “Have you really never heard the boat story, or anything else…questionable…about me before now?”
He finished the sip he was taking from his mug and set it on the table with a thunk. “Nope.”
“Because I find it hard to believe that the town’s chatter hasn’t reached The Shed. You’ve been here, what, six months?”
“I’ve got a strict no-gossip policy.”
“Seriously?”
“Seriously.” He eyed her appraisingly, as if deciding whether or not to tell her something. “If you really want to know, there have been a couple of people who saw you in here and, after you left, they tried to bring you up. They started in on an old story or began hinting at the reasons why you came back, but I shut them down.”
Quinn tried to imagine how a person telling a story like that would react if Ian had actually stopped them in their tracks. It would have been pretty amusing. “A strict no-gossip policy, huh?” she asked, feeling the corner of her mouth pull up.
The granite expression on his face said he was dead serious. “If I’m not part of the problem or part of the solution, I figure I don’t need to know it.”
“That’s pretty noble of you.”
“I don’t know about noble, but I do know it’s hard enough to get through life without people pointing out your mistakes to everyone else.”
“You’re not wrong about that.” She folded her hands in her lap and scooted to the edge of her seat. “The thing with Annie devastated me. Changed me. It made me want to be better. To do better. I promised myself I would spend my life doing good for people, not hurting them. I decided I wanted to stand up for people who had been hurt, help them get justice. I went to law school, then to work for a plaintiffs firm in Tampa, representing people who were disadvantaged or damaged somehow.”
“Sounds like you were working hard to make amends.”
“I was, but it was stressful. Sometimes there were millions of dollars at stake. We represented the injured, widows, widowers, orphans, people victimized by fraud—the list was varied and endless. While it felt really good to help people, the eighty-hour workweeks started to take their toll. And if I’m honest, at some point the success and money eclipsed the desire to make a difference. I was aiming to make partner too, so I just kept piling it on. I started having anxiety attacks, small at first, then full blown panic episodes. And,” she paused, for some reason feeling awkward about mentioning this part, “I was engaged. Simon was a resident at a hospital in Tampa. But my job and his job and my growing anxiety started eating away at our relationship. He didn’t like that the hours I was working conflicted with his or the way it was consuming me—and as a resident he had his own stuff going on. We almost never saw each other.”
“Eventually I started self-medicating to take the edge off. A drink here and there…but it didn’t help. I started having crying fits. It became hard to get out of bed. I began missing deadlines, I was late all the time and I was lying to everyone in the office, trying to hide my condition. Finally Simon pushed me to see a psychiatrist, and talking about it did help. She prescribed alprazolam and that helped too. For a little while. But then my workload got even heavier and Simon and I were fighting and it wasn’t enough. I went back to the doctor and she prescribed something else and that seemed to make a real difference, until it didn’t. There were days when it got so hard to push through. I felt like I couldn’t breathe. So occasionally I drank on top of the medication, hoping to even myself out.”
“I know that didn’t work.”
“No. But by that time, the panic was getting so bad I wasn’t thinking straight. Finally I started taking the alprazolam on top of the other med, hoping that would do it. I was in this spiral of lying and self-medicating and working myself to the bone and everything was falling apart. And then I started to suspect someone was watching me.”
“What, like, stalking you?”
Quinn nodded. “Exactly like stalking me. I would get this feeling—walking to my car or into my condo—that somebody was following me. I’d see shadows move but no one was there. I’d go to my office late at night and feel a presence. I’d go in and out of rooms searching for someone, because I just knew they were there.”
“But you never found anyone,” Ian said.
She wagged her head. “No. The panic kept growing and I never slept. My heart raced constantly and I was having palpitations—PVCs, you know, where your heart skips? It happens if I get too worked up. Simon was threatening to end the engagement. It finally all came to a head one day when I was in a courtroom waiting for a hearing to start. I thought someone had been stalking me in the parking garage, and I’d seen a man by the elevators who I thought was watching me. Then in the courtroom I heard someone call my name and there was the same man, coming at me, reaching into his pocket, pulling out a gun. There was a deputy near me and I took his gun and fired on the man before he could shoot me or anyone else.”
Ian’s eyebrows were arched toward the ceiling, astonishment splashed across his face. “That’s…unbelievable. It sounds like you saved a lot of people.”
Quinn frowned. “No. Turned out, there was no gun. It was just a guy with a cell phone. And he wasn’t even there for me—he was the plaintiff in another case.”
Ian's mouth dropped open. “What happened?”
“Nobody got hurt. Fortunately, in my state I was a terrible shot. Put two holes in the wall before the deputy took me down.”
“What about you hearing your name called? What was that?”
“Didn’t happen. I hallucinated it. Along with the shadows moving and constantly sensing someone following me. The doctor’s final diagnosis was that the combination of anxiety, stress, no sleep, alcohol, and doubling up on the medications put me in a state of paranoia which led to the hallucinations.”
“Wow.”
Quinn expelled a small, sad huff. “Yeah. The fallout dragged on for a few months, but long-story-short, I was disbarred.” She made air quotes as she said, “For engaging in an intentional abuse of prescribed medications and alcoholic substances leading to actions which constituted an assault on multiple persons, recklessly endangering lives and resulting in a conviction of one count of simple assault.” Quinn recited the precise wording of her disbarment notice with robotic efficiency, having read the language enough times to commit it to memory. But the repetition had done nothing to diminish its sting.
“They convicted you of a crime? With you in that state of mind?”
Quinn’s gaze shifted as she rubbed her thumb up and down her glass. “I was abusing substances. I wasn’t in my right mind by the end, but I made the decision to take what I took. My attorney was able to get the charges knocked down to simple assault because of the mental capacity question, so I avoided jail time. But the state bar wasn’t so forgiving.”
“And so you came home?”
“
The courtroom thing happened in November. By the end of December I had pled guilty to simple assault and was put on probation with the condition of completing rehab. I came here for Christmas, then went into rehab for thirty days. The bar’s decision came down right after I completed my program, so in early February I packed up, left Tampa and came here to live with my parents. They had been wanting to retire and I needed a job so I took over the realty business. By March they felt like I could handle it, and moved to Delray Beach. And that is the story of me.”
She leaned back from the table, drained after spilling the whole sordid tale. Aside from Lena, Ian was the first person Quinn had shared the whole ugly truth with. Her nerves hummed as she waited to see how he would take it.
He reached out, putting a hand on her forearm, his skin warm with the mug’s heat. “No. That’s not the story of you, Quinn. It’s just one of your stories.”
“What’s the difference?”
“It’s the difference between something being your definition and something being one of your defining moments.”
She wasn’t sure she bought into that, but she appreciated what he was trying to do. “Well, whatever it is, combined with what happened when I was twelve, it’s the reason that Shane Cody won’t give me the benefit of the doubt. I’m not sure if he thinks I’m confused, or self-medicating again and hallucinating or just flat-out lying. But he doesn’t believe me and neither do the people he works with, based on the reception I got there today. On top of that, this morning when I got to work, my office manager had already heard about the entire episode.”
“How did it get to her that fast?”
Quinn almost laughed at the sincere surprise on his face. He may have lived in Seaglass Cove for months, but he still didn’t appreciate its capacity for rumor mongering. “Tiny town. Word travels fast. Her best friend is a woman whose husband is in the sheriff’s department, and right now I’m juicy gossip. Anyway, she was hinting around, asking if I was feeling overwhelmed, had I maybe done anything to take the edge off? And she won’t be the only one asking those questions. By tonight most of the town will know and think I’m off the wagon again.”
“Quinn, based on what you’ve told me, it sounds like you’re in recovery and doing all right with that. Are you?”
His forthrightness surprised her, but she didn’t find it annoying. At least he wasn’t tiptoeing around her, making vague insinuations. “I am.”
“You’re not relapsing? Not drinking, not abusing medication?”
“No. I’m not even on the meds anymore. They work for some people, but didn’t for me.”
“Okay. Then you know the truth and you have to cling to that. And as for Cody, unless he’s got evidence that you made the body up, he’s got an obligation to pursue it whether you’re relapsing or not. If you ask me, he’s letting a personal bias get in the way.”
“I can’t really blame him, given our history.”
“Well, that aside, let me ask you something. Those hallucinations you were having before—did you actually see something that wasn’t there?”
Quinn searched her memory. “It was more like I misinterpreted things. Thought shadows were more than they were. Stuff like that. I did hear things that didn’t happen—”
“But you didn’t see things that weren’t there?”
“No. The man in the courtroom didn’t have a gun, but he was pulling out a black cell phone.”
“Okay, so, if you didn’t see things that weren’t there back in Tampa, why should Cody think you hallucinated a dead guy on your floor?”
“Well, I’m not sure he thinks that, exactly. I think he believes I mistook an unconscious man on my floor as a dead one.”
Ian tapped the fingers of one hand on the table. “Something doesn’t add up here. Walk me through what happened last night step-by-step and don’t leave out a thing.”
Chapter Twelve
“And that’s all of it,” Quinn said, as she finished recounting the break-in for Ian. “You heard Shane—with nothing taken and no leads there’s basically nothing to do.”
Ian hunched over the table, his hands folded in front of him, fingers interlaced. He had pushed his mug aside and for several minutes now had been rolling his thumbs over each other as he listened to her talk. He said nothing the whole time, alternating his intense stare between her and his own hands. His gaze was so pointed that a few times when he locked eyes with her, Quinn’s stomach did a little flip.
“Before last night, had you ever felt you were being watched since coming back to Seaglass Cove?”
“No. Never.”
“Well, I think he’s got this all wrong.”
A wave of heady disbelief rolled over her. “You believe me?”
“Absolutely.”
“Why? You don’t even know me.”
Ian straightened in his seat, dropping his broad shoulders. “Because I think people deserve a second chance. There’s no reason to believe that anything you’ve said isn’t true, other than evaluating it based on your past, and I just don’t think that’s right. People make mistakes. But that doesn’t mean we should automatically judge everything they do by those mistakes. Mistakes are something we do. They aren’t who we are.”
He was talking to her, but there was a fervor in his tone that suggested his comments weren’t just about her. What’s your story, Ian Wolfe? she thought.
Before she had time to ponder the question further, he plunged ahead with one of his own. “Was there anything strange, anything that seemed off to you when you first walked back in your place and found the guy on the floor?”
“You mean, other than the guy on the floor?” she asked, feeling the corners of her mouth draw up.
He laughed. “Yeah, other than that.”
Quinn let her gaze wander off into the growing number of people milling about the dance floor as she scrolled through the mental images of what she had seen that night. After a few moments, she looked back at him.
“You know, there was. He was dressed in khakis and a button-down shirt. He looked more like a copy store clerk than a burglar. It didn’t make sense to me. I even told Shane, but he didn’t think much of it.”
“That is pretty odd. What about his shoes?”
“His shoes?”
Ian nodded, his eyebrows rising expectantly.
Quinn’s brow furrowed as she tried to remember. “I’m not sure. Dockers, I think? Or something similar.”
Ian bit his lower lip. “I agree with you. That just doesn’t sound like a burglar to me. What about aside from that night? Is there anything strange going on in your world? Weird things you’ve noticed? If this guy wasn’t a run-of-the-mill burglar, then he was there for some other reason.”
“Well,” she started hesitantly, “okay, there is something. But you might think I’m just being paranoid.”
“Try me,” he said.
Quinn inhaled a deep breath, her posture sinking as she let it out. “Today when I was leaving the sheriff’s department parking lot—after I went in to try to see Shane—I noticed this car parked behind me. And I thought…I thought the driver was watching me.”
“What made you think that?” Ian didn’t sound skeptical. He sounded curious.
“Just the way he was staring in my direction. He did have sunglasses on, but you know how you can tell when someone’s looking at you? Plus, the minute he caught me eyeing him, he drove off.”
“Sounds like you could be right.”
No protest? No, ‘you’re just imagining things’? She wasn’t used to being afforded this kind of credibility. “Wait, you really think he was watching me?”
“I don’t know. But I wouldn’t rule it out. Anything else happen lately?”
She thought about it. “I had some hang-up calls a few weeks ago.”
He leaned forward again, cocking his head. “What kind of calls?”
“Just numbers I didn’t recognize and no one answering on the other end. I assumed they were telemarketing calls, yo
u know, the kind where it takes a little while for the call to connect? So I just stopped answering numbers I didn’t know. Some hung up, others went to voicemail but they never left a message. I thought my number had ended up on a list somewhere.”
“Did you ever get calls from the same number?”
“Initially. Until I started blocking them,” she replied.
“Huh. Did you ever try calling them back?” he asked.
“No, why would I?”
The stage area was really hopping now and most of the other spaces were filling up too. Another couple of readers had wandered into the sitting area, and one man was pecking away on his laptop at a nearby table.
“Should you get back to it?” Quinn asked, waving a hand at the room. “You’ve been hanging out with me for a while.”
“Nah. I’ve got extra help on Saturday nights,” he said, and swiveled to look back at the counter, where a teenager was taking orders while another employee carried a food-laden tray into the pottery area. He turned back to Quinn, a sparkle in his eye as he dramatically lowered his voice. “I’m all yours.”
Although she could tell he was teasing her, his husky tone still had a discombobulating effect. “Uh… okay,” she answered, hoping she didn’t sound like the freshman who just got winked at by the senior quarterback.
If she did, Ian ignored it, instead launching into more questions. “What if the calls weren’t telemarketers? What if someone was trying to reach you?”
“Then why wouldn’t they say anything when I picked up? Or leave a message?”
“Nerves maybe? Second-guessing themselves? Maybe they eventually got over it, but by then you had decided not to answer. It might explain why a stranger showed up at your house unannounced.”
“But not why he was dead on my floor.”
“No. Can you think of anyone who would need to reach you, but keep it quiet? Or anyone with a grudge against you? What about old clients—or unhappy opponents on the other side?”
“I don’t think any of my clients would do that,” she said. “And if someone on the opposition wanted to threaten me, I doubt they’d just call and hang up.”
