Amber Beach

by Elizabeth Lowell

  “Yeah, I’ll just bet she will. Does she have a temper?”

  “Amen.”

  “Should be interesting.”

  “Not for me.”

  Smiling faintly, Conroy picked up his glass, drank until a swallow or two remained, then set the glass down with a thud. His cigarette hissed when it hit the flat beer.

  “If I hear anything that might help,” he said, standing up, “I’ll give you a call.”

  “Don’t say anything over my phone that you don’t want your superiors to know.”

  For the first time Conroy looked shocked. “Is it that bad?”

  “If it isn’t already, it will be.”

  “Seems like a lot of trouble to go to for a million bucks worth of amber.”

  “Half a million, plus change, is what I turned over to Donovan International’s rep—Kyle Donovan.”

  “Would that much amber fit in the Tomorrow?”

  “Not comfortably. Why?”

  “My orders are to board you once a day, or whenever the goddamn suit grabs his phone and says the word. It sounds to me like they’re expecting you to pick up something.”

  “Fairy dust.”

  “What?”

  Jake just shook his head. “Someone upstairs has been bitten by the lost treasure bug.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “You know what the Amber Room is?”

  “No.”

  “With luck, it will stay that way. Good-bye, Bill. And thanks. From now on stay as far away from this foul-up as you can.”

  “Hey, what are friends for?”

  “To keep,” Jake said softly. “When the suits question you about our little chat, tell them what they already know.”

  “What’s that?”

  “We’re old friends, and you’re the kind of stiff-necked, honorable man who doesn’t like screwing friends on orders from men in suits. So you met me, we had a beer, and I told you I thought Kyle might be hiding out in the San Juan Islands but I hadn’t found any trace of him or the amber. Then Honor Donovan showed up and I signed on with her, figuring she had a better line on Kyle—dead or alive—and the missing amber than I did. You listened to me and decided that whatever I was doing was nothing you wanted any part of. You left. End of story.”

  “What happens when I tell them that you’re every bit as stiff-necked and honest as I am?”

  “Save us both a lot of trouble. Don’t tell them. And don’t shake my hand when you leave.”

  Conroy looked at his glass. The remains of the cigarette floated facedown among ashes. As he watched, the butt began sinking. He looked up. “I’d like to help you.”

  “You have,” Jake said. “Now help yourself. Stay away from me until the fairy dust settles.”

  For a moment Conroy hesitated. Then he turned and walked out of the bar. He didn’t look back.

  Jake forced himself to sit and drink a few more swallows of beer before he stood up and left. Once he was outside, he walked swiftly around the corner. Then he stopped, turned just enough so that he could see behind him, and bent down to tie his shoe.

  Though he fiddled with the laces for more than a minute, no one came around the corner to follow him.

  Alone in Kyle’s cottage, Honor rubbed her eyes, sighed, and wished she had a second brain to hold all the new information. She hadn’t worked so hard since she had slogged her way through genetics on her way to a liberal arts degree. Muttering to herself, she went back to poring over a chapter in the oversize book her fishing guide had insisted she read before they went out the next day at dawn.

  Summer fog wrapped around the cottage like a hungry cat hoping to be fed. She barely noticed. Chapman Piloting, Seamanship & Small Boat Handling had her full attention. The page she was reading, and rereading, described the “danger quarter”—how to find it, how to tell whether you and another vessel were on a collision course, and who had to give way under the law of the sea.

  “Only for you, Kyle, would I do this,” she said into the silence. “Only for the brother who talked me through endless variations of the old algebra problem about the train leaving at noon and averaging twenty-two miles per hour, and how long will it take me to catch up with the blasted thing at thirty-nine miles per hour.”

  She sighed and rubbed her forehead wearily. She hadn’t been sleeping well since she came to the cottage. In truth, she hadn’t been sleeping particularly well since she turned thirty and realized that the men she dated always turned out to be too . . . quiet. She came from an outgoing, rough-and-tumble, shouting and hugging and laughing sort of family.

  When she was growing up, the Donovan men often drove her nuts. Bigger, quicker, stronger, arrogant in the way of healthy animals, they were true believers in “might makes right.” After losing too many contests of strength to her brothers, she had vowed she would never go out with anyone who reminded her of the large, confident, forceful males of her childhood.

  She had kept her vow. Now she wondered if she had done the right thing.

  Twice she had made the mistake of taking one of her clean-shaven, quiet, reserved gentlemen home. The first time her brothers got her date so drunk he couldn’t find the floor with anything but his face. The second time Kyle had handled the intrusion alone. He quietly, relentlessly baited her date until the nice man fled in confusion.

  Honor hadn’t fled. She had stayed behind and ripped a strip off Kyle from heels to forehead. He had laughed and laughed until she was tempted to hit him with a skillet. Then he told her what she really didn’t want to know.

  You would have destroyed that jellyfish the first time you lost your temper. Try dating something from the vertebrate branch of the animal kingdom. You’ll both enjoy it more.

  Nice doesn’t mean spineless!

  Hell, sis, I know that. When are you going to figure it out?

  With that Kyle had picked her up, hugged her hard, and told her what a great sister she was—and would she help him adjust the valves on his old Thunderbird?

  Anger, laughter, tears, love. So many memories of Kyle. Honor hadn’t known how deeply she was tied to her brother until she lost him.

  Instantly she corrected herself. She hadn’t lost Kyle. She was going to find him no matter what.

  Frowning, she forced her attention back to the “danger quarter” and the rules of the sea. Thinking about childhood and Kyle and men who were too nice for her own good wouldn’t help anyone. Finding her brother would.

  The Donovan males had the rest of the world covered. She had the entire group of San Juan Islands to search, and maybe Canada’s Gulf Islands as well. To do that, she had to be able to get herself around the islands. To do that, she had to learn how to drive a boat, because the local ferries stopped at only a handful of the major islands.

  It would have been easier to hire a boat, but she had decided it wouldn’t work. If Kyle was hiding—for whatever reason—approaching him on his own boat was the only way to get close. He might be too proud to ask his family for help in a private mess, but he wouldn’t run from them once they showed up.

  Yet in order to get close to Kyle in his own boat, she had to learn how to drive the boat. To do that, she had to spend hours reading about danger quarters and other arcane things that made her head ache.

  Sometimes she was afraid that what she was doing was more complicated but just as futile as flinging a symbolic lei of flowers on the sea where a ship had sunk, killing all aboard. On a map the islands looked so small, so accessible, so easy.

  But they weren’t.

  They were rank upon rank of fir-covered rock thrusting up from a cold sea. Wrapped in rain and wind, sun and night, the islands were isolated and starkly beautiful; many of them were also inaccessible to the point of mystery.

  Don’t think about it all at once, Honor told herself for the thousandth time. Just think about the next step. Then the next. Then the next. If you can’t do that, then just go buy flowers and stand on the shore and snivel about Kyle while you throw petals into the
sea. What you’re doing might not seem like much, but—

  The phone rang, scattering her unhappy thoughts. She picked up the receiver and spoke eagerly. “Archer?”

  “Jake.”

  “Oh. Hi.”

  “Like I keep saying, you should work on your siasm.”

  She smiled and straightened in the chair. Matching wits with her unexpected fishing guide had proved to be a great antidote to fear. Energy sparked through her.

  “Give me something to be enthusiastic about,” she challenged.

  “Have you had dinner?”

  She looked at her watch. It was after seven. No wonder her stomach was growling. “I haven’t eaten since lunch, if you call half a cheese sandwich lunch.”

  “Do you like crab?”

  “No. I adore it. I worship at its crabby little altar. I would kill for—”

  “Not necessary,” Jake interrupted. “I already did. After dinner I’ll show you the basics of the fishing gear we’ll be using.”

  “I just lost my appetite.”

  “You’ll get it back.”

  “Do you really have fresh crab?” she asked piciously.

  “I really do. Two Dungeness crabs, eight inches across, pulled out of the water by yours truly this morning, cooked, and put on ice for dinner.”

  “You’re right. I’m hungry.”

  “My cabin or your cottage?”

  “Where’s your cabin?”

  “Close to Deception Pass,” he said.

  “Oh. I assumed you lived in Anacortes.”

  “Not anymore. The San Juans are my getaway place, not my home.”

  She hesitated and thought about the call from Kyle she kept hoping to get. “I’d better stick close to my phone.”

  “Okay. I’ll be there in half an hour. How are you fixed for bread and salad?”

  “I can manage that.”

  “Wine?”

  “That too.”

  “Have you figured out how to avoid a collision at sea yet?”

  “Stay on land.”

  “Wrong answer. Look under ‘danger quarter.’ “

  “Why look for trouble?”

  “Beats having it sneak up on you. See you in thirty.”

  Smiling, Honor hung up the phone and leaped to her feet. She thought about a fast shower and a change of clothes, then decided against it. The black sweat suit and new white boat shoes were all the occasion called for. Jake was her teacher, not her date. She hadn’t expected that learning to handle a boat would involve bookwork on land, but it did. The more she learned at night, the faster she could begin searching for Kyle by day.

  All things considered, a hundred bucks a day was cheap wages for Jake. He was willing to put in long days.

  And long nights?

  The unexpected thought shivered from Honor’s breastbone to her knees. She started to chew on herself for being so frivolous as to be interested in a man while her brother was in trouble, but the lecture had no real force behind it. The cold truth was that she needed something to keep her mind off the depressing things that could have happened to Kyle. For all Jake’s rough edges—probably because of them—he was a world-class distraction.

  “Still, this is a really stupid time to rediscover your hormones,” Honor muttered. “You need an affair right now like you need to go fishing.”

  Put that way, fishing sounded almost appealing.

  Smiling wryly, she went to the kitchen, stuck a bottle of white wine in the freezer, and went back to learning more than she wanted to know about small powerboats and big water.

  The phone rang.

  “Damn,” she muttered. “I almost understood that last bit.”

  The phone rang again.

  She ignored it and tried to visualize the changing swath of ocean that was a boat’s danger quarter when under way.

  The phone rang twice more. She grabbed it.

  “Hello,” she said curtly.

  Silence.

  “Hello?”

  There was a soft click as someone hung up.

  She stared at the phone and told herself she was foolish for being uneasy. Wrong numbers happened all the time. Especially here, “at the end of the grid,” as Kyle put it. No big deal.

  But recently it had been every night. Even twice a night.

  Though she tried not to, Honor kept remembering one particular candidate for the job of fishing guide. He had showed up at the cottage without warning. His eyes were greedy, shiny. Reptilian. The kind of man you never want to meet in fog-draped twilight.

  Telling herself she was being silly every step of the way, she got up to check the front and back doors of the cottage. Both were locked. She hesitated, then closed the curtains.

  “Kyle would laugh himself sick if he could see you. Frightened of the dark! Maybe you should check under the bed, too. And don’t forget the closet.”

  Her sarcastic words echoed in the small room. Her breath caught. It was so quiet she could hear the fog dripping from fir branches onto the cottage roof.

  “Kyle, where is your twenty-two pistol when I need it?” she whispered.

  Nothing answered her but random drops of water.

  She knew her brother had the gun because she had found the permit. Yet no matter how carefully or how often she searched the cottage, the gun hadn’t turned up. Nor had she found it on the boat, despite all the nifty little compartments she had discovered while searching for any clue to Kyle’s disappearance.

  “Where could he have hidden it?” Honor asked the cabin.

  The only answer was Archer’s curt advice as he saw his two younger sisters off to college: Anything can be a weapon if you need it. But your best weapon is your brain. Use it.

  In addition Archer had taught Honor and Faith some brutal little tricks to use if a date wouldn’t take no for an answer, but he had always emphasized that it was better never to get into trouble in the first place.

  Honor wondered if he had given Kyle that same advice. And if so, had he followed it?

  “A million dollars in amber gone,” she said to the cabin. “A dead man. A missing brother. If that’s what comes of following Archer’s advice, I’ll stick to Miss Manners.”

  Restlessly Honor checked the windows again. For the first time she noticed that the window locks were shiny, unscratched, obviously new. Curious, she looked at the doors more closely. New dead bolts reinforced the tarnished old locks.

  “This is industrial-strength stuff,” she said, surprised. “Those dead bolts should keep out anything short of a battering ram. Why doesn’t that make me feel better?”

  Probably because she kept thinking about why her brother—who was hardly weak and had a handgun to use if pushed to it—felt he needed to install city dead bolts on a rural cottage.

  A fortune in stolen amber.

  A dead man.

  A missing brother.

  “Where are you, Kyle?” she whispered. “Why haven’t you called us? You know we’d help you no matter what. We may all drive each other nuts from time to time, but so what? We’re family. We’re supposed to drive each other nuts!”

  The dripping of fog onto the roof was the only answer Honor got. Rubbing her arms against a cold that existed more in her mind than in the cottage itself, she paced through the small rooms—bedroom, kitchen—dining room, living room, kitchen—dining room, bedroom, and back again.

  When the sound of her own footsteps began to get to her, she did what she should have done in the first place. She picked up her sketch pad, a pencil, and the piece of amber Jake had rescued from a hard landing on the floor that morning.

  Soon she forgot her fears, her worries, and the empty sound of dripping water. Since Kyle introduced her to amber a few months ago, she had become fascinated by its unique physical characteristics—an organic gemstone created by once-living trees rather than the more usual gemstone created by geological processes. Amber was the only gemstone that was also a fossil.

  It was also beautiful in a mysterious, satiny, sens
uous way. The piece she was holding now had been rounded by time, a distant sea, and the very nature of fossilized resin itself; the fist-sized lump of amber was both a window on the past and a tantalizing glimpse of the future sculpture that lay concealed within the translucent golden mass.

  Honor had been studying the amber in her apartment in Laguna Beach, California, when Archer called and asked her—ordered her, actually—to Kyle’s cottage. The idea of her fiercely self-contained older brother’s actually needing something from her had been so startling that she simply had swept the recent shipment of amber into a suitcase along with some clothes and grabbed the first plane out of John Wayne International Airport to SeaTac.

  The days that followed were so hectic and unsettling that there had been little time for work. Yet she and Faith had a show to prepare for in Los Angeles in less than six weeks. All of the jewelry and decorative art for the show already was designed, created, polished, and ready to display. All of it was in the traditional, inorganic gemstone material she was accustomed to working with.

  But ever since Honor saw the recent shipment of Baltic amber from Kyle, she had been haunted by its possibilities. There was something within this one piece of amber. Something remarkable. She was certain of it. She just hadn’t been able to discover it.

  Amber in her left hand, pencil in her right, Honor stared at the shifting lines of light and shadow within the ancient resin. Shadow and light twisted, turned, twined, slid achingly close to becoming . . . something.

  A knock at the door made her jump. A vision of new, strong dead bolts replaced the elusive image in the amber. Her heartbeat doubled. She swallowed in a throat suddenly gone dry and licked equally dry lips.

  “Who is it?” she asked in a raw voice.

  6

  “IT’S JAKE MALLORY.”

  With a long sigh Honor set aside the amber and closed her sketch pad. She shouldn’t feel relieved that Jake was here, but she did. His solid, if sometimes overpowering, masculine presence reassured her in a way she couldn’t put into words. Instinct, hunch, she didn’t care. She simply knew that he wasn’t the type to make scary, one-sided telephone calls to women.