The Substitute Sister

by Lisa Childs

  And not being able to stop her from leaving. Today.

  She was packing now. He’d left before she’d awak ened again, but he knew that was what she would be doing. Packing Annie’s things and what few things of her own she’d brought. Knowing her as well as he’d come to know her in such a short time, he knew she wouldn’t take anything of Nadine’s…but her daughter.

  He would go back to say goodbye. But he couldn’t stand there and watch her pack. Instead he sat in the dining room of the inn, his coffee cooling while he brooded into the depths he suspected were about as black as his soul.

  “Sheriff,” Norder said as he pulled out the chair across from Reed.

  “Sure, join me,” Reed said, the sarcasm as bitter on his tongue as the cold coffee. But he’d intended to have another go at Norder, anyway, even though he hadn’t found anything when he’d searched the man’s room yesterday.

  “Thank you.” The younger man turned over a coffee cup and waved Carol over to fill it. “For the seat and for cleaning my room yesterday.”

  “You offered,” Reed reminded him. He wouldn’t have had enough to get a search warrant.

  “As you learned for yourself, I have nothing to hide,” the younger man said with a smirk that Reed itched to wipe off his face.

  Carol snorted over Norder’s claim, her ears as sharp as ever, as she approached their table.

  “There was another murder,” she said, like Reed didn’t know it. “That poor nanny. And he’s still here.” Her eyes hardened with suspicion.

  Reed held a hand over his still-full cup. “I’ve got it, Carol.”

  And Reed hoped to hell that he did, or that he was at least getting close to catching the killer before he killed again. Carol must have believed him because she nodded and walked off with one last glare at the stranger.

  “Brrr,” Norder said with an exaggerated shudder.

  “Yeah, you’re not exactly getting a warm reception here. Why do you stay?” Even as he asked it, he knew.

  “Sasha.”

  Reed’s gut clenched, and he fisted his hand on the tabletop. “She hasn’t exactly given you a warm reception, either.”

  “Ouch. Direct hit, Sheriff,” Norder said, but the smirk grew, twisting the man’s lips.

  Lips Sasha had once kissed. The thought of that churned Reed’s stomach, the bitter coffee threatening to come back up. He fought against the nausea and the jealousy.

  “Sasha’s not the reason you came to Sunset Island. I wonder if you would have if she had called you. You came here because Nadine called you,” he reminded the other man.

  “Nadine’s dead.” Despite the man’s flip tone, emotion clouded his eyes. “They are identical twins.”

  Reed’s temper, already worn thin, snapped, as did his arm, reaching across the table to grab Norder by the neck. “Sasha is no substitute for Nadine. She’s…”

  Special. Beautiful. Kind-hearted.

  Norder swallowed hard. “She’s what?”

  “None of your damned business. If I didn’t suspect you of murder, I’d throw you off the island myself.” He forced his fingers to relax, forced himself to drop his hand from the Norder’s throat.

  “Afraid of a little competition, Sheriff?” he goaded, rubbing his hand over his neck.

  God, Reed wanted to slug the man, but he already had an audience of interested diners. “Don’t push your luck, Norder. I might just lock you up.”

  “You have nothing, Sheriff. Nothing to tie me to either of these murders.”

  But his gut. Was it instinct or jealousy that made him want this man to be guilty?

  “You’re here.” And that was enough evidence for Reed. Too damned bad it wouldn’t be enough for a judge.

  “And I’m a stranger. You want it to be me, so you don’t have to arrest one of them.” He gestured around the dining room, startling their interested spectators.

  No, he didn’t want to arrest one of the people he’d sworn to serve and protect…as he had Nadine. But he’d failed Nadine. And she wasn’t the only one who’d suffered for it. Annie had. And Sasha. And Barbie had, as well.

  And because he couldn’t find the killer, he was about to lose Annie and Sasha. So he had to take a risk. “Someone was blackmailing Nadine.”

  Norder lifted a blond brow. “Really?”

  “You sound surprised.”

  “It’s just, that doesn’t sound like something Nadine would tolerate. Maybe something she’d do…”

  Despite the two years of friendship they’d shared, Reed had never really known Nadine. She was nothing like her twin despite their identical faces. “She drained all the cash from the estate she inherited. She was paying someone.”

  “And you think that person’s the killer?” Norder took a sip of his coffee, his face serious as he obviously considered what Reed had shared with him. “Why kill the cash cow?”

  “Because it dried up. She was broke.” Just the house and the grounds left. Sasha’s suspicions nagged at him. She’d thought her sister’s death was about the house.

  Norder nodded, then took another sip of his coffee. “Nadine was hardly the type to save money. She never planned for the future.” The man’s voice vibrated with excitement in the life he’d lived when he’d been with Nadine. “She lived in the moment.”

  And now she was dead. “That might have been true when you knew Nadine. But that wasn’t the Nadine I knew.”

  “How well did you know her, Sheriff?” Norder asked, his voice thick with jealousy.

  Not well enough to keep her alive.

  “I’m the one asking questions, Norder. About blackmail.” Reed drew on his years of law enforcement experience. If he’d been back in Detroit, he would have had the guy in an interrogation room. He would have been standing over him, fists on the table, threatening.

  He’d never had so much at stake before. The safety of a child and a woman he cared about more than he’d thought he would ever let himself care again.

  “I don’t know anything about blackmail,” Norder said with an insulted sniff. “I’m getting my life together. I’ll be finishing medical school soon, starting my residency…”

  “That kind of education isn’t cheap.”

  The younger man shrugged. “You’d have to ask my parents about the expense.”

  He would. He needed to verify everything the man told him. “Problem is that Nadine was only here a short while. She’s really not done much on the island that anyone could blackmail her for…”

  Unless all the rumors were true.

  “So that’s where I come in,” Charles said, lips lifting into a sneer.

  “You knew her well.”

  He sighed. “Yeah, I did.”

  “You know about her past.”

  Norder snorted. “Yeah, shoplifting. Passing bad checks. Maybe lifting a credit card number or two. She ran away from home when she was seventeen. She had to survive. So she used her wits.”

  Reed sat back, his suspicions shaken by the man’s vehement defense of his dead lover. “She was no saint.”

  “She wasn’t Sasha, no,” Norder said, bitterness flashing across his face. “But she didn’t give a damn about what she’d done. She wouldn’t have cared who knew it.”

  “That was before Annie.”

  The child had changed everything. Was she Norder’s? Was that why the man had stuck around? Was he biding his time before making his paternal claim? Maybe he figured he could claim them both, the child and her aunt.

  “You’re saying someone might have used her past to take away her kid?” Norder remarked with a soft whistle. “Harsh.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Why didn’t she go to you? If you two were so close, why didn’t she ask you for help?”

  Norder had listened to his share of gossip, too. And the same jealousy that ate at Reed’s gut over Norder’s involvement with Sasha was apparent in the tightness of the other man’s jaw.

  “I wished to God she had.” She’d be alive, and he wouldn’t ha
ve to live with her death on his conscience. He’d known something was wrong. He damned well should have pressed her for more.

  “Maybe she thought you wouldn’t understand, being a lawman and all. Everything’s so black-and-white for you.”

  Colors meant nothing to Reed. All he cared about right now were life and death. Sasha’s life and Nadine’s death.

  “Some shoplifting, bad checks?” Reed wouldn’t have considered her past enough to make her an unfit parent.

  Unless there was more…unless as Sasha suspected, it wasn’t about Nadine’s past at all. It was about the house.

  “So you really don’t have a motive for her death,” the man needled.

  “Oh, I wouldn’t say that. There’s always a motive with old lovers.” Like Charles’s reason for hanging around because Sasha was still on the island.

  “But you have to remember this, Sheriff, when you consider motive.” The man’s eyes gleamed with deep emotion. “I loved Nadine.”

  “And Sasha?”

  “I think you love her.”

  SASHA’S HANDS SHOOK as she folded Annie’s tiny clothes into the suitcase she’d found in Nadine’s closet. She kept glancing toward the rocking chair, but it didn’t move. No one whispered her name.

  Why did she miss it?

  She hated leaving, but for Annie’s safety, she had no choice.

  “Want help?” Mrs. Arnold asked from the doorway.

  Her offer shouldn’t have surprised Sasha. She knew how much the woman wanted her gone. “Not now, but I’ll need a hand bringing this stuff down to the ferry.”

  Would the gnarled gardener be able to carry any of the bags? She doubted it. But Mrs. Arnold was strong, probably strong enough to slash a young woman’s throat. She shivered and cast a nervous glance to where Annie played on the floor, humming as she stacked blocks into leaning towers.

  “The sheriff planted an officer outside the door again,” the woman said, unwittingly relieving some of Sasha’s uneasiness at being alone with her.

  “Tommy?” she asked.

  “Someone a little older, I think,” the woman said with a rueful smile. “He’ll be able to handle these things. Are you taking it all?”

  Sasha shook her head. “No.”

  As certain as she was that she had to leave to protect Annie, she also knew she wanted to come back…after the killer was caught and it was finally safe.

  “What are you going to do about the house?” The older woman was obsessed with the house, not even mentioning what she was sure to know. There was no money for her next month’s salary.

  Sasha had to talk to the lawyer, had to see how much the expenses were, had to see what she could afford.

  Mrs. Arnold’s tentative smile faded. “You’re going to keep it even though it wasn’t rightfully hers.”

  Sasha’s chin came up as she came to her sister’s defense. “I talked to Mr. Scott. He doesn’t believe that.”

  “He’s an artist. He’s irresponsible and flighty,” Mrs. Arnold said, her tone dismissive as well as disgusted.

  “So she wouldn’t have left him the house,” Sasha said.

  And Sasha could keep it, could return to Sunset Island once the killer was caught. She could explore all these feelings she had for Reed and see if he returned any of them.

  And her parents might like the house. They’d never owned one, and they deserved easier lives than the ones they’d lived. They deserved a secure future. And if they couldn’t afford to keep it, they could sell it and use the proceeds for their retirement. Or she could put it in trust for Annie, so that Annie would have something from her mother.

  Mrs. Arnold pursed her lips as if about to speak, then she turned and headed back into the hall.

  Sasha’s relief that she’d been spared another diatribe about her twin’s misdeeds was short-lived.

  The woman spoke again, “Mrs. Scott wouldn’t have left it to your sister. She had granddaughters of her own. She would have left it for them.”

  Surprise jolted Sasha, and she paused while putting toys in a case. “What? Mr. Scott had been married?”

  “No. But he has two daughters. His mother knew that. She would have left it to them. Not Nadine.” Perhaps ashamed that she had shared family secrets, the housekeeper disappeared into the hall again. After a breath-holding moment, Sasha heard her footsteps on the stairs.

  The memory of the letter burned in Sasha’s mind. Nadine had admitted to many mistakes. Had she swindled the old woman out of her estate? Had she killed her as Mrs. Arnold suspected?

  She glanced toward where her niece played in the turret room Nadine had decorated so gaily for her. “What did your mother do?” she asked her.

  Annie looked up. “Mommy, come pway.”

  “I can’t, sweetheart. I have to speak to someone.” From her sweater pocket, she withdrew her cell phone to call the lawyer. She had put off making her decision long enough. And there were truths she needed to know.

  After what had happened yesterday, Barbie’s murder, almost losing Annie…she’d put it off too long.

  SASHA RAPPED THE KNUCKLES of one hand on the bright-yellow door of the carriage house while she held tight to Annie’s hand with the other. When no one answered, she turned to leave, figuring Mr. Scott must have gone to town.

  “Wait!” a voice called from above, and she tipped her head back to find the older man hanging half out of a second-story window. “The door’s unlocked. Please come up. I have something I want to show you.”

  She hesitated before reaching for the door handle. She’d already seen enough on the island to give her a lifetime of sleepless nights. But she’d slept last night, in Reed’s arms. But Reed wasn’t going home with her.

  “You’re safe,” Mr. Scott called out, but his calm assurance wouldn’t be enough to settle her nerves. “One of the sheriff’s deputies is watching you from the porch. I could hardly harm you with an eyewitness. And you have Annie with you…”

  Barbie had had Annie with her, too. Had the little girl been an eyewitness to her nanny’s murder? Sasha prayed not, and because Annie had slept so soundly the night before, Sasha figured she hadn’t seen anything. Nothing that would give her the nightmares that Sasha would have to live with the rest of her life….

  A life without Reed.

  Unless she came back to Sunset Island.

  She grasped the handle, pulling open the door to a shadowed flight of steps. She lifted Annie, carrying the toddler as she ascended to the second floor.

  Mr. Scott was wiping his hands on a paint-saturated rag when they joined him in a wide-open area awash with sunshine. Tall windows looked out onto the lake where barely a wave rippled the surface.

  Sasha had never seen the water so calm since she’d come to Sunset Island. An unsettling thought flitted through her head. The calm before the storm?

  But whatever storm hit the island, she wouldn’t be here to experience it. Once the lawyer came back over from the mainland, she would get the answers she needed and deal with the estate, then catch a ride with him back to Whiskey Bay. Because of having to wait for his return, she’d missed the ferry. But she didn’t want to wait until tomorrow for another one. If she did, she might change her mind about leaving Reed.

  “I’m glad you came up,” Roger Scott said to Sasha, then waggled his paint-stained fingers at her niece. “Hi, Annie.”

  The little girl buried her face in Sasha’s neck. Out of shyness or fear?

  This had been a bad idea. But she hadn’t dared leave the little girl with Mrs. Arnold. She didn’t dare leave her with anyone, not after what had happened yesterday.

  “I’m sorry we interrupted your work,” she said, turning for the stairs again.

  And as she did, the colors from the canvases leaning against every space of wall spun before her eyes in a kaleidoscope. They evoked the same dizzy sensation she’d experienced on the stairs the day after someone had tried to push her down them. Had Mr. Scott had anything to do with that?

  “No, I
was done for now. Stay,” he urged. “You came to see me for a reason. What do you need?”

  Nadine’s killer behind bars. Her heart back from Reed. Sanity.

  But she couldn’t voice any of those wishes, not in front of her young niece. Instead she studied his paintings, the canvases full of much more color than anything she could see through the windows.

  He’d captured the lake in every kind of mood—stormy, violent, foggy, sunny. And he’d done the house and grounds, as well, the paintings lush and vivid.

  But he didn’t limit himself to landscapes. He’d caught Jerry working diligently in the garden, his gnarled hands holding delicate blossoms, his craggy face soft as he admired the fruit of his labor. Mrs. Arnold on the porch, watering the hanging pots. Barbie, her youthful face alight with joy in the day, as she played with Annie.

  And many, many canvases held images of Nadine. Nadine with Annie, her eyes full of love, Nadine alone and pensive, Nadine…

  This was the only way Sasha would ever see her sister again. In paintings, pictures.

  Only her spirit lived on…in the Scott mansion.

  “You’re a brilliant artist,” she told him, truly awed by his talent. Then she noticed his signature, R. Scott, and she remembered seeing his work at galleries in Grand Rapids and Chicago.

  “Thank you,” he said, accepting the compliment as if she were one of the knowledgeable reviewers who gushed over his paintings.

  “I don’t know much about art,” she admitted.

  “But you know what you like,” he said, his lips lifting in a charming smile. Charming like Charles. Nadine would have gone for him. “And that’s all that matters to any artist, that someone appreciate their work.”

  “But you’ve dropped out of the art scene,” she remembered aloud, then flushed over her intrusion into his personal life. “I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t be. I stopped painting for a while. I have your sister to thank for starting me up again.”