Only . . . how? The radio was gone. There was no air horn. No way of amplifying her voice whatsoever, and there was no point in shouting; the shore was too far for anyone to hear. Besides, it had to be either very late at night or early in the morning, and who would be out at that time of night?
As dispassionately as she could manage, she eyed the distance to shore and tried to estimate how long it would take someone to reach the sinking boat. In a fast boat, probably only a few minutes, but so many boats were already out of the water.
She shook away the question. She couldn’t do anything about the boat that might be coming to fetch her, so she wouldn’t worry about it. What she had to do was signal that boat, but again . . . how?
Blowing out a breath, she shoved her hands in her coat pockets and was surprised to find something in them. Oh yes. The tissues and the matches. Fat lot of good they were doing her. If she hadn’t been dead set against littering, she would have tossed them overboard.
She went back to the cockpit area and got down on her hands and knees. Maybe there was storage for flares. Maybe Noth hadn’t seen it. Maybe she’d be able to set one off. Maybe . . .
Only there were no flares.
She sat back on her heels and blinked away the tears that threatened. Signal. She had to have a signal. Without a flare, what else could create a signal in the dark? What would create a light? She didn’t have a flashlight, and she had no way to flick on the boat’s lights. She had nothing.
Hang on. Matches. She did have matches.
She looked around but saw nothing that would burn worth a toot. The wood trim might catch on fire, but there wasn’t enough to make the kind of huge blaze that she needed. Sure, the boat’s fiberglass would burn, but it would take an accelerant of some kind, and she didn’t have anything handy . . . or did she?
Not stopping to think, she scrambled to the boat’s stern, slapping her palm against the hull, searching for what she knew had to be there.
“Got you,” she breathed, then she unscrewed the gas cap and grinned as the stink of gasoline flowed up into the night air.
She hurried down to the bathroom and hunted around for the toilet paper she’d tossed on the floor way back when getting untied had been the most important thing in her life. With the almost full roll in hand, she rushed back up the stairs and unrolled a long length of toilet paper.
After feeding it into the gas tank, she pulled it back out. She did the same thing with the rest of the toilet paper and ended up with more than half a dozen gas-soaked lengths of paper.
She gathered them up and placed them at strategic locations on the boat, all facing the shore, all in spots that had wood trim or at least vinyl upholstery that would fire up faster than a fiberglass hull.
“Now or never,” she said and lit the first match. Once it was burning steadily, she tossed it onto the biggest, wettest pile of paper. It went up with a satisfying whoosh! and she moved onto the next pile.
In less than a minute flames shot high, and Katie’s nose wrinkled at the stink of burning fiberglass and plastic. She ignored the stench and scanned the shoreline, looking for boat lights that might be headed her way.
The fires burned hot and high, and still, she saw nothing.
The boat settled deeper into the water.
Still nothing.
The fires grew, and she edged to the boat’s bow and started to wonder if her attempts at arson had been a little too successful.
But there was still no sign of rescue.
Katie watched the boat sink lower and lower, watched the fires come closer and closer. She would swim, if it came to that. She was a strong swimmer, and maybe shore wasn’t as far away as she feared. Maybe she’d make it.
A few minutes later, when the fires had been extinguished by the water that was starting to lap at her toes, she tried not to think about the water’s temperature and made her next plan. She’d stay with the boat as long as possible, because it was always better to stay with the boat, even if it was falling away under your feet, and then she’d swim for it.
Even as she made that last plan, the boat took a sudden lurch and dropped away. Katie sucked in a deep breath of air as the cold water surrounded her. She toed off her shoes, put her head down, and started swimming.
Swimming in the dark, cold water.
Swimming for her life.
She didn’t think about what she’d miss if she died; she didn’t think about who would miss her. Every stroke and every breath was focused on survival, on making it to shore.
Swim, she told herself. Swim!
So she did.
And she never knew, later, which came first, the searching spotlight or the young voice that sounded out of the dark. “It had to be about here, Dad. I’m sure of it. I positioned it with that new app I downloaded.”
Katie saw the boat about twenty yards away. “I’m here!” she shouted. “Over here!” But her throat was raw from so much time in the water, and only a croak came out.
“Johnny,” his dad said reasonably, “I know what you thought you saw, but we’ve been out here for almost an hour. If you’d seen a burning boat, we’d be seeing flotsam. There’s nothing.”
“But, Dad—”
“Sorry, son. We’ve been out here long enough.”
Katie saw his hand close down on the throttle. “Help me!” she yelled at the top of her lungs. “Help me!”
“Dad! Dad!” Johnny shouted. “Did you hear?”
His dad must have heard, because he swung the boat around, and soon they’d hauled a wet and shivering Katie onto their boat, where they wrapped her in blankets and rushed her back to shore.
Twenty
“Would you like more coffee?”
Katie, who’d stopped talking and was staring at the contents of her mug, looked up at Detective Hamilton and tried to smile. “Thanks, that would be nice.” She actually didn’t want any more coffee, but she was beyond tired of talking and would appreciate the time it would take for Hamilton to do the refill.
“No problem.” The big man, who’d been sitting across from Katie at the table in the Artisans Alley vendors’ lounge, pushed himself to his feet and went for the pot. “I could use more myself.”
He probably needed it a lot more than Katie did. After her rescuers had brought her safely back to shore, 911 had been called and the detective had been yanked out of bed. As far as Katie could tell, he hadn’t had any sleep since that midnight call, and it was now almost noon.
Hamilton’s cell phone rang, and he walked into Katie’s office, shutting the door. Privacy for his phone calls was why she’d ended up in the vendors’ lounge that morning to begin with, and she was starting to get itchy about all the time a stranger was spending in her creaky office chair.
She got up. Maybe she did want more coffee. What would a little trembling in her fingers hurt?
When the mug was half empty, her office door opened again. Hamilton came out, full of energy and smiling broadly.
“They’re starting to talk,” he said.
Katie nodded. Both Warren Noth and Luke Stafford had been captured hours before—but neither one had said anything beyond requesting legal representation. “What are they saying?” she asked.
“They’re both claiming everything was Kimper’s idea,” the detective said.
“How convenient.” Katie rolled her eyes.
“Oh, sure. But it doesn’t matter, really. You can get tossed in jail for being an accomplice, too. And Kimper sure wasn’t out there last night.”
“No.” Katie wrapped her hands around the mug. The few hours of sleep she’d grabbed had been filled with dark dreams, and she’d woken up in a panic so thick that it had taken the combined purrs of Mason and Della to calm her down.
Detective Hamilton looked at his notes. “Noth said he met Luke Stafford about a year ago when Noth happened to st
op by the Kimper Insurance office to pay his insurance bill. Stafford was there, doing some maintenance work, and the three of them, Noth, Stafford, and Kimper, started talking about boats.”
He glanced at Katie, who was listening raptly, and went on. “Noth and Stafford both claim that all they did was talk about how an insurance scam could be pulled, that if you had the know-how and some equipment, you could sink a boat, claim it was stolen or lost in a storm, claim the insurance, then salvage and sell it. You’d have the insurance money and the money from the sale of the boat.”
“In the warehouse,” Katie said slowly, “I saw Noth doing something at the stern of the boat, near the top and off to the side.”
“Exactly,” Hamilton said, smiling. “Do you know what’s often on that part of a boat?”
Suddenly, she did. “The serial number. He was making it illegible.”
Hamilton gave her an approving nod. “Kimper set up all those insurance companies so the underwriters wouldn’t get suspicious about so many claims coming from one agency.”
It all made a convoluted sort of sense. But there was still one big mystery that Katie hadn’t even come close to solving. “Did Noth or Luke say anything about how Josh ended up in the bathtub at Sassy Sally’s?”
“Now there’s a story.” Hamilton poured coffee into his mug, offered some to Katie, then sat down again. “And I do mean a story.”
Katie frowned. “Do you think they were lying?”
The detective shrugged. “It doesn’t matter what I think, really. What matters is what we can prove.” He eyed her. “You worked for Kimper for years. Do you know if he could swim?”
“If he could . . . ?” Katie gaped at him. “I have no idea.”
“Noth and Stafford said they were out boating with him that Labor Day, and that Kimper accidentally fell overboard. They claim they had no idea he couldn’t swim, that they thought his flailing around in the water was him just messing around.”
Katie shook her head. “I find that hard to believe, but who knows? Maybe he couldn’t swim. I’d ask Marcie, his widow.”
“We’re working on it,” he said. “Noth and Stafford said they fished him out of the water still alive. Said they took him back to Sassy Sally’s, because they knew that’s where he was staying. He was fine when they left him, they said, and that he must have had some water in his lungs and that must have triggered a heart attack or something. Oh, I know, I know,” he said, smiling. “It’s unlikely to the extreme. But that’s their story, and so far they’re sticking to it. The prosecutor is going to have the field day of his life ripping them apart in court.”
“But assuming he drowned right there in front of them, why on earth did they take him to Sassy Sally’s and not just leave him in the lake?”
Detective Hamilton slid his notebook into his jacket pocket. “I doubt we’ll ever know why—not for certain—but I have a theory. I think those two are both severely homophobic and saw implicating two innocent men as a big bonus.”
Katie sputtered. “But that’s . . . that’s . . .”
“Awful.” The detective stood, nodding. “Horrible and appalling. Makes you want to root for Don Parsons tomorrow all the more, doesn’t it?”
“What’s tomorrow? Is he playing in some late-season golf tournament?”
Hamilton’s eyebrows went up. “Playing, yes. Golf? Not even close. Didn’t you know? Parsons and Farrell are big stakes poker players. I hear that’s how they met, at a poker tournament in Miami. They’re both good enough to play in those Vegas tournaments they show on television. The pot tomorrow will probably go over a million dollars.”
“I had no idea,” Katie said faintly. A million dollars? That explained the money to renovate the bed-and-breakfast, and it explained why neither one of them seemed to have a job. It also made sense of a few other things that Katie had been puzzled about. She grinned, glad for the explanation.
Hamilton thanked her for her time and said he’d be in touch. As he headed out, Andy came in, exactly at the time they’d arranged earlier.
“Ready for lunch?” he asked, helping her to her feet and giving her a huge hug. “I love you, by the way,” he whispered into her ear. “Please don’t ever scare me like that again.”
“Is that your, um, brother?”
Katie pulled away from Andy, although she didn’t really want to, and looked at Ray Davenport’s daughters. “No, this is Andy Rust, my boyfriend and the owner of Angelo’s Pizzeria.”
“B-boyfriend?” Sadie stuttered. She looked Andy up and down, taking in his age, his size, and his unquestionable good looks.
“Um, we didn’t know you had a boyfriend,” Sasha said, her cheeks turning a bright shade of red.
“And you didn’t ask, did you?” Katie’s smile took the sting out of the words. “I appreciate that you don’t want your dad to be lonely, but I’m sure he can take care of that himself.” She thought of Ray, remembering that odd connective spark of . . . something that she’d felt once or twice when with him, then pushed the memory away as ridiculous. She couldn’t possibly be attracted to Ray Davenport.
“Boy, do I feel stupid,” Sasha said. “Wait until Sophie hears this.” She backed out of the vendors’ lounge and continued.
“The poor kid,” Andy said, then turned back to Katie. “Are you okay?”
She smiled up at him. “I am now.”
“Katie?” Rose called from the main sales floor. “Katie!” She charged into the room, flush faced, and her hair, which normally didn’t have a single strand out of place, was mussed. “I have to talk to you right this minute.” By the tone of her strained voice, it had to be a real emergency.
“What’s the matter?” Katie asked, concerned. She’d always thought Rose was unflappable.
“It’s that Godfrey Foster,” Rose burst out.
Brittany appeared in the doorway. “Is that the big guy with the allergies?”
Katie tensed. She hadn’t seen Godfrey since he’d been taken away in the ambulance after that allergic reaction to Crystal’s nail fumes. “Is Godfrey all right?” Please let him be okay, she thought. The last thing Artisans Alley needed was a lawsuit.
“Yes,” Rose said. “And that’s the problem. He’s perfectly all right.”
“But that’s good.” Katie frowned.
“No, no, you don’t understand,” Rose said, almost frantically. “He’s perfectly fine. He was always fine. I overheard him on his cell phone, talking to his wife, saying that his fake reaction had worked, that the nail girl would be gone from Artisans Alley by Monday.”
“Fake?” Katie’s voice was low and surprisingly calm. “Godfrey faked an allergy to get rid of Crystal?”
Rose nodded.
Turning to Brittany, Katie said, “Tell Crystal she can stay.” She would deal with Godfrey later—as in telling him to leave and refunding him any unused rent—but she first had to make things right with Crystal. “Tell her we’ll work out a way to vent the fumes if I have to pay for it myself.”
“I’ll help.”
Katie looked up to see Duncan McAllister standing in the doorway. “You don’t have to do that,” she said stiffly.
“No, but I will.” He nodded. “It’s my apology for being so difficult. My only explanation is that when I was coaching kids’ hockey, I was falsely accused of abuse. It was hard to deal with, and when you started asking all those questions about boats and whatnot, well, I overreacted. I’m sorry, and I’ll show it by helping out with Crystal’s project. She’s a good kid. She doesn’t deserve crap from someone like Godfrey Foster.”
“Me, too,” Ray said, coming into the room and slinging his arms around his daughters. It was obvious he’d already ditched his cane. “A little bit of money, a lot of labor, and we’ll have that venting system finished in no time.”
“I’ll help.” Vance edged into the by now crowded room. “An
d I’ll help double if I can get some boating instruction from Duncan, here, next summer.”
“Sounds like a plan,” Duncan said agreeably.
As the two men fell into a boating-oriented conversation, Katie got a wonderful idea. Seth didn’t like to sail alone, and she couldn’t go out as often as he would like, so what she needed to do was introduce him to Gwen, giving him a deckhand and her a way to go sailing.
“What are you grinning about?” Andy asked, squeezing her hand.
She gestured to the room, to the multiple conversations going on, to the plans being made, to the relationships forming and growing. With contentment in her heart, she said, “I’m happy.”
Because Artisans Alley was a huge success in all the ways that really counted.
Katie’s Recipes
Chocolate-Dipped Madeleines
10 tablespoons unsalted butter
⅔ cup sugar
3 large eggs, at room temperature
½ teaspoon salt
1 tablespoon vanilla extract
1 cup all-purpose flour, sifted
Chocolate Glaze
¼ cup corn syrup
¼ cup water
¾ cup sugar
1 cup chopped bittersweet or semisweet chocolate
Melt the butter, then set it aside to cool to room temperature. In a medium-sized mixing bowl, beat the sugar, eggs, and salt until they’re light yellow and very thick. Stir in the vanilla. Add the flour and melted butter alternately, using a gentle folding motion so the batter loses as little volume as possible. Refrigerate the batter, covered, for 45 minutes or so, until it’s thick.
Preheat the oven to 375°F. Scoop the batter into the lightly greased wells of a standard-sized madeleine pan, using 1 slightly rounded tablespoon of batter for each cookie. (If you have only one pan, bake in sequence, keeping the remaining batter refrigerated.) Bake the madeleines for 12–14 minutes, until they’re light brown at the edges. Cool in the pan for several minutes, then remove and cool completely on a rack.
Dead, Bath, and Beyond Page 26
