Temptation Bay (A Windfall Island Novel)

by Anna Sullivan

  His grin only widened. “But you won’t.”

  Chapter Three

  Dex could see Maggie struggling between wanting him gone and having to be the one to make it happen.

  “I could just stay here,” he said.

  “I could call George.” Maggie leaned against the desk and crossed her arms. She made him ask the question.

  She didn’t know he already knew the answer. “Who’s George?”

  “George is the sheriff.”

  As threats went, it was a pretty good one. Dex had done his homework on the local heat before he’d come to Windfall Island. A lot of people would take George Boatwright for a loser who couldn’t cut it in a larger urban arena. A lot of people would be wrong. George had been an army sniper, but it wasn’t his perfect aim that concerned Dex. It was his instincts. George would take one look at him and run a background check. Dex had laid a false back trail for himself, but it wouldn’t stand up to too much scrutiny. “If you’re afraid to spend any more time with me…”

  She gave him a look, then disappeared into a smaller office behind the main one, reappearing with a set of keys. She didn’t say a word as she exited the office, and she didn’t offer to carry his luggage. Hell, she barely gave him time to toss his bags into the trunk of a sleek black Mustang GT before she slammed it closed.

  “I’m headed into town, Mort,” she yelled at an overall-wearing, scrubby-looking, twenty-something guy who gave her a half wave as she got in the car.

  Dex barely spared him a glance as he shuffled off in the direction of a building that had to be a hangar. “You were going to tell me about the island,” he said, settling into the passenger seat.

  “Persistent, aren’t you?”

  “When I want something badly enough.”

  Maggie held his gaze as she started the car and put it in gear, turning her attention forward again as she peeled out of the airport lot with a squeal of rubber. For someone so closed off, Dex mused, she didn’t realize just how much she actually gave away.

  She drove like a maniac on the narrow, winding road that molded itself to every twist and turn of the shoreline. Her car, as deceptively sleek and pretty as its owner, hugged the curves like automotive Velcro. Whatever else could be said about Maggie Solomon, the woman appreciated fine machinery, and she knew how to use it. She worked the gears, clutch, and brake pedal like a race car driver, her face bright with the same delight as when she’d been flying—until he spoke, and she closed off again. It was like the clouds covering the sun suddenly. The light, the warmth was still there, and you knew it had to shine again some time. But not for him. Dex regretted that, more than he cared to admit.

  But he couldn’t let it matter.

  “How far is it to the village?” he said as she powered the car through a series of curves winding around the rocky outcroppings along the shoreline.

  She glanced over at him, one brow arched, the corners of her mouth lifted into a slight smile. “Why don’t you ask me what you really want to know?”

  “Because you won’t answer my questions. I wonder why that is.”

  She bumped up a shoulder, let it fall. “Like I told Jessi, you’re trouble.”

  “Maybe I’m here on behalf of someone on the island.”

  “I’d know about it. Which means you work for an outsider.”

  Outsider. He didn’t so much file that term away as he took note of the way she said it. She might not have lived on Windfall her whole life, but she was an islander now, through and through.

  “And if I said I don’t intend to cause harm to anyone?”

  “Good intentions are little comfort after the fact.”

  “They’re not much good now, seeing as you’re determined to think the worst of me.”

  She throttled the car down, then punched it through another curve. “In order to understand Windfall,” she said, no hesitation, no defensiveness, no apology for putting him off before, “you need a little context—history.

  “There’s not much in the way of industry here. Never has been. The soil is fertile, but the island isn’t big enough for more than subsistence farming. Fishing can be profitable, but boats are expensive to own and maintain. Even if the early settlers of the island had had collateral, there weren’t banks on every street corner waiting to give out loans. But there were a lot of ships going in and out of New World ports.”

  “And the Atlantic is anything but predictable.”

  She shrugged again, with the same take-life-as-it-comes attitude he imagined the first settlers had possessed.

  “There was always a captain willing to push the season,” she continued. “They’d sail well into the winter, when crossing the north Atlantic was treacherous. In the event a ship didn’t make port, the same owners who’d paid those crews to risk their lives didn’t want to lose their cargo.

  “Most of the organized salvage crews operated farther south, along the heaviest-traveled shipping routes between South America and Europe, but there were many communities like this one along the Atlantic coastline, where crews put out at a moment’s notice to offload cargo and rescue passengers from ships that ran aground, usually at great personal danger to themselves. History calls them salvagers; rumor calls them wreckers.”

  “What’s the difference?” Dex asked.

  “Salvagers were opportunists who took advantage of ships driven onto the rocks by the Atlantic. Wreckers weren’t that patient. Allegedly. There was a lot of money to be made, enough that the leaders of some of the salvage crews were said to have ordered lights to be carried along the shore.”

  “To wreck them.”

  “Tall tales,” she said dismissively. “Lanterns shone at shore level don’t carry far across open water, and even if they did, they would have warned ships away from the shoals, not suckered them in.”

  “What about survivors?”

  “In the early days, who knows? Congress passed the Federal Wrecking Act in 1825. The Act regulated compensation for salvagers, including conditions involving survivors. It also decreed a death sentence for anyone found guilty of shining false lights or extinguishing real ones.”

  “It must have been a hard life.”

  “Harder, I think, than you and I can imagine. And it was only compounded by the attitude from the mainland. Salvage crews were insular, secretive, and dangerous. No one, including wives and children, discussed their business with outsiders. It’s a powerful legacy.”

  “There aren’t many shipwrecks nowadays.”

  “There’s no real need for a monarch in England, either.”

  Tradition dies hard, Dex interpreted. Mess with one Windfaller, mess with them all. Including Maggie. She’d told him the other residents were armed to the teeth and junkyard-dog ornery, and he’d still rather take them on than Maggie Solomon. She had an edge to her, a quality that told him she’d do whatever it took and not think twice.

  “My point is,” Dex said, “there hasn’t been any salvaging income in more than a century. You said farming and fishing weren’t viable undertakings. How have the islanders survived?”

  “Any way they could. Working on the mainland, running booze during Prohibition, tourism nowadays. Necessity is the mother,” she finished, “a mother who turns out some pretty tough children.”

  “You fit right in here, Maggie.”

  “You don’t,” she said, no heat, no threat, but a warning all the same. “Tread lightly.”

  “And carry a big stick?”

  She laughed a little. “I wouldn’t. People around here see a stick, they just naturally feel threatened.”

  “Or when they see a lawyer?”

  “This is the Horizon,” she said, angling the car into a parking space in front of a weathered, two-story, wood frame building. The sign over the door looked like it had been carved out of driftwood or the broken plank off an old shipwreck. A wavy line bisected the sign from left to right. On top of the line was a half circle with rays coming out of it, painted a faded yellow. The wood b
elow the line was painted an equally faded blue.

  “Any chance we can continue this later?”

  Maggie turned to face him, and suddenly the car was way too small. It filled with the scent of her, fresh salt air with just a hint of motor oil, strangely irresistible. He felt the heat pumping off her, saw the pulse beating in the hollow of her throat. She wasn’t as calm and disinterested as she appeared.

  He’d known her barely an hour, but he already craved her like a drug, could all but taste the hot magic of her mouth, feel the silk of her skin, knew how her long, slim body would fit to his.

  She’d make it a contest, Dex mused; she’d take as much as she’d give. And how much sweeter the surrender would be.

  “Maggie—”

  “No.”

  “You’re not being honest with yourself.”

  “Maybe not,” she said, meeting his eyes, letting him see the desire, and the uncertainty, in the brilliant blue depths. “The real question is, how honest are you being with me?”

  “As honest as I can be.”

  She smiled slightly. “That’s how honest I’m being with myself.”

  She leaned forward and for a second, just a second, he thought she was going to kiss him because her face turned toward his. He felt her breath whisper over his lips… and then she popped his door open and shifted back into her seat, but not before she brushed against him and the world shuddered to a halt. Or maybe the lurch he felt was his nerve endings all shrieking to attention at the same time. It felt amazingly, electrifyingly good. He might never open another door again as long as Maggie was around.

  “This is good-bye, Counselor.”

  “Not if I have anything to say about it,” Dex murmured. But he stepped out of the car, disgusted with himself, and not just for mishandling the situation with Maggie.

  He should have done more research, but damn it he’d thought lawyer would be a good cover. Now he wondered if the truth might’ve given him something in common with these people; after all, right and wrong were concepts with blurry lines. Then again, lawyers were called sharks for a reason.

  And sharks, from the sound of things, weren’t all that different from Wreckers.

  After Maggie dropped him off at the Horizon—or, more accurately, kicked him out—there hadn’t been much of the day left. Dex chose to spend it in his hotel room, factoring in what he’d learned from Maggie and re-thinking his game plan. He hadn’t expected the case to go smoothly, or for Windfall Island to be a simple place just because it was small, but he’d come, he admitted, with expectations, which, if Maggie was to be believed, the place defied.

  He was nothing, he told himself, if not flexible. Patience, however, was another story, and sleep hard to come by with his body still wired and his brain spinning scenario after scenario, all of them ending the same way: with him solving Eugenia Stanhope’s kidnapping, a case that had baffled the best investigators, in and out of organized law enforcement, for the better part of a century. Making a name for himself.

  Any name but failure.

  He took out his cell and speed dialed, smiling when his old man’s voice came over the line. “Hey, kid,” Carter Keegan said heartily. “Still tilting at windmills?”

  “You know me,” he replied. “Never could resist a lost cause.”

  “Plenty of lost causes right here in the big, bad city of Boston. Take the other day…”

  Dex smiled, listening to Sergeant Keegan’s voice, with its broad Southie accent, as he talked about the Boston Police Department and the insanity that took place on a daily basis. His old man, a cop through and through, thought he was crazy to give up a perfectly respectable career as a fourth generation Boston cop to go out on his own.

  Considering Dex was almost down to his last thin dime, Dad wasn’t too far wrong.

  “Your mother’s gone out to the store. She’ll be sorry she missed you,” Carter was saying. “I swear, she worries more now than she did when you wore a uniform and walked a beat in some of the city’s worst neighborhoods.”

  “I was close to home then,” he said, completely understanding how his mother felt. Phone calls could be made, e-mails sent, but there was no substitute for seeing the face of someone you loved. “How’s Lou?” he asked, wishing he could see her for himself, but knowing his father wouldn’t sugar coat it.

  “Louise is doing better, I think. It’s still day by day, but she’s getting tired of your mother being, what do they call it these days, a hovercraft?”

  “A helicopter mom,” he said, his mind going just for a moment to Maggie. She and his sister were a lot alike: strong, independent. Fighters. It took a lot to bring Lou down. If she was tired of being coddled, then she was on the mend. “That’s good to hear,” he told his father.

  “It’s damn good to see. You should drag your sorry butt up here and find out firsthand.”

  “I’m on a case, Dad. I’ll get home first chance.”

  “Hell, kid, just make sure you call your mother later on. Otherwise she’ll find a reason to blame me for it.”

  Dex laughed, feeling restored. Traveling around the country chasing missing persons cases meant he couldn’t be there for a sister whose life had imploded, a sister who’d always been there for him. Hearing she was doing better, hell, hearing his old man call him kid, went a long way toward soothing his conscience.

  And made him even more determined to solve Eugenia Stanhope’s mystery. After all, he thought as he exited the Horizon, he wasn’t the only one living with the choices he’d made.

  Dex slipped his phone in his pocket and walked out of the hotel. The sky, far off at the horizon, was a mass of purple and gray where Mother Nature warred with Neptune in some distant, empty stretch of the Atlantic. The angry color bled to a clear, deep blue above Windfall Island, but the breeze off the water had a bite, both in temperature and tang. And attitude, Dex thought, fancying he could feel just a light slap in it from the storm raging miles away.

  Fall had come with a vengeance, not just in the snap on the air, but the beauty of leaves shining red and yellow against that intense blue sky—the color, he couldn’t help but notice, so much like Maggie Solomon’s eyes. And wasn’t she just like the morning, he mused, placid on the surface, all her emotions pent up and seething just under the surface.

  He’d seen the depth of her generosity when it came to her friends, but something about him rubbed her the wrong way. It probably hadn’t helped when he’d put her up against the helicopter. But he’d do it again. Hell, given the chance, he’d do more, push her past that iron control she seemed to wield over herself as automatically as she drew breath.

  It would probably be glorious, but it wouldn’t gain him her trust, and he needed her trust.

  Even though he’d already betrayed it.

  And if that didn’t set well with his conscience, well, it was too late to turn back now, with the deal struck and the down payment already spent. And he wasn’t a man who dealt in regrets, he reminded himself, turning his attention back to the case as he set off through the village.

  The single road Maggie had taken from the airport at Temptation Bay contorted itself around rocks and hopped over small streams in a seeming race to make it to the village, but there it meandered suddenly, like it had been laid out by a drunken sailor—which it probably had. Businesses sat cheek-by-jowl on the inland side of the street, with a scattering of houses nestled in the curve behind them. Shanty-style buildings tottered along the shoreline side, some so old it looked like the next strong breeze might set off a domino effect. Signs were posted on the end walls: No leaning.

  Each building was unique, some of them painted in garish tones with gaudy striped awnings, others less in-your-face, their colors softened by the sun, salt air, and the harsh weather that spewed off the Atlantic Ocean. Like the Horizon, each business sported a pictograph sign, holdovers from a time when few of the residents could read. None of the narrow lanes had names; the residents likely found it unnecessary. The tourists would find i
t charming, Dex imagined, and the tourists were very necessary.

  True to Maggie’s word, Dex saw no industry of any kind in the village. A trio of fishing trawlers were moored at the rickety docks, along with two Solomon Charters boats—for the crossing from island to mainland and whale watching, Dex assumed—but tourism was clearly the island’s main source of income. He could use that; merchants who depended on tourism were invariably chatty, open to satisfying the curiosity of strangers.

  He set out with high hopes; Windfall Island dashed them in record time. He hadn’t gone a block before he realized nearly every tourist-centric business was already closed for the season. That left the businesses that catered to residents’ day-to-day needs.

  He chatted up Mr. MacDonald, sole proprietor and, this time of year, stock boy, cashier and bagger of the single grocery store. And by “chatted,” he meant he’d talked and Mr. MacDonald had stared like a basilisk at him. Dex spent a little money at the five and dime, where the only conversation consisted of how much change he got back. Then he visited the hardware store, the pharmacy, and the pizzeria, grabbing lunch in the aromatic heat and fending off questions while the owner and her son revealed absolutely nothing about themselves or the island.

  He’d even poked his head inside the doors of the Clipper Snip, telling himself it was the overwhelming odor of chemicals that made his mind reel rather than the eight pairs of female eyes that had swiveled in his direction then lit with some variation of avarice. They were only after information, Dex assured himself. It didn’t stop him from feeling like he was about to be gobbled up like the last hot dog at a Fourth of July party.

  Still, he loved this part of a case, when the clues could lead him anywhere, straight ahead or back the way he’d come or halfway around the world. Where everyone was a suspect and the most innocent tidbit of information could turn out to be the linchpin. And this case… this case carried special weight, just by being so damned historically significant, not to mention its importance to a family like the Stanhopes.