All the Blue-Eyed Angels

by Jen Blood

  “I’m sorry to hear that.” Something about the way his eyes slid from mine suggested this might not be the whole truth. Interesting. “So…A Fed. You must have some great stories.”

  I curled up next to Einstein, laying my chin on his body so I could get a better look at the man across from me. It occurred to me that I was drunk. And recently single. And Diggs could be home any second now.

  “A few,” Jack said. “I’m mostly just a cop, though. A cop for the government—more red tape, better benefits.”

  “What division are you in?”

  “Homicide.”

  I wasn’t sure how to respond to that. The reporter in me came up with two dozen questions and at least three stories to pitch to editors I knew in the business. One-on-one with a bottle of wine and a gorgeous homicide agent—wasn’t that how most Pulitzer prize-winning stories began?

  Jack tipped his head back, checking the time on a wall clock behind us. “Diggs will be back soon—we should turn in. I’m sure you have a big day tomorrow.”

  I nodded. Closed my eyes. Stories and pitches and Pulitzer speeches faded. An image of Michael flashed through my mind. I wondered if my ex-husband was alone tonight. For the last two weeks before I left, though the divorce was final, we’d still lived together. Still slept together. I had still kissed him goodnight, and we’d made love for the last time less than twenty-four hours ago. My head spun, lying on the floor in Diggs’ half-finished home with a man I’d spoken no more than two sentences to before tonight.

  When I opened my eyes, Jack was closer. He studied me intently.

  “Are you all right?”

  “Just tired,” I told him. “I’m gonna take Stein out one last time and hit the hay. See you in the morning?”

  His eyes remained on mine. I didn’t know much about him so far, but he didn’t seem happy. Or maybe I was just projecting. For a second I thought he might kiss me, but the moment passed. He stood. Extended his hand and helped me to my feet, where I swayed with his hand still in mine.

  “Thank you for the company,” he said.

  Things went still for a moment. “My pleasure.”

  He stepped back. “Sleep well, Erin. See you tomorrow.”

  He went his way. I walked the dog.

  Chapter Five

  Once Einstein had been walked and we were curled up together in my new bed, sleep proved more elusive than I’d expected. I went over the events of the day ad nauseam. The interview with Noel Hammond had been less than rewarding. I don’t know what I’d been hoping for, but it was something along the lines of, ‘Sorry I held out on you all these years—Colonel Mustard did it in the chapel with a tiki torch and a bottle of lighter fluid. And, oh yeah, here’s why.’

  Clearly, that wasn’t going to happen. The Payson house seemed like a bigger project than I could realistically handle, and the fact that I was now proud owner of an island and all its ghosts was not comforting. I got out of bed. Paced the floor. Got dressed again, snapped the leash to Einstein’s collar, and headed out.

  It was one-thirty in the morning, and Diggs wasn’t home yet.

  Once I was outside, there was no question where I was headed—the place that had been my refuge in Littlehope even as a teen: the Trib. My breath came in puffs of cold white air in the darkness. The unpaved road leading into Diggs’ place was at least half a mile long, with no neighbors along the way. He’d purchased the land cheap from an old neighbor of his father’s a couple of years before—driven into seclusion, I suspected, because his third marriage had gone sour and this was Diggs’ version of a new, monastic leaf.

  Evergreens stood in black silhouette against a deep blue night sky, the moon and a thousand stars lighting my way into town. Coyotes howled in the distance. Einstein growled but stuck close. A steady chorus of frogs trilled froggily; a dog barked somewhere nearby. Einstein stopped moving and growled again.

  “No fair freaking out the city girl, Stein,” I said.

  He looked at me and thumped his tail. We resumed our trek.

  Michael had never visited Littlehope. I always told him he would hate it, and he took me at my word. Raised in Brooklyn by a widowed mother with an overactive social conscience, Michael hummed the dueling banjos bit from “Deliverance” every time we headed to the Hamptons for the weekend. No, my ex-husband would not be a fan of Littlehope.

  Behind me, Diggs’ motion-sensitive porch light had gone out some time ago. There was no sign of lights up ahead, either; I was starting to question the wisdom of a midnight stroll, even in the relative safety of Littlehope. The coyotes took up their call once more—one would begin, another would join in, a third would answer. Einstein stopped moving, his tail low, his body tensed. When he growled this time, it came from deep in his chest.

  Something moved in the underbrush to our left. Einstein lunged, coming up short at the end of his leash.

  “Okay, this is less fun now.” I dragged the dog along until he was forced to walk beside me, took the cell phone from my pocket, and hit the first number on speed dial.

  “You should be sleeping,” Diggs said, without so much as a howdy do.

  “Ditto. I’m not tired.” I kept my eyes straight ahead and upped our pace to just shy of a jog, though I’d be damned if I’d let Diggs know what a pansy I’d become since moving to the big city. “I thought I’d stop by the office and try to get some work done, since your house is a little crowded.”

  There was a pause on the line. “Shit. I’m sorry about that—he was supposed to be out of town for a couple of weeks.”

  “Don’t worry about it. We had dinner—it was kind of nice.”

  “Was it, now?”

  “Don’t start. I was wondering how your contacts are around here.”

  A branch snapped about ten yards behind me. Einstein stopped again. Diggs was talking, but my heart was thumping too loudly to hear him; I had to ask him to repeat himself.

  “Where are you?” he asked.

  “On your road, I think—it’s hard to tell without a smoggy skyline to light the way. Einstein’s a little freaked out.”

  “You’re walking?”

  “You’re the one who said I should get back in shape.”

  He called me a pain in the ass and said he would come pick me up. Out of obligation, I argued the point for ten seconds before I agreed that a late-night drive might not be such a bad idea. By the time I hung up, I felt better for having called, but much, much worse for the time I would have to wait until he arrived.

  Another branch snapped, this one closer.

  Einstein was on high alert now. All the night sounds had gone silent—no more frogs, no more crickets, no more coyotes. Nothing but Einstein’s growls and my hastened breathing. And then, so quiet it was almost undetectable, I heard it: the whisper of a body crouching low to the ground, pushing through dense brush.

  The leash went taut as Einstein strained forward. My heart was pounding, blood rushing in my ears. Somehow in the midst of everything I got turned around; when the figure lurking in the shadows finally appeared, he came in from the right. For a split second I just stood there stupidly, waiting for someone to come from the direction I’d been expecting.

  I didn’t recognize him at first. Matt Perkins had been fifteen years younger when I’d seen him last, and since that time he had aged a lifetime. The former Littlehope constable had always been an athletic man—it was a surprisingly physical job, and he had taken the role seriously. Now, he was wiry and much thinner than I remembered him, his stride hindered by an obvious limp. Despite any physical infirmity, he came up on us fast and stood too close, his eyes searching mine in the darkness. Einstein growled furiously while I held tight to his leash.

  “I dreamed you,” Perkins said to me. I shined my flashlight at him. He blinked in the glare. His hair was white and his pupils were too large, his face slack on one side as though he had suffered a stroke in recent years.

  I took a step back. “Constable Perkins?”

  “I dreamed you.
I dream people, and they arrive. I dreamed you, and wished that I hadn’t. No one invited you back.”

  He closed the distance and kept coming, ignoring Einstein, until we were standing close enough to touch.

  “I need you to take a step back—you’re upsetting my dog.”

  “Your dog will die like a dog,” he said. He laughed. There was a manic light in his eyes that scared the holy hell out of me, a tiny trail of spittle down the right side of his mouth. I stepped back again, pulling Einstein with me. Off in the distance, I could hear a car engine coming closer.

  “I dreamed you. I dreamed them all—I watched the fires burn and I’ll watch you die with a bullet in your skull. Just like him.” The light went out in his eyes, suddenly. A single tear fell down his cheek.

  “You shouldn’t have come,” he said again. “I’m sorry for that dream.”

  He turned around and disappeared back into the woods just as Diggs topped the hill. I’d wrapped Einstein’s leash around my hand one too many times and it had cut off my circulation; I unwound the line to give Einstein more lead, but he didn’t seem anxious to take it. Diggs pulled up alongside us in his Jeep.

  “Hop in.”

  “Did you see him?”

  He looked at me blankly.

  “Matt Perkins—the constable. He was here.”

  For a second, Diggs looked doubtful. When he realized it was unlikely I’d make up the story, he got serious.

  “Get in, we’ll head back to the house. We’ll have to let Jack know he’s gone off the reservation again.”

  “Again?”

  Diggs nodded. He looked tired, and not all that interested in telling stories. “The last year or so he hasn’t been doing great. He’s been staying at a residential place that Edie Woolwich runs, but he likes midnight strolls.”

  “He scared the shit out of me.”

  This earned another nod. He drove slowly, both of us looking along the side of the road for any trace of the old man.

  “Yeah. He does that.” He glanced at me, shifting gears—both literal and metaphoric. “Listen, I gave the State Fire Marshal a call today.”

  “Yeah?”

  “He said he’d talk to you if you want to swing by tomorrow morning. I told him a little about the story, and he said you can have access to whatever you want—check out the archives, talk to anyone who might have worked the case back in the day, whatever.”

  “He remembered the fire?”

  “Uh, yeah—he had a vague recollection of one of the biggest fatal fires in Maine history.”

  “What time?”

  “He said ten, if it works for you. I have to work, but I figured you’d be okay on your own.”

  “Yeah, of course. Thanks.”

  When we pulled up in front of the house, Diggs wrapped his hand around my wrist as I was getting out of the Jeep.

  “Hang on—can I talk to you for a second?”

  I got back in and shut the door as quietly as I could. Einstein whimpered, then circled the backseat a couple of times before he lay back down. The porch light had come on when we rolled up but now it went off again, leaving us in darkness once more.

  “What?”

  “I’m sorry Jack’s here—I really did think he’d be gone for a while. It’s bad timing, I know.” I waited for him to say what was really on his mind. Finally, he sighed. “Listen, Solomon, I’ve been where you are right now.”

  I glanced around to indicate that I had no clue what he was talking about, though of course I knew full well.

  “You’re just getting your feet back under you after…you know, everything. Things might be a little raw for a while.”

  I raised an eyebrow, but remained silent while I waited for him to get to the point.

  “I’m just saying, you might not be making the best decisions right now. So jumping into something with somebody new, while it might seem like a good idea now, can lead to complications you may want to avoid.”

  “Jesus, Diggs—I told you, nothing happened. We had dinner. We talked. He went to bed; I had a close encounter with his crazy uncle, and called you.”

  His hand was still on my wrist, warm against my cool skin. Our eyes held, his frustration clear.

  “I’m not just talking about Juarez,” he said. “The last time I saw you, you were—”

  I pulled away. “I’m fine, Diggs. And if you’d stop hovering and just let me do what I came here to do, I’d be that much better.”

  His jaw tensed, but he didn’t say anything further. I let Einstein out the back and went inside. Diggs didn’t follow me. When I looked back at him from the front door, he was still sitting in the driver’s seat, hands on the wheel, watching me with frustration and worry and that tangle of emotions that had been tripping us both up for years now.

  I turned my back on him and went inside alone.

  Chapter Six

  It was just after eight when I woke up the next morning, and Diggs and Juarez were both long gone. I showered and dressed and tried not to think about my fight with Diggs the night before, or the fact that he seemed to be sleeping even less than I was, or how justified he was in being pissed at me. Which meant, of course, that I just thought about it more.

  I’d been visiting Maine the last time I saw Diggs, ostensibly covering a story on one of the neighboring islands in Penobscot Bay. I was three months pregnant at the time—though I hadn’t shared that with Diggs. Or my husband, for that matter. I had also neglected to tell anyone about the unexpected windfall that resulted from Malcolm Payson’s death. I didn’t mention inheriting Payson Isle, or the discovery of the photos Noel Hammond had taken. I wasn’t sleeping, I wasn’t eating, and I sure as hell wasn’t talking.

  An OBGYN would probably have caught the fact that the pregnancy was ectopic weeks earlier; that diagnosis was complicated by the fact that I never actually saw an OBGYN, however. Diggs got a call from Michael after my fallopian tube burst, telling him they weren’t sure I’d make it. He drove down to Boston that night. I was unconscious when he got there, and just coming around when he left forty-eight hours later.

  So…In all fairness, Diggs’ concern wasn’t completely unjustified. I just wished he’d stop worrying and leave me be. I’d survived the miscarriage and my subsequent divorce, and now for the first time, there was nothing stopping me from learning the truth behind the Payson fire. I could dig as deeply as I wanted, work as long and as hard as I liked, and answer to no one while I was doing it. Unless, of course, Diggs kept up his self-appointed role as my Great Protector.

  By the time I got to Augusta that morning, I’d convinced myself that whatever it took to get the information I needed was worth it. If that meant I had to shut Diggs out of the investigation, so be it. I parked outside the Maine State Sheriff’s Barracks, locked my car, and went inside with renewed focus.

  Sergeant Bill Flint had the square jaw and the piercing blue eyes of a Hollywood action hero. We met in his office, a concrete enclave in the back corner of a larger concrete enclave that housed the Sheriff’s Barracks. Five minutes after he showed me in and mysteriously vanished, he returned with two cans of Coke and a box of files. He set the box on a card table in the corner of the room, where I’d already seated myself.

  “Sorry,” he said, indicating the soda. “I’m trying to quit, but we got called in at midnight for a house fire in Lewiston. All-nighters don’t come as easy as they used to.”

  Laugh lines and graying at his temples suggested the sergeant was in his fifties. The hint of shadow under his eyes and the faintest hint of stubble nudged the action hero mythos a shade closer to icon status. Between Diggs, Juarez, and Captain America here, it was getting damned difficult to stay focused.

  “No need to apologize—I just appreciate you meeting with me. These are the files?”

  “You lucked out. We had an intern here yesterday, so I had him photocopy what you’ll need. We won’t have time to go through all of it, I’m sure, but you can take the copies back with you. The ME will ha
ve the autopsy reports over in the crime lab archives—I’ve already put in a call. They’re expecting you.”

  Working as a reporter in Boston, I’d gotten used to being stonewalled at every turn. This new spirit of openness and cooperation was unnerving.

  “Thank you. I was hoping to ask a few questions, too. Diggs told me you were on the scene—I know it was a while ago, but I was hoping you might remember a few details.”

  He looked amused.

  “That’s funny?” I asked.

  “Sorry,” he said quickly. “Diggs told me your connection to the fire—believe me, I don’t think it’s funny at all. It’s just that we’ve all gone over the case so many times that I think even our newbies could walk you through it, point by point. Everyone here’s been trained on the details, using it as an example of what not to do in an emergency.”

  I assumed my poker face, sensing a lead. “There were problems that night?”

  “Not from this office,” he assured me. “The Fire Marshal and the other agencies did a great job of handling the investigation and the inevitable fallout, considering it was a situation no one had been remotely prepared for.”

  I didn’t say anything. I was crossing into dangerous territory—even twenty years after the fact, any government agency would do its best to protect its own. Flint seemed to sense my skepticism, however. He leaned forward.

  “I spoke with Fire Marshal Cooper this morning, before meeting with you. He was clear on one thing: he wants you to have access to whatever you need in your investigation. We did a good job on that case—or as good as we could, considering what was handed to us. You can ask me anything, Ms. Solomon, and I’ll do my best to give you whatever answers I have. I’m confident that any issues you might find with the way the investigation was conducted, the fault won’t lie with this department.”

  “So where do you think the fault should lie?”

  He grinned—a broad, boyish smile that made me like him that much more. “I guess that’s the question, isn’t it? But if you’re looking to lay blame, you don’t need to look much farther than your hometown.”