The Harbor

by Carla Neggers

  Twenty

  The Castellane kid didn't let his injuries stop him from arguing with Zoe all the way back to the village. She wanted him to talk to the police. He didn't want to do it. J.B. was in favor of hauling him straight to the police station and letting Goose Harbor's finest sort out what went on tonight. Zoe was more willing to compromise.

  "It was just a fight," Kyle said. He was warmer now, his speech less slurred. His lip had started to bleed again, probably because he wouldn't shut up. "Can't a couple of guys get into a fight anymore? Why involve the police?"

  "They need to be aware of how Teddy Shelton reacted to you," Zoe said.

  J.B. debated leaving them both out of the decision-making and pulling up to the police station. It was next to the town library with its Olivia West Reading Room. What was the kid going to do, jump out of a moving car?

  He threatened to. "If you try to take me to the police, I swear I'll jump out of here. A few more bruises aren't going to matter."

  Good, J.B. thought. I'll provide them. He was ready to call Kyle's bluff, but he reined in his irritation and passed the call off to Zoe. Her town, her sister's boyfriend.

  She caved. "Fine. We'll drop you off at your father's yacht."

  "What for? He'll have a heart attack or blame me for bleeding on his rug. Come on, Zoe. Give me a break. I just want to clean up and crawl into bed. Drop me off at my apartment or Christina's. My father goes to bed at ten, anyway."

  Zoe shook her head. "I'm not leaving you alone or with my sister. What if Teddy comes back to have another crack at you? Have you thought of that?"

  When he drove into the parking lot at the docks, J.B. saw that Christina's café was lit up. She must have spotted his Jeep, because she ran out and waved them down.

  Zoe glanced back at Kyle, her expression neutral— her ten years in law enforcement finally showed. "She's worried sick about you."

  J.B. braked, but before he could come to a full stop, Zoe had the door open. "Chris, it's okay. Kyle's with us. He got in a fight—"

  She saw him and cried out. "Kyle! Oh, my God, look at you! Who did this?" Ignoring Zoe, Christina reached for him in the back. "What happened? God, Kyle, you're bleeding. Zoe, why aren't you at the hospital?"

  "He won't go."

  She went through the bare bones of the story while Christina clucked and sobbed over her beaten-up boyfriend. He seized his moment and slipped out of the Jeep. J.B. could have stopped him, but what was the point? The kid wasn't cooperating. He was enjoying the drama and attention and presuming he could get away with his rendition of events.

  It wouldn't work. J.B. would see to it.

  "Let me get you some fresh ice—I've got a freezer full." Christina looked at her sister. "It's okay if we go?"

  Zoe thought a moment, then nodded. "The police are going to want to talk to Kyle, but—sure, go on. Your door's fixed, right? Lock it. And call me if you need anything."

  J.B. considered his options, decided not one of themwas appealing and kept his mouth shut. For the time being. He stood out in the parking lot, noting how quiet it was now that it was dark and below freezing. No tourists, no night walkers, no yacht parties. Goose Harbor must be a different place in late fall and winter.

  Christina hung on to Kyle's waist, steadying him, as they walked to the café. "I can't believe you got in a fight with Teddy Shelton. He's twice your size!"

  Kyle remarked that he'd held his own. Another version of what'd happened tonight. Another lie.

  J.B. could see Zoe gritting her teeth, but she said nothing. They both got back into the Jeep, and he started it up, glancing over at her. "Think your sister'll ask you to be maid of honor at the wedding?"

  "Go to hell, McGrath." He grinned. "And I was worried you were afraid of me now that I'm armed."

  That brought a grudging smile. "Not a chance. You know where the police station is?"

  "I do."

  He had no trouble finding a parking space on Main Street in front of the station. The village was deserted at night. He leaned back in his seat. "Tell them they can get in touch with me if they want to." He gave her his cell phone number. "They can call anytime."

  "You're not going in with me?"

  He shook his head. "No."

  "Why not? You had the run-in with Shelton yesterday. You're the armed FBI agent."

  "It wasn't a run-in. I told him I thought he was having a heart attack. He blew me off." He glanced over at her, aware he'd aroused her suspicions. "Suggest they look into Teddy Shelton's prison record. Who the judge was at his trial."

  Even in the darkness, he could see how pale she was. "J.B.—"

  "Let them figure it out, Zoe. We need to pull back."

  "Stick—was he the judge? Is he in danger?"

  "I'll wait here."

  She waited another two seconds, but he didn't budge. Without a word, she pushed open her door and climbed out. He saw her hesitate. Never mind the story she had to tell about tonight, that she'd offended the people she had to tell it to—the building itself was where her father had worked her entire life. It had to hold countless memories.

  J.B. didn't envy her.

  It took her ten minutes to get the job done and get out of there. She tore open the Jeep door, flopped into her seat and burst into tears, lowering her head so he couldn't see her as she sobbed, quietly, miserably.

  "Even rougher than you thought it'd be, wasn't it?"

  She didn't answer, and he didn't expect her to.

  With her bent over like that, her sweater rode up a few inches, revealing the top edge of what looked like a tattoo of a pink beach rose just above her left hip.

  J.B. inhaled a deep breath, started the engine anddrove slowly back to Olivia West's house on the bluff.

  Zoe jumped out before he'd come to a full stop. By the time he followed her into the house, she was running up the stairs as if the hounds of hell were on her.

  It hadn't been so easy, these first days back home.

  J.B. found a heavy crystal decanter of Scotch on the sideboard in the dining room. He got a glass from the cupboard and splashed in about half an inch and smelled it. Seemed fine. Olivia West died on her one hundred and first birthday. It was safe to assume the Scotch hadn't been around for more than a century.

  He stood at the window and drank, and he thought of a woman out here on this bluff alone for the better part of a hundred years. If his grandmother had stayed, would she have lived longer? Would she and Olivia West have remained friends and gone to church suppers and played bridge together?

  J.B.'s father might have become a lobsterman. More likely he'd never have been born. Yet nothing in her letters to her friend in Montana

  suggested Olivia was lonely out here. She never married, but from everything J.B. had learned about her in his days in Goose Harbor, she hadn't lived a solitary life.

  He thought of Zoe's writings and wondered if that was what she'd run from as much as anything—not her father's murder, but her aunt's death, inheriting the rights to Jen Periwinkle, as if Olivia was daring her to write, daring her to embrace a different kind of life than Zoe had imagined for herself.

  Must have been scary, picturing herself sitting out here on this rock bluff all alone for the next seventy years.

  J.B. finished the last of his Scotch.

  Well, what did he know? At least it gave him something to think about besides what the rest of Zoe's rose tattoo looked like.

  * * *

  "You beat up my son? What the fuck's the matter with you?"

  Teddy yawned at Luke's hissing. The guy was frothing at the damn mouth, but who was on a toasty-warm yacht and who was freezing his ass off in a rusting truck? Teddy was cold and uncomfortable, stuck in the boonies for the night. He'd parked out in the salt marsh, probably right on top of a rare bird's nest or something, but before he showed his face again, he wanted to make sure the kid didn't go to the police.

  "It was a misunderstanding." Teddy figured it was the best spin he could put on it. Misu
nderstanding, hell. The shitbird was snooping in his truck. Two minutes later, and he'd have been into the apple crate. He got what was coming to him. Any jury'd see it Teddy's way. "He's okay?"

  "He's in pain. Betsy took a look at him. He didn't want to wake us, but Christina West insisted. They were supposed to have dinner together, and she became concerned when he didn't show up. Zoe and that FBI agent heard his car was spotted at the lobster pound and investigated. A lucky thing."

  Do-gooders. Bored cops. Pains in his ass. "Your kid wasn't hurt that bad. He could have driven out."

  "Apparently he was so incoherent from the beating you gave him that he couldn't find his way back to his car."

  "Nah, he just got lost in the dark. He pressing charges?"

  "No."

  "I didn't realize it was your kid until it was too late."

  "Kyle has a natural, unrestrained curiosity."

  Kyle was a spoiled brat, but Teddy said nothing. An owl hooted nearby. At least he thought it was an owl. Somebody had once told him moose were out here, too. Just what he needed. A goddamn moose sticking its nose in his window. The moose he might shoot.

  "Teddy, hiring you wasn't illegal, but people won't understand if it comes out. If it does, they'll learn about the mistake we made last fall."

  The gun, Teddy thought. The Smith & Wesson .38 revolver that Luke had sold him last September. For such a finicky guy, Luke was lax in keeping up with Maine gun laws. Like he wasn't really there for months at a time on his yacht and didn't have to do the required paperwork. But his mistake was worse than not having the right permits—he'd sold a gun to a convicted felon.

  His voice was calmer now, but still with that snotty undertone. "That's why confidentiality is such an important part of our agreement. It's why I'd like to offer you a bonus when we're finished with this job. And another bonus if you'll agree to leave town and never contact me again."

  "How much?" "Thirty and fifty." Not bad. "Fifty and fifty." "Done." There wasn't even a hint of relief in Castellane's

  voice. Teddy held his knuckles up to his mouth and in the moonlight saw they were swollen and cut from where he'd slugged Kyle Castellane. He licked on one cut. "What's next?"

  "The same mission. Maintain the status quo." Luke clicked off. Teddy tried to get comfortable in the front of his

  truck, but there was just no way. He pulled one of the tarps off his guns and ammo and used it as a blanket. It smelled like oil and dead fish, and it wasn't very warm.

  The owl wasn't going to quit.

  He'd examine his options in the morning. Even if he ended up having to clear out of Gooseshit Harbor, it wouldn't be until he'd had some sleep—and it wouldn't be until he got his hundred grand bonuses.

  * * *

  Zoe sat cross-legged in the middle of her bed and worked on her milk-gray scarf until she thought she'd go blind.

  She didn't drop any stitches. She kept checking.

  It was after midnight, and she'd heard J.B.'s door close down the hall. She hadn't meant to be rude, but she looked like hell when she cried, and what could he do but feel awkward and helpless, which she hated? But now she had a headache, and her sinuses were clogged. She didn't know when she'd feel like sleeping.

  Donna Jacobs, the acting chief of police and forty-five-year-old mother of three, was in her office when Zoe arrived. That was a surprise, but Jacobs said she was going through paperwork and listened to Zoe without interruption.

  Then Jacobs thanked her for the heads-up and showed her the door.

  If the local police had any information on Teddy Shelton, Donna Jacobs wasn't saying. If she had misgivings about having an FBI agent and ex-detective on the loose in her town, she kept them to herself, too. She was professional and serious, and she treated Zoe as she would any other private citizen, never mind that she had her job because Zoe's father was dead.

  It was exactly what Donna Jacobs should have done.

  And it had nothing to do with why Zoe had dissolved into tears once she got back to the car. The emotion of walking into the police station where her father had worked for so many years, had overwhelmed her. That simple, that awful.

  She was both surprised and pleased that J.B. had summoned the patience and grace to leave her alone and let her pull herself together, because she knew he had about a million and one questions about what had occurred with Kyle and Teddy Shelton out at Bruce's cottage.

  She'd have to tell Bruce that J. B. McGrath, grandson of a Maine native, wasn't as obnoxious as people thought.

  She remembered his startling, toe-curling, spine-melting kiss on the porch and smiled to herself, the tension easing out of her body. He'd come to Goose Harbor to recuperate after a grueling undercover operation, one that had ended with him having to kill or be killed in front of children.

  He really had picked Goose Harbor because of his Maine roots.

  More or less. Her father's unsolved murder and her aunt's death on its heels must have helped settle it.

  The scar on his throat told her how close he'd come to being another name on the FBI Honor Roll.

  She counted her stitches one last time.

  Ninety-nine. It was supposed to be a hundred. She'd unraveled back to where she'd screwed up and started from there—and she'd dropped a stitch.

  "No!"

  She held up her scarf-in-the-making and saw immediately where she'd gone wrong, about four rows back.

  That was the good thing about knitting. She could pinpoint what she'd done wrong and go back and get it right this time. If only life were like that.

  Twenty-One

  Gold-tinted marsh grass moved gracefully with the morning breeze in the protected area south of the lobster pound and the cottage Teddy Shelton had rented. The fingers of saltwater were a dark blue under a sky dotted with puffs of fair-weather clouds. A migrating hawk flew high overhead. It was all a pretty sight, but

  J.B. was focused on Teddy Shelton's truck. Yellow birch leaves had fallen onto its windshield.

  Once he found out about last night, Bruce Young had gone on the hunt for Shelton so he could throw him out of the cottage, never mind that it appeared he'd already left voluntarily. J.B. ran into him at the lobster pound and suggested he do the driving. Nobody, even Bruce, liked the idea of Shelton beating up an unarmed twenty-two-year-old without more provocation—as much as they didn't mind the idea of Kyle Castellane with a fat lip.

  Bruce was the one who'd spotted the tire tracks in the protected marsh's delicate, picturesque landscape, most of it without trails. The tracks led them straight to the truck. It was locked. Bruce was willing to crowbar it, but J.B. dissuaded him.

  "It's a long walk to town," Bruce said. "Maybe he stole a boat at the lobster pound or hitched a ride with one of the guys. I'll check."

  J.B. nodded. "I'll drop you off. Let me know what you find out."

  When they arrived back at the lobster pound, Bruce jumped out of the Jeep, then hesitated. His coat was open, a cold breeze lifting the ends of his hair. "You sure Kyle's okay?"

  "I saw him at breakfast," J.B. said. "He's colorful, but he'll be fine."

  "Hate to see anyone go through something like that. Think he's not pressing charges because he's scared Shelton'll find him and finish the job?"

  J.B. had thought this one over on his own. "I think it's because he didn't tell us the whole story." Bruce nodded. "Maybe he wasn't just standing next

  to Teddy's truck."

  "Could be."

  "Teddy could have freaked once he realized he'd

  knocked the shit out of a Castellane. He could be long gone, you know." Bruce exhaled, obviously not relishing this development. "Christina? She okay? I didn't stop by the café this morning."

  J.B. had breakfast there with Zoe, who was distant, not cool, just not that approachable. Since he had things on his mind, too, J.B. didn't mind eating his eggs and home fries in silence. She'd had a goat-cheese-and-chive omelet. One of the lobstermen teased her that year she'd spent in Connecticut was sh
owing. Christina had seemed very pale and drawn, even more tired, just going through the motions of her café routine.

  "She's hanging in there," J.B. said.

  "Yeah. Well, I'll see what I can find out about that jackass Teddy."

  "Don't go up against him, Bruce."

  He grinned. "What, you think if he can beat the crap out of Kyle, I'm a goner for sure?"

  "No, I think he's probably armed to the teeth. He likes guns, Bruce. That's what put him in prison."

  Bruce shook his head in mock amazement. Not much got to the guy. "You think the FBI's got a file on me?"

  "If not, I'm making one. Keep me posted."

  "I'd ask you to do the same, but I know you won't."

  Fifteen minutes later, J.B. was back at Olivia West's house, standing on the bluff as Zoe dragged her lime-green kayak through the rose bushes, which made him think of her rose tattoo, which in turn brought up his long, tortured night. Not good. He was in deep with this woman. It was like having someone grab him by the ankle and jerk him over a cliff. He was plunging headfirst, no bottom in sight, anything possible, from a smooth dive into the water at the bottom to smashing himself to death on the rocks.

  He stood at the edge of the waist-high roses. "Glutton for punishment, aren't you?"

  "You know how it is." Her kayak was at her feet, half pushing her down the steep path. She had on leggings, a turtleneck and fleece vest, her orange life vest hanging open. She squinted up at him, the sun high and bright above her. "You've got to get right back up on the horse again. If I get dumped out today, I might consider a new hobby."

  "Do you have another kayak?"

  That took her by surprise. "What?"

  He smiled. "Another kayak. I can go with you."

  "Have you ever been kayaking?"

  "Nope. Looks easy enough."

  "This cockiness of yours is why people around here want to set fire to your boat. I guess compared to what you do for a living, probably kayaking does look easy." She sighed, gestured toward the house. "There's one in the garage. It's shocking pink."