Black Rock Bay

by Brianna Labuskes

  “Could he have been the older man Monroe was seeing?”

  “What?” This time it was Edie who was taken off guard.

  Mia’s eyes slipped to her mother’s face. “There’s been talk that Monroe was seeing someone other than Asher.”

  “No, that can’t be.” Edie crossed her arms over her chest. “Those two only had eyes for each other that summer.”

  “You think?”

  That wasn’t the impression they’d been given. Izzy heard her own doubt reflected in Mia’s voice.

  “I thought she was bad news at first, God’s truth.” Edie nodded. “But I’d never seen that boy like that before.”

  And that was more in line with what Lacey had said. Maybe Monroe had seemed interested at first, to hook Asher, but had gotten bored once the newness had worn off.

  “So. I was out of it?” Mia got them back on track, and Izzy guessed her thought process hadn’t seemed much different from Izzy’s. They knew all of this. “When Earl brought us back here.”

  “Lacey wasn’t much better, still had blood on her,” Edie said. “But she was somewhat coherent.”

  “What did she say?” Mia asked.

  The ghost of Edie’s earlier assertion hung in the air. Earl Bishop was a good man.

  On an exhale, Edie put her tea down and then sat back against her chair. “She said she didn’t know how Earl had gotten there so fast.”

  “To the lighthouse?” Mia clarified.

  Edie nodded. “She’d run to tell her parents, but on the way back, Earl was already at the meadow. She kept asking me how he’d gotten there so fast.”

  Mia chewed on her bottom lip, and Izzy kept her mouth shut, not wanting to draw attention to herself.

  “It doesn’t mean anything,” Edie finally said. “He could have been out on patrol. Received the call on his walkie-talkie.”

  “I don’t remember when he showed up,” Mia said. “And Jimmy was there?”

  “She didn’t say anything about him.”

  “You know he was there, though, right?”

  Edie shrugged. “That’s what people said.”

  Mia leaned forward, her forearms on her thighs. “What was the talk afterward? What did everyone think happened? Not what they told investigators, but what did they really think?”

  “Don’t you mind that,” Edie said, her eyes shifting to Izzy once more. So very aware of a stranger in her presence.

  “If it’s that I killed them, I’ve already been filled in on that,” Mia said.

  “People just like to talk.” Edie shook her head. “Like the sound of their own voices.”

  “But that’s what people were saying?” Mia pressed.

  Edie sighed and reached up to grasp the cross on her necklace. “They wondered why you were the only one to make it out. With only one wrist . . .” She nodded toward Mia’s arm.

  With only one wrist cut.

  What had stopped Mia?

  “It looked a lot more believable that you didn’t have anything to do with it since you were injured yourself,” Edie continued. “Just enough to show you attempted to”—she waved her hand—“but not enough to carry through with it.”

  “Then I came out, made up some wild suicide-pact story, and got away with murder?” Mia asked. Her face was still relaxed, though she’d gone pale, the flush from the cold long gone.

  “People are bored,” Edie said, and all of a sudden she sounded tired, so tired. “Not much to do here other than sit around and tell tall tales.”

  “This isn’t a tall tale,” Izzy butted in. Annoyed with her, annoyed with these people. Annoyed with herself for the part that whispered the accusation wasn’t that far-fetched. “They’re calling Mia a killer.”

  “Oh, they’d never say it so anyone else could hear,” Edie said.

  Mia met Izzy’s eyes across the table, and she knew they had both come to the same conclusion. The reporter.

  “But someone did,” Mia murmured.

  “So Jimmy Roarke, Henry Jackson, and Earl Bishop were all buddies.” Izzy was leaning back in her chair once more. Edie had gone upstairs a few minutes ago, and Mia was staring off into nothing, her back ramrod straight. “And they all just happen to show up at the lighthouse that night?”

  “One of them must have called the others,” Mia said, but she wasn’t quite present, her words dragging, her eyes still on a point near the door. She blinked, a lethargic droop, and then met Izzy’s gaze finally. Her pupils ate up the blue in her eyes. “One of them was there first.”

  “Which one?” Izzy asked the obvious question.

  Mia sucked on her lip, then released it. “Just because Lacey saw Earl first doesn’t mean that’s what happened.”

  “Yeah. She was, what? Fifteen? Probably in shock,” Izzy agreed. “And maybe she did see Earl first. But one of the others could have called him?”

  “Could have been any of them,” Mia said. “But if Earl’s suicide was staged, then someone wants us to think it was him.”

  The horses and zebras theory, the one they used to keep themselves in check when tempted to spiral down some wild path on an investigation, snapped into her mind. Maybe Earl had done something all those years ago; maybe he had actually killed himself, the guilt stoked back to life by the reporter asking questions. It was the simplest explanation. But Izzy had seen his frail body beneath the sheet. It would have taken a miracle for him to have overpowered Robert Twist.

  Which left them with a killer still unaccounted for, no matter what Earl’s death was ruled.

  “And maybe that same someone who set up Earl’s death wanted the reporter to start looking into you,” Izzy said, trying to grab hold of all the threads. There were too many. They needed to start cutting some away. “To get attention off of themselves.”

  “The reporter was already looking into me, though,” Mia said, her toe tapping against linoleum. There was a similar twitch running along Izzy’s calves, a need to expel the nervous energy that just kept building the longer they sat around in this goddamn kitchen. “Late October. After Peter left the island.”

  “Yeah.”

  Mia pressed her thumb into her temple, another one of those gestures that was becoming commonplace. She’d seemed to have had a headache since they’d stepped foot on St. Lucy’s. Not that Izzy blamed her. “I just. The timing? It seems odd. And I know it’s a common name, but the fact that a Peter was in the reporter’s contacts, was one of his last calls . . .”

  The timing. The timing.

  “What if Peter was the one who found something out about that night?” Izzy said.

  Mia’s eyes focused, alert for the first time since Edie had left the kitchen. “That would make more sense than someone on the island willingly talking to a reporter.”

  “Yeah, I’d imagine they would have been on guard for a reporter,” Izzy said, warming to her theory. “But an artist? You said they’re thick on the ground here.”

  “Dismissed, even.” Mia pushed to her feet, started pacing. “Ignored.”

  “He doesn’t know what to do with the information, so he tells his buddy, the reporter,” Izzy said. “Maybe whatever it was wasn’t enough to go to the police, or maybe Twist saw his opportunity to get a byline in something other than a regional artist magazine.”

  “Twist comes and checks me out at the station.” Mia picked up the conversational ball. “Then makes up some cover about investigating suicides on Maine islands but is really coming here to dig into the night at the lighthouse.”

  It wasn’t suicide. The reporter’s voice for his phone recording had taken on an eerie undercurrent for Izzy that hadn’t existed in the original message.

  “The voice memo,” Izzy said. “That was Peter telling Twist, or Twist summarizing what Peter had told him. It wasn’t suicide.”

  “So what about San Sebastian?” Mia asked, her voice low like she was talking more to herself. “The plane ticket?”

  Izzy answered her anyway. “He was onto something. The killer was g
etting nervous, and Twist knew he needed to get off the island. Which was true. He just didn’t do it soon enough.”

  They both paused a beat.

  Then Izzy put voice to the question she guessed was sitting heavy in Mia’s gut, as well. “So where is Peter now?”

  If Robert Twist had come to the island asking if the artist was still there, that didn’t seem to bode well for Peter.

  Mia blinked a few times, too fast, then flexed her jaw. “We find him. We find him.”

  “And by ‘we’ you mean a uniform, right?” Izzy clarified.

  Mia grabbed for her phone. “Of course. And have them find Charles and Bix Bell while they’re at it.”

  Mia muttered a curse, and Izzy knew what was wrong without having to ask.

  She checked her own cell. No service. She held it up, screen out, wiggling it a little to catch Mia’s attention. Her partner looked out the window, sighed. “Landline it is.”

  While Mia searched her contacts for the front desk of the police station, Izzy pulled up emails. There must have been a blip of Wi-Fi sometime recently because there were two messages from Theo sitting unopened at the top of her inbox.

  “Did you see these emails?” she called to Mia before she could start dialing. “From Theo.”

  Before the question was even out, Mia was hovering over her shoulder, her body curled around the back of Izzy’s. “No, what did he find in the journals?”

  Izzy clicked into the thread, and they both skimmed it.

  “Mentions Earl Bishop’s dementia,” Izzy said, even though Mia had read it as well. “He thought he was back in that summer during the interview.”

  “Got agitated.” Mia straightened. “Cash was mad, kicked the reporter out.”

  “Fits with the anger issues,” Izzy muttered, earning a nudge from Mia’s hip. “What? He’s showing a repeated pattern of violent behavior.”

  “He wasn’t at the lighthouse that night, though,” Mia said.

  “Says who?” Izzy countered. “Look at the fight story from a different angle.”

  “What do you mean?” Mia moved toward the kettle. The water had to be cold by now, but she just fiddled with the handle, not moving to reheat it.

  “No, really.” Izzy let her chair drop. They were on a roll now. “Cash makes up some bullshit story about Monroe being pregnant, him punching Asher, getting grounded. He just gave himself the perfect alibi.”

  “A perfect alibi . . . that no one can corroborate?” Mia asked, disbelief in the arc of her brows. “Not quite perfect, Iz.”

  “Ah, but that’s where you’re wrong.” Izzy slapped the table, loving the feeling of pieces slotting into place. “Jesus. It makes him look just bad enough, you know? The story? Oh, you punched the victim in the face the same day that the kid, quote, unquote, killed himself. Can’t believe you’re admitting that to the cops. It must make us believe you and everything else you’re about to say. But then he twists it to give us the perfect excuse of why he wasn’t at the lighthouse.”

  Mia didn’t say anything; her neutral mask was in place.

  “The only reason we know any of that is because of him, and he only told us it after the man who had done the ‘grounding’ was no longer around to call out his lies.” Izzy stood up herself, unable to keep still any longer.

  “You’ve said it a million times,” Izzy continued. “Everyone here is lying. Why wouldn’t he? Don’t you think he was a little too upfront with his information today? Quite a different tone than he’s been taking with us.”

  Izzy paused her pacing, but her mind was still stumbling forward, ever forward. “What if . . . ?”

  When Izzy didn’t continue, Mia kicked out a foot, falling far short of actually tapping Izzy but getting the point across. “What if what?”

  Izzy pinched the skin of her wrist, the flicker of pain not enough to silence the thought. “What if Monroe wasn’t even pregnant?”

  Mia shifted back, an almost imperceptible jerk, but Izzy was watching her closely.

  “Why would Cash tell us she was?”

  Spinning away from Mia, Izzy stalked over to the small refrigerator and then toward the back door, then repeated the path as her mind shifted through possible scenarios, each more outlandish than the next.

  Finally she stopped to find Mia, one lazy brow raised, leaning against the counter, still patient, just waiting as Izzy prowled around the room.

  “I don’t know.”

  Mia looked away, her delicate jaw in sharp profile, the dim natural light sliding over her pale skin, so that she looked like a painting—exhaustion, grief, resignation, all caught in a few brushstrokes. But then Mia rolled her shoulders, turning back to Izzy, and she was once again just Mia, a blank slate, all her sticky emotions sloughed off with that one careless move.

  “All right,” Mia said. “It’s something to consider.”

  Where that left them, Izzy didn’t know. She shook off the odd moment, then moved to wake the computer up from its doze so she could get into the second email from Theo.

  At the top was a note.

  Sorry, this one took me longer. It was more the reporter’s thoughts than the interview itself. Looks important, though. Good luck, bucko.

  Looks important. The words had Izzy straightening out of her lazy slouch.

  “What is it?” Mia asked, sharp and fast.

  Izzy read over the short paragraph one more time to make sure and then looked up.

  “I think he might have found out who Monroe’s older gentleman was.”

  Mia raised her brows. “Who?”

  “Jimmy Roarke.”

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  MIA

  The one thing Mia missed the most on this case was an investigation room. There was something about the stripped-down starkness of white walls and a utilitarian metal table that kept people from being able to hide behind carefully constructed masks.

  Jimmy Roarke’s kitchen, on the other hand, let the man be distracted by, dodge, and dance away from any question that got too uncomfortable. He fiddled with mugs for tea, dug in the cabinet for crackers, positioned himself so that the fading sun created shadows on his face.

  Mia watched him now as he flicked off the soap opera that was playing on mute on the small television mounted to the wall near the stove. It was odd to imagine him there, tinkering over dinner, indulging in melodramas. She’d pictured Hungry-Man frozen dinners and TV trays in a living room that needed to be scrubbed of decades of careless eating.

  He was a burly man, like many on the island, his shoulders stretching the worn flannel of his shirt, towering over Mia by more than a foot. Silver now tangled in his red beard and the hair at his temples, but he was so familiar that her chest ached with it.

  She hadn’t wanted it to be Jimmy, even as his name kept cropping up. Chasing the reporter away from the lighthouse. Ellen’s story of him talking with Cash about the Bells. The scribbled, shaky note in Earl Bishop’s bedroom.

  But Jimmy had always been nice to her, nice to Mama. When Mia’s father had passed two years before that terrible summer, Jimmy had shown up to help mow the lawn in the spring, clear the snow in the winter. Sometimes he’d even bring around fish he’d caught, good ones, not just the ones he wouldn’t be able to sell at market. He’d never asked for anything in return, not money nor Mama’s attention. People whispered about how he was a little slow, didn’t always catch on, missed jokes, and turned conversations awkward. But Mia had always just thought he was kind.

  He finally sat and ran his palms along the rough material of his well-worn jeans. “I don’t know what I can tell you, Mia.”

  His voice softened on her name, like she was a familiar and lovely ache as well. She didn’t often think about anyone on St. Lucy’s missing her; she didn’t think about the island when she could help it. And since she’d been back, she’d encountered more antagonism than welcome. But maybe she’d been liked, maybe missed. At the end of the day, these were her people.

  If only she weren�
��t here for the reason that she was here. She wanted to be straight with Jimmy, ask what the hell he’d been doing. But that’s not how any of this worked.

  “We’re just checking in with everyone the reporter talked to, Jimmy,” Mia said instead.

  Jimmy’s foot tapped against the linoleum, an unsteady beat that tattled on the anxiety he was clearly trying to keep under wraps. “Didn’t talk to him much, though.”

  Mia decided to come at it from the side. “Sammy says the guy was poking round the lighthouse.” She paused. “And that you chased him off.”

  “Might have.” Jimmy hunched over his mug, his foot still going, filling the quiet room with the dull thud of rubber against tile. “He liked to snoop everywhere.”

  “Everywhere?”

  Beneath his beard Jimmy’s lips twitched, pursed, relaxed. “Poking into everyone’s business.”

  Mia waited, but he didn’t elaborate.

  “Did he say anything when you caught him at the lighthouse?” Mia pushed.

  Thwap, thwap, thwap. No pause, no stutter. “No.”

  Maybe she didn’t have an interrogation room, but now she had a baseline for Jimmy’s tell. If she could read it right.

  “You were there that night, weren’t you?”

  Jimmy’s foot stopped, and the quiet pressed in against her. It was only when it was missing that she realized how loud the tapping had been.

  And then it was back. “What do you mean?”

  “The night Monroe and Asher killed themselves,” Mia said, hating this tactic, hating that she had to put it so harshly. But Jimmy was a suspect, not a family friend. And there was no room for pulling punches here.

  “Half the island was out there, Mia,” Jimmy said, not unkindly, his hand coming up to thread into his beard, catching in the knots. Everything about him had actually relaxed at the question, the tapping slowing as he sat back in his seat. Mia flicked her eyes to Izzy, who was in her peripheral, then looked back at Jimmy.

  “Can you tell me about it? What happened that night?”

  Again, there was no sign of distress, just a sadness in the slope of his eyebrows, in the crease between them.