The Cottages on Silver Beach

by RaeAnne Thayne

  She opened the door and Cyrus trotted in, looking perfectly at home.

  “Do you two want some cookies for the road? Rocco makes them and they’re fabulous, trust me. He’s training to be a dessert chef at one of the hotels in town and I’m lucky enough to get to eat all his experiments.”

  Elliot had a hard time picturing her big, tough-looking husband training to work with delicate pastries, but he supposed everybody had a thing.

  “That’s very kind of you. Thank you.”

  She stuffed several cookies from a container on the counter into plastic bags and handed them to Elliot.

  “I’m really glad you called,” Peg said as she walked out on the porch with them. “I’ve wondered over the years what happened to her. If you solve the mystery, will you please keep me posted?”

  “I’ll do that. Thanks,” Elliot said.

  As they walked to Megan’s SUV, he was aware of her vibrating with tension, like a lit bundle of firecrackers, ready to go off at any moment.

  She kept Cyrus with her again instead of putting him in his crate, as if she needed the comfort of her pet. Somehow she managed to hold back until they had both climbed into her SUV, with Elliot in the driver’s seat again.

  The moment he turned the key and backed out of the driveway, words burst like those firecrackers exploding into the night sky.

  “I told you she left on her own. I knew it. I knew it! I’ve been saying it for years. She was a desperately unhappy woman who was struggling with depression and was self-medicating.”

  He headed toward the interstate, his mind whirling from the interview and the implications of it.

  “And I was right about Luke,” Megan went on. “He had nothing to do with it. She left completely on her own and vanished hundreds of miles away from home.”

  He had to point out the part she seemed to be avoiding.

  “What about her injuries? How do you explain those? Luke admitted all along the relationship was stormy.”

  She cuddled her dog closer. “I don’t know how she got hurt, but I promise you, it wasn’t my brother’s fault. He would not have hurt Elizabeth. I will not believe that for one single instant. My brother would never raise a hand against a woman. Never. Not after what we—” Her voice trailed off and she pressed her cheek to Cyrus’s head.

  “After what you—?” he prompted.

  He wasn’t sure she was going to answer him. She kept her features angled away for a long moment before she finally turned back to him.

  “After what we saw at home.”

  Elliot stared at her, shock firing through him, hot and fierce. “You lived in an abusive home?”

  She curled her hands again, knuckles white. “My father was a son of a bitch. Everybody knows that. The town drunk. I’m sure your father spoke of him.”

  He barely remembered her father. They had lived in Sulfer Springs, one of the poorer areas of Haven Point, and Paul Hamilton had worked at the boatyard. He knew his father hadn’t liked the man, which was a rarity for John Bailey, who had tended to give everybody the benefit of the doubt.

  If he remembered the details correctly, her father had ended up getting plastered at one of the roadhouses on the highway and wrapping his car around a tree when Elliot and Luke had been in high school. That would have been a few years after her mother died. That couldn’t have been easy on her.

  “Not everybody who drinks beats his family.”

  “True enough. I guess we lucked out.” She said the words in an emotionless tone that gave him a clearer picture than if she had ranted and cursed and regaled him with horror stories.

  “You know Luke and I have different mothers, right?”

  “His mom died when he was pretty small, right?”

  Megan nodded, gazing straight ahead at the gathering dusk. “She had a miscarriage and didn’t get treated and somehow ended up with an infection that turned septic. That’s the story I heard, anyway. Luke wasn’t quite six. Four months later, Paul married my mother. I came along about nine months after that.”

  She sighed. “My mom was older and wanted a family. That’s what my grandmother told me years later, once when I asked why my parents hooked up. Paul was decent enough when he was sober. A good provider. He could be charming. Funny. Generous to his friends. But he wasn’t sober often.”

  He didn’t know what to say. Her childhood couldn’t have been more different from his own.

  “My mom was almost forty and...not necessarily what some would call pretty. I thought she was the most beautiful woman in the world. I’ve had time to think about it over the years and I think he married her because her family had money from the inn and he needed a mother for Luke. I think she married him because she thought she was running out of options for a family of her own.”

  She was quiet for a long moment. “It wasn’t a happy marriage.”

  “Your father hit her?”

  She finally nodded. “When he was drinking, which, as I said, was most of the time. Luke would try to protect me from hearing it. The verbal abuse was worse than the physical abuse, I think. It wore her down, sucked away her confidence.”

  She sighed and petted the dog in her lap. Did she realize Cyrus had fallen asleep a few miles back? Elliot didn’t think so.

  “My mother died of cancer when I was eleven,” she went on, echoes of old pain in her voice. “Sometimes I wonder if she would have fought harder if things had been better at home.”

  He swore to himself, sick inside. He had great sympathy for women who were victims—though he had to admit, that sympathy tended to shrink a bit when they allowed their children to witness it.

  “After my mother died, my grandmother kind of took over custody of Luke and me. I don’t think she and my father ever had an official custody arrangement but he didn’t argue and we just moved into the inn with her.”

  “That must have been a change.”

  “It was wonderful,” she admitted. “He died a year later in a drunk driving accident. You probably know that. Fortunately, it was the best possible scenario because he didn’t take anyone else out with him.”

  He remembered that, when Paul Hamilton had wrapped his pickup around a tree. He had tried to comfort Luke and hadn’t quite known what to say—especially as Luke had shown so little emotion over his own father.

  What kind of friend was he? He should have guessed. All the clues had been there, as he looked back over his friendship with her brother.

  Luke had never wanted them to hang out at the Hamilton home, only at the Bailey place. He hadn’t talked much about his home life at all—hadn’t wanted to talk about it—so Elliot hadn’t pressed. He had figured out early that Luke had little respect for his father. Now he understood it better.

  Elliot had always planned a career in law enforcement. Even as a youth, he should have been perceptive enough to pick up on something that now seemed so very obvious.

  He turned his gaze to the woman beside him and something seemed to shift inside him. Amid that kind of ugliness, how was it possible that Megan could hold on to her beautiful, kind spirit? The artistic, compassionate soul, able to see the good in everything around her?

  Emotion clogged his throat and he had to clear it away before he could speak. “I’m so sorry you had to live through that.”

  “I don’t need your sympathy,” she said stiffly. “I’m only telling you this because you need to understand. After watching the abuse that my mother suffered—and probably his own mother, though he may have been too young to remember—Luke would never raise a hand to a woman. Never. I know he wouldn’t. He’s not capable of it, Elliot. Whoever hurt Elizabeth—whomever or whatever she might have feared—I know it was not my brother.”

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  HOW WAS SHE supposed to process everything that had happened that day? Megan’s head spun, her thoughts racing. The day h
ad been a roller-coaster ride and her equilibrium still felt as if she were spinning and twisting.

  Their drive yesterday along this same route seemed like another lifetime ago!

  Was it possible this Peg McGeary could be the break they had been searching for all these years? The case had been cold for years. Could Elliot really have found the one person who could finally lead them to answers?

  She hated having to tell Elliot about how difficult things had been at home the first eleven years of her life. It was something she had tried hard to put behind her.

  She always told herself those years did not define her. Yes, it had been horrible to witness her father mistreating her mother. Every child deserved the security of knowing her parents loved each other, would always take care of each other.

  Luke had been the one to watch over her. The two of them had survived together and even thrived after they moved in with her grandmother, where they were safe.

  Megan wanted to think her grandmother’s love had healed many of her scars.

  It was a part of her life she didn’t like thinking about and never talked about, but she had had no choice but to share it with Elliot. He had to know the grim reality she and Luke had lived with during their childhood.

  “I know you want to think that,” he said, his tone so gentle it almost brought tears to her eyes. “But you have to see it from my perspective. As a law-enforcement officer, I’m aware that most studies show that those who grew up in abusive households are more likely to be abusers themselves.”

  “Most. Not all. Not my brother.”

  “You can’t be certain. You don’t know what goes on behind closed doors.”

  “I know what I’ve seen all my life and what I saw of their marriage from the outside.”

  Luke had been a patient husband trying to deal with a difficult woman. She had seen it over and over.

  “More than once I saw Elizabeth on the verge of hysteria and Luke was never anything but patient and kind to her. Even in situations where he had every right to respond with anger, he managed to hold on to his calm, no matter how tough she made it.”

  “Doesn’t sound like they were very happy together.”

  “Before the kids came along, they were. I think Elizabeth really struggled with being a mother, especially of two children. Bridger had colic and that didn’t help anything. She was depressed and angry all the time. Her dreams didn’t match up with her reality and she took that out on Luke.”

  She paused. “I asked him once how he could keep from retaliating, how he clung to that control. I’ll never forget his answer. He gave me a sad kind of smile and said it was easy, really. He simply asked himself in every situation what our father would do. Then he did the exact opposite.”

  Elliot appeared to digest that as he drove another few miles.

  “I wish I’d known back then,” Elliot said finally. “About what things were like for you two at home.”

  She cast him a sideways look. “What could you possibly have done?”

  “I don’t know. What if I had told my father what was going on?”

  He would have, too. Elliot had always been the sort who would try to protect anyone he thought was in jeopardy.

  “It wouldn’t have done any good,” she said, though the idea of it warmed her. “My mother never would have pressed charges. She was a sweet woman in many ways and I loved her dearly. But over the years, I’ve come to...accept her weaknesses. My mother wanted the pretty picture. She wanted everyone in Haven Point to think she had the perfect marriage. She could never accept that it was only an illusion, even when she had two black eyes and a broken wrist.”

  She didn’t blame her mother. Not anymore, at any rate. She put the blame squarely where it belonged, at the feet of Paul Hamilton.

  “You must think I’m the worst sort of friend,” Elliot said.

  “Why? Because you didn’t know? How could you have?”

  “I should have figured it out somehow. If I had picked up on the signs, I might have been able to get Luke to confide in me and tried to involve the authorities.”

  Luke would have hated that, his friends knowing the truth. Her brother could be so stoic about things. He buried his feelings deep, probably because their father had preyed on any hint of weakness.

  “Don’t blame yourself, Elliot. Luke never would have talked about it to his friends. He didn’t want to talk about it with anyone. Gran tried to get us into counseling after my mother died but Luke never wanted to go.”

  Her grandmother used to say Luke was a young man who knew how to keep himself to himself. Not for the first time, she wondered how someone like Luke, reserved and composed, could have fallen for a drama queen like Elizabeth Sinclair, who was never happy unless she was the center of attention.

  “He always told Gran he was dealing with things in his own way,” she said. “Anyway, none of that matters right now. The important thing here is that Elizabeth left on her own. She caught a ride with a trucker and headed out of Idaho. Peg just confirmed that. What I don’t understand is why none of this has come out before. It seems like basic police work. Why would the Haven Point Police Department not follow through on a solid tip like that?”

  “Good question.”

  Was it her imagination or did he look uncomfortable as he drove?

  “Why do you think the police department didn’t at least take down her statement?”

  He faced forward, eyes on the road ahead of them, but she didn’t miss the muscle that suddenly flexed in his jaw. “During an ongoing investigation, sometimes tips get missed. I’m assuming that must be what happened here.”

  She gave him a closer look. “But you’re not sure, are you?”

  “Not completely, no.”

  He drove about a mile before he spoke again. “You were honest with me when I could sense you didn’t want to be. In return, I feel I have to make a confession.”

  She gazed at him, baffled by the grim note in his voice and aware of a sense of foreboding. “A confession.”

  “My father’s performance the last few years he was on the job was...uneven.”

  He said the words in a voice devoid of expression, but she could sense they had great significance, though she didn’t quite know what. “Uneven? What does that mean?”

  If she hadn’t been watching closely, she might have missed the guilty expression that flashed briefly over his features.

  “In retrospect, we suspect—Marshall, Cade and I—that Dad was suffering from early-onset dementia the last year or so of his service. Cade was concerned enough about Dad during the few months before the shoot-out where Dad was hit that he was ready to report him to the authorities and ask for a performance review. The point became moot when my father was shot and suffered a brain injury.”

  He glanced at her. “Please. I would ask you not to share that information with anyone. It could jeopardize every single case he worked on that last year—and they were all clean convictions. Cade made sure of that.”

  She was both touched by his trust in her and staggered by the information. Wyn or Katrina had never said a word to her. How tragic. John Bailey had been such a good man. Everyone in town thought so.

  “Dementia. Dear heavens.”

  “I know. It would have been horrible. It’s also impossible to confirm now, since Mom chose not to have an autopsy after he died. Cade is the one who worked closest with him those last few years. He said Dad’s behavior was inconsistent. One day he would be fine and totally on his game. The next he would put his car keys in the coffee maker then spend the whole day looking for them.”

  He was quiet. “Again, I would ask you not to say anything. If you do, I’ll have to deny I ever said it.”

  The ramifications of the information he had shared with her were huge. Catastrophic, even. Was it possible that his father had dropped the ball into the invest
igation of Elizabeth’s disappearance?

  “That’s why you’re looking into the case, isn’t it? You’re trying to find exactly what we did today, track down leads your father might have missed.”

  It wasn’t malicious on his part, some effort to go after Luke and make him pay for a crime he didn’t commit. He was genuinely trying to find answers.

  Elliot was the oldest son. The steady, reliable one, the FBI agent who had thrown everything into being the best. Did he feel responsible for fixing his father’s mistakes now?

  “I’m so sorry about John. He didn’t deserve that, after all his years of dedicated service to the people of Haven Point.”

  His hands tightened on the steering wheel. “He didn’t.”

  “You do see that Peg’s testimony could be exactly the link we’re looking for. This could exonerate Lucas, after all this time—after all the whispers and sidelong looks and veiled innuendos.”

  She hugged Cyrus, who woke up, looked around, then closed his eyes again.

  “We still can’t prove anything. We only know Peg picked up a woman she has tentatively identified as Elizabeth. While it might answer a few questions, it also raises more. If it was Elizabeth, what happened to her after Pendleton? I’ve looked at Luke’s phone records and haven’t seen a phone call from Oregon that night, but I would have to look more closely.”

  “He was in Haven Point all night with Cassie and Bridger then had an alibi for the rest of the day, working with a homeowner. That’s on record. How could he have loaded up the kids, driven the four hours to Pendleton, killed Elizabeth, ditched her body somewhere on the way back and made it home in time to be at the job site first thing in the morning?”

  He tapped a finger on the steering wheel. “Good question.”

  “If Lucas can prove he was nowhere near Oregon, someone else was responsible for her disappearance. Or she simply decided to stay away. Admit it! This makes it less likely than ever that Lucas was involved.”

  When he said nothing, she ground her back teeth. “You stubborn man! Admit it! You, along with everyone else, have been wrong all these years!”