Last Kiss

by Luanne Rice

  “Yes.”

  “What happened?”

  “He was in New York, and got mugged, and the cops said it was random…” She broke off, her face crumpling. Gavin took a breath, knew he had to slow her down if he wanted her to get through it.

  “Why was he in New York?” he asked.

  “He moved there last August, a year ago…to start his freshman year.”

  “College?”

  Nell nodded. “NYU. He wanted to be a filmmaker, and they have the best program anywhere. It’s hard to get in there, and Charlie didn’t have, well, the most straightforward academic record. He was so smart, and athletic—but sometimes he had a hard time concentrating in school. He always wanted to be doing things, not just sitting and studying. But he was so talented, he really had a vision, even though he was so young. The admissions people couldn’t not let him in when they saw how passionate he was….”

  Passionate. Sheridan’s son; not a surprise. Gavin filed the information away, then backtracked.

  “What do you mean, he didn’t have a straightforward academic record?”

  “Well, he went to a few different schools, depending on where his mom was recording. They lived in Nashville, then New York, then back to Nashville, and then senior year here at Hubbard’s Point. He was a year ahead of me, but we were at the same school…Black Hall.”

  Gavin nodded, wondering about Sheridan, trying to imagine what had made her come back here to Hubbard’s Point year-round—this had always been her summer place. He’d been used to seeing her in beach weather; but he remembered the December he’d stood with her in the cold, the snow falling around them, and he’d loved her more than ever. Over eighteen years ago now…

  “His grades were okay, not great,” Nell continued. “Charlie loved living life, not studying it. That’s why he was out so late that night. The cops acted almost as if it was his fault, going down by the river…”

  “The river?”

  Nell nodded. “The East River. That’s where he was murdered.”

  “You said it was late?”

  “Three a.m.”

  Gavin looked at her. He thought of a young kid in Manhattan, out doing whatever, wrong place–wrong time. Tenderness wasn’t his strong suit. But she had mentioned Sheridan a few moments ago, Sheridan not making music, just visiting her son’s grave, and Nell herself looked so haunted and vulnerable, so Gavin made his voice gentle.

  “The cops think he was mugged?” he asked.

  “Yes, but he wasn’t!” she said vehemently.

  “Why do you sound so sure about that?”

  “Because of Charlie,” she said. “If you knew him…” She looked down at her knees, pulling words together. “He was…you’d just, if there were any choice, any choice at all of people to mug, he wouldn’t be the one you’d pick.”

  “Was he big?”

  “Well, sort of,” Nell said. “But that wasn’t it. He was tall, muscular, really lean from running. But it was more the way he moved, and the way he could look at you. As if he could see through you, read your mind, and know everything you wanted, all at the same time.”

  Gavin listened. She wasn’t convincing him. The rough water moved closer to the boat, and Gavin saw flashes of silver: a school of bait closely followed by something bigger. He registered the dark horizontal lines of a big striper. It rose, then disappeared, and he stared at the patch of water where it had been.

  “He’d spent time in cities his whole life,” she said defiantly.

  “Well, that doesn’t make him immune.” He wanted to give her some words of wisdom about young men thinking they’re invulnerable, about Charlie having been out late in a place he probably shouldn’t have been, but she cut him off.

  “It would be like someone mugging you,” she said.

  That got his attention. “What do you mean?”

  “Like what I said before: if a mugger had the choice, do you think he’d pick you?”

  “No,” Gavin said, not immodestly. He was six three, one-ninety, all muscle, just like the striper, and not lean like a runner, not to mention licensed to carry and unlicensed to do a good deal more. “But then again, I’m not lean.”

  Nell peered at him, frowning with displeasure. “Who cares how big you are? If the guy wants to kill you, the way they did with Charlie, you think your big football shoulders are going to stop him?”

  “It wasn’t football,” Gavin said.

  “Well, whatever sport. The point is, I’m talking about a look in your eyes. Kind of like a force field…somewhere between a laser and a razor, and Charlie had it—it was, it was like an aura of danger. It came from either not caring or caring too much—I was never sure exactly which. Charlie was badass; you wouldn’t mess with him. You just wouldn’t.”

  Gavin suddenly knew what she meant—“the look.” He’d seen it in the mirror, and he spotted it on the street. He was surprised she could put it into words, this young girl from the beach. What did she know about badass?

  “The police investigated?”

  “Yes,” she said, sounding sullen.

  “You think they got it wrong?”

  “I know they got it wrong,” she said.

  “Why was he down by the river?”

  “Who knows? If you knew Charlie, you’d realize that he went where he wanted. It was a hot summer night, and he was probably trying to catch a breeze.” Her throat caught. “He loved rivers, but he was probably wishing he were here at Hubbard’s Point, at the beach…”

  “Who was he there with?”

  “No one. I told you—it was hot. He loved being by the water. Here, even in Nashville—the river there. Going to the water inspired him. He was already working on a documentary, even though his classes hadn’t really started yet. Maybe he was thinking about that, trying to clear his head.”

  “What was he making the documentary on?”

  “His father, sort of, but not really,” Nell said, impatient. She wanted to tell the story in her own way. But just hearing the words “his father” got Gavin in the fighting spirit.

  “What made him want to do a documentary sort-of-but-not-really about his father?” Gavin asked. “Is his father dead?”

  “No,” Nell said.

  Too bad, Gavin thought, staring at the water. His gaze lifted toward the Point. Here he was, anchored off Hubbard’s Point after a long trip south from Maine. Nell was watching him, waiting for him to tell her whether he’d take the job or not, whether he’d keep the soggy bag of money she’d brought as his retainer.

  He’d already signed on—from the moment in Maine he’d heard her say the words “Sheridan Rosslare’s son.” The rest of it didn’t much matter. Gavin had heard about Charlie’s death right after it happened. He’d thought of it every day since then, thought of Sheridan. He’d written her a hundred notes, ripped them all up. He would have sent flowers, but he had the feeling that wouldn’t have helped Sheridan. She had made her wishes clear that snowy day nearly two decades ago, and he’d worked hard to find an uneasy peace and respect those wishes.

  As hopeless as he thought the case was—pretty clearly a straightforward mugging—he knew he’d be getting police reports, interviewing witnesses, talking to the cops and whatever assistant DA had been assigned to the crime. He turned to look at Nell. She might be his new client, but he wouldn’t be doing the work for her.

  “What does his mother think?” he asked.

  “Charlie’s mother?”

  He nodded. “Yes. Sheridan.”

  “Think of…what?”

  “Of your calling me.”

  Nell paused. “She doesn’t know.”

  That brought him up short. “Then how did you contact me?”

  “Not through her,” Nell said quietly but sharply. “From what Charlie said, your name wasn’t to be mentioned in the house. I found you because I remembered some things Charlie told me about you—his aunts told him you and Sheridan used to be together. But you broke up, right?”

  “Some
thing like that.”

  “They said you almost got married.”

  “Aunts don’t always know much.”

  Nell snorted. “Trust me, Charlie’s aunts know everything, especially Agatha. She’s a one-woman Psychic Friends Network. Spooky…”

  Gavin smiled, remembering Agatha and her more suburbanstyled sister, Bunny. Sheridan had certainly had a colorful family. “Okay, so what did Charlie tell you his aunts told him about me?”

  “Well, that you’re a detective doing private investigations for some big-deal divorce lawyer, that you live on your boat wherever the work takes you, and that you have an answering service in Hawthorne.”

  “Close enough.”

  “He thought you sounded cool.”

  “That’s me,” Gavin said. “Cool.”

  She smiled. He saw her staring down at a scrap of towel tied around her ankle. As she gazed at it, her eyes filled again with tears.

  “I should have been there,” she whispered.

  “With Charlie?”

  She nodded. “It was so hard for us, being apart; we’d had the whole school year and summer together, and seeing him pack up to go to college—it was crazy-terrible. He’d only been gone a week; he called me, and we talked about my heading into the city for the weekend.”

  Gavin was silent, waiting.

  “I should have gone in. But it was so hot,” she said, crying softly. “The last weekend of summer, and a heat wave hit, and I wanted to stay at the beach. Why didn’t he get out of the city? I wanted him to take the train back out here…We argued about it.”

  “But he was trying to settle into college.”

  She nodded, wiping her eyes.

  Gavin knew about forks in the road. Going left, and only later realizing that if you’d gone right everything in your life would have been different. Split-second decisions—or ones you had the chance to consider for years. The choice of who to love, what to do, whether to stay together…

  He closed his eyes for just a few seconds, picturing Sheridan in the snow. He could see the curve of her pregnant belly, the way she’d cradled it with her arms. She was wearing a down parka, sitting on a big chunk of granite, one of the many rocks in her grandmother’s yard. The way her arms had encircled her belly, as if she were holding not herself, but her baby. He was already so real to her; she’d loved him so much.

  Gavin stared at Nell Kilvert, waiting for her tears to stop.

  She looked up at him, eyes still damp but defiant.

  “So, you’ll take the case?”

  Gavin nodded. He reached into his wallet and handed Nell his card, complete with all his contact info. She tried to hand him the money again, more insistently. He shook his head.

  “Keep it,” he said. “I’ll bill you later.”

  “What’s your rate?”

  He shrugged, staying silent as the sound of the water played against the hull of his boat.

  “Come on. I want to make sure I can afford you.”

  “You can. I’m cheap,” he said, gazing across the bay and up the hill toward Sheridan’s house again. He saw someone standing outside, near the herb garden. Or maybe it was just a shadow. The sun was bouncing off the bay, and the light was in his eyes.

  CHAPTER 3

  THE ROSSLARES’ HILLTOP COTTAGE WAS DIFFERENT IN many ways from any other house at Hubbard’s Point. From the outside it might have looked the same: set between the road on one side and the beach on the other, perched on the granite ledge, built of salt-silvered shingles with white shutters and a blue door, with green window boxes overflowing with petunias, and a brick chimney on the north side. It was pretty and sweet, a typical New England seaside cottage.

  But inside was another story. The Rosslare women had had witch powers through the generations. Sheridan Le Fanu Rosslare, the current owner, was a singer-songwriter who had for years divided her time between New York and Nashville, summering in Hubbard’s Point. Her powers were concentrated in the music she wrote, and the rooms overflowed with sheet music, CDs, notebooks, acoustic guitars, electric guitars, amps, headsets, and, recently, bottles of bourbon.

  Sheridan’s music equipment was layered over her mother’s and grandmother’s belongings. Eccentricity and witchcraft had basically skipped a generation in her mother, Clio, a good mom who had lost her husband too young to cancer, then put herself through teacher’s college while raising Sheridan and her two sisters. Clio’s contribution to the décor included books, more books, and many more books.

  The grand matriarch, Sheridan’s grandmother, was known by a single name: Aphrodite. She was Irish with a brogue so thick few Hubbard’s Pointers could understand her. She’d been born blind outside Dublin, grown up in the Wicklow Mountains—in the town of Glencree, so small it didn’t even have a sign, now known for its international center of peace and reconciliation, located in former British barracks. Her town was an axis of both peace and violence, and it seemed to spawn witches: her grandmother, mother, and aunts all practiced a form of magic called Aphrodeen—white witchcraft found mainly in Ireland, devoted to filling the world with love. Aphrodite was named after the Irish witches’ patron, the goddess of love.

  From a young age, although blind, Aphrodite had been gifted with second sight. Aphrodite could see with her heart. She had an instinct for love, and her mother and grandmother taught her which herbs to grow, which spells to chant, how a well-placed snippet of hair could make two people fall in love with each other, how patience and the willingness to listen could help a person see the truth in all things. She inherited a collection of books containing spells and enchantments; there was always someone who would read them out loud to her.

  Aphrodite had another gift: the ability to call the dead. She had been taught by her mother and grandmother that love never dies, and that the living need help contacting their beloveds who’d gone before them. They’d told her she’d refined her other senses, including the one that didn’t have a name, the sixth sense that allows connection with those who have passed on. Growing up in the rugged Wicklow Mountains, along the Military Road and the site of so much bloodshed, she had found that long-dead soldiers wanted to talk to her.

  Walking through the thick heather of Wicklow’s moorland, she would often have company: the ghosts of rebels who’d been killed in uprisings, both men and women, asking her to lay flowers on the graves of their sweethearts, asking her to give messages to their children and grandchildren. And Aphrodite would always do her best to do as they asked.

  One of the ghosts had a grandson, James Rosslare. He was a wild boy, prone to dares and risk-taking. Growing up in the mountains, he’d scale any peak, jump the widest fissures, inch along crumbling ledges, dangle off cliff edges. One time he’d broken into St. Kevin’s 110-foot-tall round tower at Glendalough, climbed the corkscrew stairs to the top, then exited through a narrow window and tried to scale the very peak using mountain-climbing gear. He would have succeeded, except the caretaker spied him hanging from a rappelling line and called the police.

  Aphrodite found James the next day, to give him the message from his grandfather.

  The police had released him with his promise never to try such a thing again, and he and Aphrodite had sat together, under a tree in his backyard. She’d tried to explain the impossible—that James’s long-dead grandfather was worried about his pranks.

  “Not just because you could fall from such a great height,” Aphrodite had explained, “but because it’s not right for you to climb Saint Kevin’s holy tower…it’s sacrilegious.”

  “Saint Kevin didn’t seem to mind,” James had said, laughing. “Only the caretaker did.”

  “The caretaker and your grandfather,” Aphrodite had said gently. “He told me to say this to you: ‘Seamai, have more respect, will you?’”

  “He called me Seamai?” James had asked, pronouncing it “Shay-mee,” the affectionate way his grandfather always had. His laughter stopped.

  “Yes.”

  “He was the only one who did
.”

  “He also told me with all that sugar you put in your tea, it’s a wonder you can’t—”

  “Fly,” James had said, growing pale. “He said that? You heard him?”

  “He did, yes. And yes…I heard him.”

  “He used to tease me about that.”

  Aphrodite nodded. “He said you’d fly all the way to—”

  “America,” James had said, shocked. “He wanted me to go there.”

  “Then maybe you should put your energy into that, instead of climbing sacred towers,” she said.

  A year later, Aphrodite and James got married. And a year after that, moved to America. James used his daredevil ways to find work at the power company—a lineman who’d scale phone poles and work in any weather. He made more in overtime than anyone on his crew, and within five years, he and Aphrodite had bought this salty, rustic cottage in Hubbard’s Point.

  Americans were less open to the sixth sense, the one located in the heart. They’d always been suspicious of witches. Hubbard’s Point was just a state away from Massachusetts, where women had been burned and hanged as witches just for living unusual lives.

  Time went on, and their daughter and granddaughters helped her grow herbs in their seaside garden. Aphrodite would teach them spells, encourage them to believe in love and express their feelings about things that mattered. Sheridan had learned the lesson as a child, grown up weaving her love and beliefs into her songs.

  She remembered sitting on her grandmother’s lap, being held and rocked. Aphrodite was barely five two, no more than ninety pounds. But when Sheridan sat on her lap, it felt like the whole world. Sheridan would lean back into her grandmother’s arms, feeling safe and protected. Aphrodite would sing softly, teaching Sheridan songs as they rocked on the porch. That was how Sheridan learned to harmonize.

  The song she wrote that started her career, “Annie Glover,” was about the last woman hanged as a witch in Boston. Annie was an Irish washerwoman, sent to Barbados as a slave by the Englishman Oliver Cromwell in the 1650s. Her husband died there, and she and her daughter were then sent to Boston, to work for the John Goodwin family.