Storm Surge. Celia Ashley

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СКАЧАТЬ shook his head. “Then I don’t know the answer. Use that lock, though, when I leave, okay? Lock it whenever you go out, even if it’s only to the water.”

      “What are you thinking?”

      “I don’t know what to think. Except that Gray guy is probably full of—”

      “No,” said Paige. “He’s not.”

      “Okay.” Dan started for the door.

      “Wait, you did have something to tell me. And not about keeping my door locked.” Paige started after him and paused. “Isn’t that why you came? Did you find out what happened with my father’s boat?”

      “Oh. Yeah,” said Dan, turning around. “Got anything to drink? Water? I’m a little dry after that run up from the beach.”

      Paige yanked a bottle from the refrigerator and twisted off the cap. She handed the water to him, lobbing the cap into the sink. “Go on.”

      He drank half the bottle down before answering. “Yes, your father’s sailboat went down in an unexpected storm. I’m digging into the details. Your father wasn’t alone when the ship sunk. He had crew members. All in all, there may be some things you don’t want to know.”

      “Like what?”

      “Drowning can be pretty gruesome.”

      “Is there something to mark his passing? Like the stone cross on the headland? His name’s not inscribed on the one here in Alcina Cove. I checked.”

      “I told you, Paige, I don’t know much yet.” Impatience roughened his tone. “It wouldn’t be, though, if he wasn’t living here anymore.”

      Paige lowered her lids, studying him from behind her lashes. “You’re not telling me everything. There’s more you know already.”

      Dan finished off the water and lowered the empty bottle to his hip. He exhaled through his nose. “One of the older guys at the station remembered something…about your dad. Remembered going out to your house.” He jerked his head toward Paige’s old home next door. “Responding to a call about a domestic dispute. Not the first time. Things were…not pretty. Your mom refused to press charges, though, and the responding officers left.”

      Paige stumbled over to the chair and lowered herself onto the hard wooden seat. Crap.

      “And nothing else? Nothing about any other kind of trouble?”

      Dan frowned, tilting his head. “What are you asking?”

      Paige shrugged. “Bea Hunt implied my father was involved with people she referred to as ‘objectionable,’ so I just wondered.”

      “I see.”

      “Plus my mom…she said some things before she died. I only want answers, you know?”

      “Sometime in the next couple of days, I’ll go down to the archived reports and see what I can find. If you want me to,” he added, taking a shuffling step toward the door.

      Compressing her lips between her teeth, Paige gave a quick nod.

      “You all right?”

      She nodded again.

      “I’m going to go. Lock the door behind me.”

      Forcing herself to her feet, Paige followed him and threw the deadbolt once he’d stepped outside. Eyeing the rumpled rug, she went over to the bed and yanked the heavy iron frame a few inches at a time until she’d centered a leg over the trapdoor. She threw herself belly first on the mattress, ignoring the sand spattering from her jeans across the coverlet. Dropping her head onto her folded arms, she began to cry.

      Chapter 7

      The keyboard’s clatter filled the room. Liam kept his office sparse. No soft surfaces to deaden sound. No personal mementos. No tennis ball to bounce off the wall when thought processes had stalled. He had his desk, his laptop, an external hard drive for photos, and a stack of books on the floor near the window. He preferred the barren workspace to a place cluttered with distractions. Because the types of distraction he would have chosen would elicit memories, and memories could do nothing at this point but renew guilt and pain. He’d been learning to release in stages the scorching culpability haunting him. Avoidance helped. His unexpected attraction to Paige Waters did not.

      In the monitor’s lower right-hand corner the digital clock read three-forty-five. Liam pushed his fingers through his hair and then rubbed his hand down the side of his face, feeling beneath his palm’s calloused flesh the raised cicatrix along his jaw. Paige had asked how he’d received it. Not one to hold back, that woman. Something on her mind, out it came from her mouth. Presumably unedited, but he could be wrong. She might have a lot more rolling around in interior dialogue she didn’t bother to voice.

      Liam leaned back in his chair, stretching his arms above his head. When he brought them back down, he tapped through the shortcut on the keys to save his work and shut the laptop, waiting a moment for his eyes to adjust to darkness before rising and moving to the window.

      The quarter moon had been a sickle in the sky late in the afternoon but had set some time ago, leaving the sky as black as a crow’s wing spangled with dew. The shipping lanes were empty, making it impossible to discern the sea from the dark dome above. Liam could barely make out the spume against the rocky shoreline. He pressed close to the windowpane, the glass cooling the healed, ridged skin, and recalled how he hadn’t known he’d been cut, how he hadn’t felt the pain, how he had mistaken the blood pouring from the wound to soak his shirt as salt water and sweat.

      He thought of Paige then, wondering if her insomnia had worsened after the incident at her cottage two nights ago. He hadn’t seen her, not even a glimpse, and he’d been watching. Did she keep her door locked now? It might not even matter. Her curiosity and all she wanted to know could prove her undoing. The truth would destroy her. It might very well destroy him.

      * * * *

      Paige had taken to sleeping with the light on over the stove. Before dawn, she rose from bed and crossed the floor, smacking the switch to the off position in defiance. Whatever had taken place the other night, she didn’t understand it, but nothing had been stolen, nothing disturbed. She would much rather forget the whole thing, yet she didn’t plan to move the bed from its position over the trapdoor.

      Returning to the mattress, she sat in the gloom with her feet tucked up and her arms around her knees, listening to the first stirrings of songbirds in the bushes outside. When the sun peeked over the horizon, they would be in full form. By that time, she hoped to be climbing into her car and heading north. Dan had called last night with the name of the harbor from which he believed her father’s boat had sailed on its last trip into the wide, blue sea.

      Her stomach knotted as she thought about unearthing that part of the puzzle. After what she’d learned about the long ago visit of the police to her home, she wasn’t sure she should bother to try. The fact the authorities had been called only confirmed what she’d always understood about her father’s predilection toward violence. She would be better off not discovering any more. She had been better off not knowing him, hadn’t she?

      She ground her teeth together. With effort, Paige relaxed her jaw, drawing and releasing several long breaths through СКАЧАТЬ