On Fire. Carla Neggers

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      “Emile—my grandfather.”

      “We’re going to get you some help, okay?” The crewman touched her arm through the blanket. “Just hold on.”

      “I’m not hurt.” She felt as if she were shouting, but couldn’t hear her own words. “The crew—are they all right? They made it to the lifeboats?”

      “Miss St. Joe—”

      Something in his face, his tone, sent a stab of dread straight through her. Oh God. “How many? How many died?”

      The eyes of the nearby crew turned toward her, and she realized she must have shouted this time. The crewman winced. He was Coast Guard all the way. Every death at sea pained him. He said nothing, and Riley knew. There had been deaths aboard the Encounter. Not everyone had made it off alive.

      A man yelled, and she looked up and saw three crewmen holding back Sam Cassain. He was tall and tawny-haired, a thickly built man, a firebrand, a good captain with a propensity for mouthing off. He would speak first, think later.

      Riley saw her crewman grimace, as if he wanted to protect her from Sam’s words. Too late. She could make them out clearly.

      “Five died,” Sam yelled. “Five. And it’s your goddamned grandfather’s fault. The great Emile Labreque. He’s responsible. He knows it.”

      “Who?” Riley clenched the blanket tightly around her, her fingers rigid, her stomach lurching. “Who died? Sam, for God’s sake—”

      He couldn’t have heard her, but he shouted, “Bennett Granger’s dead. He fried in the fire. He never had a chance to make it to the lifeboats. Think Emile should be the one to tell your sister, your brother-in-law?”

      Riley couldn’t speak. Bile rose in her throat. Bennett Granger was the chief benefactor and cofounder of the Boston Center for Oceanographic Research. He and her grandfather had been friends for fifty years. His son had married Emile’s granddaughter, Riley’s sister. God. Who would tell Matthew and Sig?

      “Get him out of here,” her crewman shouted.

      “You mark my words, Riley St. Joe,” Sam said, his voice deadly. “I warned Emile. I told him the Encounter was an old girl and we needed to take more precautions. He wouldn’t listen. His mission always came first. Now five people are dead. That’s on his shoulders, not mine.”

      Riley struggled to get to her feet. The crewman held her by the elbow, keeping her from going after Sam—or from passing out. “Don’t,” he said softly. “There’ll be an investigation. This will all sort itself out in due time.”

      “But Emile—my grandfather—”

      “He’s in the infirmary. He’ll be okay.”

      Every part of her, mind and body, was spent. She couldn’t even lick her parched lips. “The fire was an accident. It wasn’t Emile’s fault. It wasn’t anybody’s fault.”

      The crewman made no response, but his eyes told her everything. He agreed with Sam Cassain. He believed Emile Labreque was responsible for the explosion and the fire that sank the Encounter and killed five people.

      Riley clutched the folds of her blanket. Bennett. Oh, God. She wished she could start the day over and save the Encounter, save Bennett, save the crew. But the old ship was gone, and five people were dead, and Emile…her grandfather, she thought, was doomed.

       One

       R iley ignored the slight tremble in her hands and jammed the two ends of her high-performance paddle together. She zipped up her life vest. There was no reason to be nervous. She’d kayaked the coves and inlets of Schoodic Peninsula since she was six years old. Today’s conditions were near perfect: a bright, clear, still September morning, halfway between low tide and high tide.

      She squinted at her grandfather, who’d come down from his cottage to the short stretch of gravelly beach to see her off. “Come with me,” she said.

      He shook his head. “You go on. You need to get back out on the water.”

      “I’ve been out on the water. Caroline Granger had us onto her yacht for a cocktail party Friday night.”

      “Cocktails.” Emile snorted. “That’s not getting out on the water.”

      She knew what he meant. She hadn’t been on a boat, a ship, even a kayak, since the Encounter disaster a year ago. On the Granger yacht off Mount Desert Island Friday night, she couldn’t make herself go below. She’d never been claustrophobic, not until the watertight doors had shut her and Emile into the diving compartment, not until the two of them had endured the hot, cramped, terrifying hours in the experimental submersible.

      This had to end, she told herself. She was a scientist, director of marine and aquatic animal recovery and rehabilitation at the Boston Center for Oceanographic Research. She couldn’t get spooked about the water.

      “I shouldn’t kayak without a partner.”

      Emile shrugged. “You’ll stay close to shore. Just watch out for fog rolling in later.”

      “You’re sure you won’t come with me?” she asked him.

      “I can kayak anytime I want.”

      One of the perks of his exile, he seemed to be saying. After the disaster of the Encounter, Emile Labreque had shocked the world by retiring to the Maine fishing village where his family had settled generations earlier. It had been his home base for years; he owned a small cottage, where Riley and her sister had spent summers growing up. He looked after a small, private nature preserve on a part-time basis. The last hurrah of a legend.

      He eyed Riley as she dragged her shocking pink, siton-top ocean kayak to the water’s edge. He wore his trademark black Henley and khakis, and at seventy-six, he was as alert and intense as ever. She’d inherited his lean, wiry physique, his dark hair and eyes, his sharp features—and, some said, his single-mindedness.

      “You’re planning to stop on the island?”

      She nodded. “I packed a lunch. If the fog doesn’t roll in, I’d like to have a little picnic on the rocks, like the old days.”

      He gazed out at the water. The bay sparkled in the morning sun. Labreque Island was farther up the point, almost at the mouth of the bay—a tiny, windswept landscape of rock, evergreens and sand that had been in Emile’s family since the turn of the century.

      “I should warn you. John Straker’s staying at the cottage.”

      “Straker? Why? What’s he doing back here?”

      “He took a couple of bullets a while back. He came home to recuperate. I let him use the cottage on the island.”

      Riley digested this news as if it were a hair ball. John Straker wasn’t one of her favorite people. He’d left the peninsula years ago to join the FBI. A lot of people in his home village couldn’t believe the FBI had accepted him. She’d only seen him a few times since. “Who shot him, criminals or his friends?”

      “A fugitive СКАЧАТЬ