The Harbor. Carla Neggers
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nature preserve was her own doing, Olivia thought. She’d bought up the land with earnings from her books and created a nonprofit organization to maintain it. And now Patrick had been killed there.
Murdered.
Olivia raised one hand, and Zoe took it, squeezed back gently and sobbed. She looked like a young woman who’d just lost her father, not the young woman Olivia had seen only yesterday, so confident and determined, preparing to head to Quantico for her sixteen weeks of training at the FBI Academy. Patrick was proud of her but worried about her zest for adventure, her need to push herself. His father was the same way and died young in the line of duty. He was afraid Zoe would, too. Instead, he had.
“I’ll see you later, okay?” Zoe whispered.
“Yes, dear. Of course. I love you.”
“I love you, too.”
“And Patrick—oh, Zoe, I loved him so.”
But Zoe was gone, and Betsy O’Keefe bustled into the kitchen, her own face smeared with tears. She was a stout woman in her late forties, a registered nurse who’d moved to Goose Harbor with her widowed mother at four. Hard workers, both of them. The mother had died a few years ago. Sometimes it seemed to Olivia everyone she knew was dead.
“You’ve had a terrible shock,” Betsy said. “Come, let’s get you to bed and have you lie down a bit.”
“I don’t want to lie down. Betsy...” Olivia stopped. What had she meant to say? She couldn’t remember. It didn’t happen often, but sometimes she’d forget things. What she’d eaten for breakfast, names—she’d lose track of what she was saying. She frowned at Betsy. “I can’t—”
Olivia gasped, grabbing her chest, the jolt of adrenaline and awareness—knowledge—so sudden and forceful, it hurt. Patrick in his uniform, the job he had to do—the arrest he was making—
Betsy leaped to her side. “Miss West!”
“Betsy—I know who did it.”
“What, love?”
“I know who killed Patrick.”
Betsy was pale now, sobbing. “I—I bought a hundred and one candles for your birthday tomorrow. I hope we can fit them all on your cake. Zoe and Christina will come by—”
“Betsy—Betsy, why can’t I remember?”
“Remember what, love?”
“The murderer’s name. The bastard—”
“Maybe I should call the doctor.”
“No, don’t.” Olivia’s voice was firm. “I’ll sit here a while and think. I’ll remember. I know I will.”
Betsy made tea and babbled about birthday cakes and the leaf-peepers and whatever pleasantries she thought would distract her elderly charge—and they did. Olivia couldn’t form a coherent thought, much less call up the name of the murderer.
My God. I do know who did it.
She stared at the first line of her obituary and felt a rare tug of regret at her mortality. If only this once she could be Jen Periwinkle and forever sixteen.
Zoe West sat at the cluttered farmhouse kitchen table and stared out at the beautiful northwest Connecticut landscape, the hills dotted with brightly colored leaves, and she tried to piece together how she’d ended up here. It was as if one day she was headed to Quantico, and the next, she was here, canning beets and milking goats with Bea Jericho.
She knew she should be grateful. Charlie and Bea were incredible people, hardworking, determined to hang on to their land instead of chopping it up into mini-estates and making a fortune.
But Zoe didn’t belong in Bluefield, Connecticut, and she knew it. She’d known it the day she’d arrived in town almost a year ago.
She needed to go home. It was just a matter of when. Goose Harbor hovered on the horizon of her life, like a fog bank she knew would engulf her in due time. Better to deal with it. Get it over with. The status quo was untenable, increasingly impossible to endure.
She’d had three calls in three days. Bruce Young, a lobsterman who’d graduated high school with her; her sister, Christina; and Greg Sampson, the one friend Zoe had left in the Maine State Police. They all wanted to tell her that an FBI agent was on the loose in Goose Harbor.
At least they said he was an FBI agent. Apparently he didn’t want to advertise it but had slipped up with Bruce Young. His name was J. B. McGrath—Jesse Benjamin McGrath. It went right over Sampson’s head but struck Bruce and Christina as suspicious, since Jen Periwinkle’s evil nemesis was also named McGrath. Mr. Lester McGrath, a fictional character, but still. To them it was at best a weird coincidence.
Greg Sampson said he was at Perry’s waterfront bar the night Special Agent McGrath had beaten all comers at darts. Greg had no reason to check out this McGrath character’s story but thought it was legit. He reminded Zoe that a person, an FBI agent or no FBI agent, didn’t make friends in Goose Harbor by beating all comers at darts.
Deep into her second month of unemployment, Zoe was determined to resist the idea that J. B. McGrath was her problem. He was on vacation. FBI agents deserved to take vacations. Goose Harbor was a great place for a vacation, with its strips of sand beaches, its picturesque harbor, its historic houses and quaint shops and inns. That he’d arrived almost to the day of the one-year anniversary of the chief of police’s unsolved murder didn’t necessarily mean a thing.
Even in her self-imposed exile in Connecticut, Zoe would have known if the Maine State Police’s Criminal Investigations Division had asked for FBI assistance in her father’s murder investigation. The truth was, there were no new leads. They had his body, they had the two bullets that had struck him and they had very little else. No footprints in the sand, no DNA evidence left behind, no witnesses. For all anyone knew, Patrick West, Goose Harbor’s beloved chief of police, could have stumbled onto out-of-town drug dealers who shot him and made off for parts unknown.
In the weeks after his death, although she was no longer a state police detective herself and was supposed to be on her way to Quantico, Zoe had done everything she could to find her father’s killer. She’d stepped on toes of people who got in her way and toes of people who didn’t—she didn’t care. She just wanted answers. Why had a good man died that early October morning? Why had she been the one to find him?
And Olivia. Her great-aunt had died the next day, on the morning of her one hundred and first birthday. The doctor said she just gave out, but Zoe blamed herself, the shock of the news of her father’s death. She and Betsy O’Keefe—the entire town—could have conspired to keep her great-aunt from finding out what had happened. They could have tried.
“I know who killed your father. Oh, Zoe, I know...”
The ramblings of a dying woman. Zoe should have realized Olivia was in trouble, but she and Betsy had coaxed her to bed for a nap. She never got up again.
After weeks of trying to find her father’s killer, it was Stick Monroe who’d finally pulled Zoe aside and told her she had to ease off. Calm down. Let her colleagues in CID do their jobs. Stick was a retired federal judge and her mentor, her friend, and everyone knew he was the one person she might listen to. He reminded her that her class at the FBI Academy was set to start. All she had to do was drive to Washington, D.C., and get on with her new life.
Instead she withdrew from the academy and took off, ending up as the sole detective in Bluefield, Connecticut, a small town in the northwest part of the state. Nothing much had happened until the past summer, when the governor of Connecticut drowned in his own swimming pool in her town. It wasn’t an accident. Then a Texas Ranger and a Texas lawyer showed up, the new governor and her kids were nearly killed, and basically all hell broke loose.
And when it was