Temptation Bay (A Windfall Island Novel) (6 page)

And made him even more determined to solve Eugenia Stanhope’s mystery. After all, he thought as he exited the Horizon, he wasn’t the only one living with the choices he’d made.

Dex slipped his phone in his pocket and walked out of the hotel. The sky, far off at the horizon, was a mass of purple and gray where Mother Nature warred with Neptune in some distant, empty stretch of the Atlantic. The angry color bled to a clear, deep blue above Windfall Island, but the breeze off the water had a bite, both in temperature and tang. And attitude, Dex thought, fancying he could feel just a light slap in it from the storm raging miles away.

Fall had come with a vengeance, not just in the snap on the air, but the beauty of leaves shining red and yellow against that intense blue sky—the color, he couldn’t help but notice, so much like Maggie Solomon’s eyes. And wasn’t she just like the morning, he mused, placid on the surface, all her emotions pent up and seething just under the surface.

He’d seen the depth of her generosity when it came to her friends, but something about him rubbed her the wrong way. It probably hadn’t helped when he’d put her up against the helicopter. But he’d do it again. Hell, given the chance, he’d do more, push her past that iron control she seemed to wield over herself as automatically as she drew breath.

It would probably be glorious, but it wouldn’t gain him her trust, and he needed her trust.

Even though he’d already betrayed it.

And if that didn’t set well with his conscience, well, it was too late to turn back now, with the deal struck and the down payment already spent. And he wasn’t a man who dealt in regrets, he reminded himself, turning his attention back to the case as he set off through the village.

The single road Maggie had taken from the airport at Temptation Bay contorted itself around rocks and hopped over small streams in a seeming race to make it to the village, but there it meandered suddenly, like it had been laid out by a drunken sailor—which it probably had. Businesses sat cheek-by-jowl on the inland side of the street, with a scattering of houses nestled in the curve behind them. Shanty-style buildings tottered along the shoreline side, some so old it looked like the next strong breeze might set off a domino effect. Signs were posted on the end walls:
No leaning.

Each building was unique, some of them painted in garish tones with gaudy striped awnings, others less in-your-face, their colors softened by the sun, salt air, and the harsh weather that spewed off the Atlantic Ocean. Like the Horizon, each business sported a pictograph sign, holdovers from a time when few of the residents could read. None of the narrow lanes had names; the residents likely found it unnecessary. The tourists would find it charming, Dex imagined, and the tourists were very necessary.

True to Maggie’s word, Dex saw no industry of any kind in the village. A trio of fishing trawlers were moored at the rickety docks, along with two Solomon Charters boats—for the crossing from island to mainland and whale watching, Dex assumed—but tourism was clearly the island’s main source of income. He could use that; merchants who depended on tourism were invariably chatty, open to satisfying the curiosity of strangers.

He set out with high hopes; Windfall Island dashed them in record time. He hadn’t gone a block before he realized nearly every tourist-centric business was already closed for the season. That left the businesses that catered to residents’ day-to-day needs.

He chatted up Mr. MacDonald, sole proprietor and, this time of year, stock boy, cashier and bagger of the single grocery store. And by “chatted,” he meant he’d talked and Mr. MacDonald had stared like a basilisk at him. Dex spent a little money at the five and dime, where the only conversation consisted of how much change he got back. Then he visited the hardware store, the pharmacy, and the pizzeria, grabbing lunch in the aromatic heat and fending off questions while the owner and her son revealed absolutely nothing about themselves or the island.

He’d even poked his head inside the doors of the Clipper Snip, telling himself it was the overwhelming odor of chemicals that made his mind reel rather than the eight pairs of female eyes that had swiveled in his direction then lit with some variation of avarice. They were only after information, Dex assured himself. It didn’t stop him from feeling like he was about to be gobbled up like the last hot dog at a Fourth of July party.

Still, he loved this part of a case, when the clues could lead him anywhere, straight ahead or back the way he’d come or halfway around the world. Where everyone was a suspect and the most innocent tidbit of information could turn out to be the linchpin. And this case… this case carried special weight, just by being so damned historically significant, not to mention its importance to a family like the Stanhopes.

He should have been having the time of his life. And what was on his mind? Maggie Solomon. She was hardheaded,
sarcastic, argumentative, uncomplimentary, and a general pain in the ass. And he couldn’t wait to see her again. He’d known her less than twenty-four hours, but the world seemed so much brighter than it had yesterday, so much more filled with possibilities. Which was saying something when he stood on the brink of the biggest opportunity of his life. He solved this case and clients would be beating down his door, clients with substantial cases that didn’t involve who was doing whom in some tawdry out-of-the-way motel room.

And he couldn’t keep his mind on the prize. Okay, not only his mind.

Christ.

He took a deep breath, put Maggie in a tiny little box he locked away in an obscure corner of his brain, and swung through the door of the Windfall Island Antique Store. And stopped dead.

Hoarders: The Antique Chronicles
, he thought, taking in the haphazard stacks of merchandise crowding the place with absolutely no sense of order.

A Chippendale dresser sat against the wall, its top crowded with vases, one of which could have dated to the early Roman Empire, others to the post–World War II trinket trade in Japan. A cheap dinette table was flanked by a six-pack of chairs; at least one of them looked to be a Windsor, if Dex remembered even a tenth of the research he’d done for an elderly client whose nurse had systematically stripped her house of antiques, replacing them with halfway decent fakes.

Ottomans sat on chairs, which rested on tables propped up by statuary, all of it balanced precariously, sometimes to the rafters high overhead. Dex stepped in and found himself in a maze of winding aisles barely wide enough to navigate. Around every corner something new caught his
eye, items ranging in age and value from priceless museum quality to cheap flea market. Ten minutes later and with no idea where he’d left the door, he came to what appeared to be the front counter, if the gold and silver-plated antique cash register sitting on a glass display case was any indication.

Beside the counter stood a tall, gaunt figure with a white, slightly shiny complexion, dressed in the clothing of a nineteenth-century magistrate. Wax, Dex decided, despite the eerily lifelike eyes.

And then it spoke. “Can I help you?”

Dex pasted an open and friendly expression on his face and stepped forward. “You must be the proprietor.” Josiah Meeker, or so the discreet gold lettering on the front window had informed him.

“And you’d be Dexter Keegan, lawyer from Boston,” Meeker said, staring distastefully at the hand Dex held out.

Dex might have been offended if he hadn’t seen the way Meeker’s own hands rubbed against his pants legs. OCD in some form, he would have bet. Dex glanced around. That would explain why it looked like the man had never parted with a single piece of merchandise in his entire life.

“You after anything in particular?” Meeker said, still looking like he’d been sucking on a lemon.

“No.” Dex wandered over to a trio of cabinets made of lacquered wood fronted with age-spotted glass.

Smalls—little collectible items—crowded the warped wooden shelves. He pretended to study the worn and well-loved old toys, costume jewelry, miniature china figurines, and matchbox cars that took him back to his childhood. But his eyes shifted to a pair of doors in the corner. Both doors bore signs limiting access to staff members, but one of those doors was narrower, with an external lock and a
small thermostat on the wall beside it. Temperature-and, he’d have wagered, humidity-controlled.

“What’s your business on the island?” Meeker wanted to know. “Maybe it will help me steer you to something likely.”

History
. But Dex stopped himself from saying it. There was something about Meeker that made his gut talk. Dex always listened to his gut, especially when caution was the message it sent.

“I’m just getting to know my way around the village.”

“You’re that lawyer checked into the Horizon yesterday.”

“Word travels fast.”

“I haven’t heard anything about who you represent.”

“Why would you?”

Meeker’s face shifted into a smirk. “You tell me.”

Dex borrowed Maggie’s signature shrug, let his gaze drift around the place before they landed on the door with its telltale little thermostat. “I’m a sucker for a good cigar.”

Meeker glanced over his shoulder, and when he turned back, those black eyes of his narrowed on Dex’s face. “Don’t sell tobacco products of any sort.”

“That’s not a humidor, then?” Dex said with a tinge of disappointment, indicating the smaller door behind Meeker.

“Cigar smoking is a nasty habit,” Meeker said sourly. “I keep books in there. Which, no doubt, AJ Appelman told you.”

“AJ Appelman? At the Horizon? Why would he tell me you keep books in a humidor?” Dex asked.

“Why indeed? Just who do you represent, Mr. Keegan?”

Frowning a little, Dex turned to look at Meeker. “What does my client have to do with anything?”

“Because they’re more than just books. They’re journals,
some of them going back to Windfall’s beginnings.” Meeker’s mouth lifted in a slight, self-satisfied sneer. “I’ve had museums, universities, and all manner of research people begging me to loan them, to image them, and whatnot. I’ve turned them all down, with their letters and e-mails and phone calls.”

“None of them bothered to come in person.” Which would have given Meeker the respect he thought his due, even if he tried to deny his ego had anything to do with it.

“An outsider is still an outsider, even when he deigns to show up in the flesh. What makes you think I’d let you waltz in here and have them just for the asking?”

“Who said I was asking?”

“Are you meaning to tell me you’re not here at the behest of some museum or university, to convince me to part with the only written history of this island?”

“I can assure you my client has no idea those journals exist.” Which he could say with such absolute conviction that for the first time Meeker seemed uncertain.

“Oh,” he said, moving to fuss nervously with a display of little china boxes on a nearby shelf.

Mission accomplished
, Dex thought, all but shaking with the effort to keep his expression placid. Those journals might yield nothing, but the possibility they’d help him solve this case… It made his head spin a little, the idea that he could be the one to discover the whereabouts of a child kidnapped nearly a century past. And not just for himself. Eugenia Stanhope had a family who were still alive, still searching for her. He could only imagine what it would be like for them to finally see an end to all those years of wondering.

Yeah, he wanted those journals—as much as he wanted his next breath. Instead he turned away, taking small
consolation in knowing he must have convinced Meeker he wasn’t interested in them, or the man would still be hovering in front of that door like his skinny frame and nasty disposition posed any real obstacle.

Getting out of there before he did something stupid seemed like his only option, so Dex pointed himself into the maze, the natural light filtering in the front windows his only directional beacon.

Meeker followed along behind him. “Is there something I can help you find, then?” he said, sounding pained that he’d lost a sale.

Dex turned back at the door. “Didn’t see anything that appealed to me.”

And that was the absolute truth, he thought as he pushed through the door and stepped out onto the raised boardwalk. He hadn’t laid eyes on the journals, but he’d discovered their existence—although Dex doubted Meeker’s assertion that they were a written history.

On an island like Windfall, a community that operated as a sort of corporation to salvage shipwrecks and mete out shares, likely some of those books were more ledgers than anything else. The rest would be personal accounts, most probably written by women since they were more apt to keep diaries or journals than men.

Still, he might find a nugget somewhere in them, a bit of information that could lead him to Eugenia Stanhope’s ultimate fate.

Just as soon as he found a way to get his hands on them.

W
ithin a week, Windfall’s few remaining vacationers would be gone. Maggie knew, as she’d be flying them out herself.

Though the seasonal loss of the tourists, with their pockets full of mad money, meant lean times, Maggie preferred it that way. No outsiders meant the residents weren’t reenacting a historical salvagers’ community. They were themselves, and that, she thought with an indulgent smile, suited her so much better.

She swung through the door of the island’s only fuel station, her smile widening into a full-out, time-to-have-some-fun grin.

Jed Morgenstern, all five and a half feet of him, had what looked like a bed sheet wrapped around his waist with a tail of it draped over one shoulder. He wore a t-shirt under it, a rope belt around his waist, and a slight look of embarrassment on his craggy, weathered face.

“Maggie,” he said by way of greeting.

She could all but see him bracing himself. She didn’t disappoint, taking a half step back and looking him over
with a critical eye. “Could use something,” she pondered. “Maybe a crown of olive branches.”

“Jeez—”

“Or some gold sandals, and if you really want to pull off that look you should lose the t-shirt.”

“Knock it off.”

“What do Romans wear under their togas, anyway?”

“Maggie,” he said again, casting a cautious glance over his shoulder before he added, “You know Martha.”

“Not as well as you.” But she did know Martha. Everyone on the island knew Martha and her affinity for the tragic romances of history: Arthur and Guinevere, Romeo and Juliet, Burton and Taylor—they didn’t all have to end with death. Combine that with her constant search for novelty, and Jed’s comfort zone didn’t stand a chance. Then again, he probably had the best sex life of any man on Windfall. Not to mention more variety. “So who are you supposed to be, anyway?”

“Anthony and Cleopatra.”

“I think you mean Antony.”

Jed gave her a look, not caring a rat’s ass about the distinction.

“Did you just roll your eyes?” Martha called from the back room.

“How does she
do
that?”

“Hey, Martha,” Maggie called back to her.

“Call me Cleo.” Martha appeared and struck a dramatic pose in the doorway, looking like a forty-something version of Elizabeth Taylor, if Elizabeth Taylor had been a five-foot ten inch beanpole with magenta hair. Martha got the costume right, though—hair done in spit curl ringlets, heavy black cat’s eye makeup, white toga, chunky Romanesque costume jewelry. “I didn’t hear you complaining last night,” she said to her husband.

Jed’s complexion went about three shades redder, and he ducked his head. “I’m thinking you didn’t come in here to bust my chops, Maggie.”

“No, that was just a bonus. My fuel coming in Friday?”

“Maybe.”

Maggie shrugged. “Maybe I’ll get it somewhere else.”

“On this island?” Jed said, getting a little of his own back.

“It’ll be here Friday,” Cleo put in.

“It’s not coming by chariot, is it?”

“Funny,” Jed snapped before his wife elbowed him away from the small front counter so she could lean on it, her eyes avid as they latched onto Maggie’s face. “Tell me about the outsider you flew in from Portland the other day.”

“Lawyer,” Maggie said, “staying at the Horizon.”

“And?”

“He paid me to bring him to Windfall, I brought him.”

Cleo/Martha gave an impatient little huff. “You didn’t talk on the way? For crying out loud, Maggie, didn’t you ask him one blessed thing?”

“Oh, I grilled him,” Maggie said. Mostly because he’d insisted on it, but still, the questions had come from her own brain, right? “He wasn’t giving anything up. The lawyer-client thing, I guess.”

Martha planted her hands on her toga-draped hips. That close-mouthed lawyer crap might be all right for the Supreme Court, her expression said, but she wasn’t buying it. Martha smelled gossip, and she wasn’t giving up until she got some. She opened her mouth to let Maggie have it, but the bell over the door jangled, and Trudie Bingham, blond, bright-eyed, and barely twenty, breezed in and sang out, “Ma-il.”

Maggie didn’t waste any time thinking she was off the hook.

“Here’s yours,” Trudie said, handing Maggie a stack of random advertisements with one or two junk envelopes on top, addressed to
occupant
. “I heard you brought a man to the island.”

“Lawyer.” Maggie dumped her “mail” into the wastebasket behind the counter. “Staying at the Horizon.”

Martha threw her hands up.

Trudie was more optimistic about her chances of learning something useful. “Is he cute? Is he tall? Is he single?” she wanted to know.

Cute? Cute definitely was not the right terminology for Dex Keegan. Dangerous, secretive, potent, but not cute. “No, yes, and I didn’t ask him,” she said to Trudie. “In that order.”

Trudie stuck out her bottom lip. “Mean.” Which didn’t, unfortunately, put her off. “Is he at least famous?”

“Never heard of him before,” Maggie said.

“Oh. Then why are there reporters down at the Horizon?”

“What?” Martha streaked around the counter, clamped a hand around Trudie’s wrist. “There are reporters at the Horizon?”

“With cameras. Mom went down there to find out why.” Trudie’s pout turned into a sulk. “She made me stay behind to man the counter at the post office.”

Martha let her go. “I’ll bet it’s Paige Walker.”

Maggie froze, her heart thundering in her ears so loud she barely heard the conversation buzzing around her. Not that she gave even half a damn about Paige Walker, Windfall Island’s most famous daughter, gone to Hollywood to be a big star.

Paige might have gotten herself all polished up, earned fame and fortune, but while the surface might be as gold
as the little statues Paige had earned herself, it seemed the base alloy was still just cheap metal.

She’d been a friend once upon a time, a good friend, back when they were both schoolgirls. Before Paige had betrayed her.

“Last I heard she was in Cannes,” Martha was saying, her broad New England accent making it sound like something on a market shelf filled with pork and beans, rather than a playground of the rich and famous. “That girl never stays in one place long, even when those tabloid bloodsuckers aren’t hounding her to dish up a scandal. And she never comes home.

“ ’Course,” Martha continued, “this ain’t her home anymore, and a sex tape with a married director is more than a scandal.”

“I read the wife is going to sue her for,” Trudie screwed up her face in a Herculean effort to remember the exact wording, “alienation of affection.”

“I doubt there was much affection on that director’s side—or Paige’s, for that matter. Right, Maggie?”

“Don’t know, don’t care.”

“Well, I doubt the girl’d come back here to lick her wounds.”

Maggie figured Martha was right about Paige; she’d brushed Windfall Island off like so much beach sand a decade ago, made it clear just how much better she thought she was than everyone here. No way Paige would show her face while her precious reputation was in tatters.

But there were cameras down at the Horizon, and Paige Walker wasn’t the only famous name with a Windfall Island connection. In Maggie’s estimation, she wasn’t even the worst.

“You going down there, Maggie?”

“No.” But as she turned away from Martha and walked out the door, she knew she didn’t really have a choice.

Maggie pulled her Mustang to the curb a block away from the Horizon, then sat there until her legs were steady. The sky was the clear, aching blue of a bright fall day, the air wafted in crisply through the open window, and she could smell the tang of the sea. Everything was familiar and dear to her. And the heart she’d thought was shattered beyond repair was breaking again.

A fair-sized crowd of Windfallers had gathered in front of the inn. She couldn’t see who they’d gathered around, but she knew. If Paige Walker, star of stage, screen and, just lately, the Internet, had set foot on the island, there’d have been enough paparazzi swarming around her to pick up the island and carry it away.

And if she’d had any brains at all, any inherent sense of self-preservation, Maggie told herself, she’d turn the car around and give the Horizon and its plague of reporters a wide berth, just get the hell out of Dodge. It would have been the smart thing to do, easier on her nerves, better for her pride, even if slinking out of town made her feel like a felon. Better a felon than a tool.

And better, she thought with a vicious oath, to be a tool than a coward. She slammed out of the car, strode the half-block with her mind carefully blanked, and if her stomach was swimming sickly, if her legs wanted to buckle, who had to know? Definitely not the man who appeared at the other end of the narrow aisle that opened when those in the crowd caught sight of her.

Phillip Ashworth Solomon, Admiral of the United States Navy and her father, was nearly blinding in his dress whites. He was handsome and fit, his hair threaded
with just the right amount of silver to denote the wisdom and experience of age without diminishing his strength one iota. He wore command like a comfortable old shirt, held himself uncompromisingly straight; and Maggie knew there was no softness in him, no pity for anything he judged a weakness. Like emotion.

That didn’t mean he couldn’t feign a good sentiment if he thought it useful. He caught her into a hug that had the camera flashes, press and civilian, firing wildly.

And in her ear he hissed, “Behave yourself.”

All she could think was how much it hurt. She couldn’t even be angry, just sick and achy and feeling like a kid again, too young to understand why she seemed to disappoint him, just by being.

He turned her to face the reporters, and she froze, miserable and lost and indecisive, telling herself it was the lights flashing in her face that made her eyes want to tear up.

“For God’s sake, Margaret, smile.”

The words struck her like knives, but when he reached for her, it was too much. She tried to push him off, but he grabbed her wrist and pulled it behind her back, as though he’d slung an arm around her waist.

“Don’t go rebellious on me now,” he murmured with a wide smile on his face, keeping his voice just under the level of the crowd. “I won’t let you ruin this, too.”

Too?
“This has nothing to do with me.”

“Of course it does. Joint Chiefs of Staff, Maggie,” he all but crowed, the smile on his face sincere this time, and just a little fanatical. “To the president.”

“No. You mean the actual president?”

His eyes narrowed, but he kept his smile firmly in place. “You stand to benefit, too, rightly so as the daughter of a high-ranking man. All you have to do is fall in line. For once.”

Maggie twisted her arm free. She wrenched her shoulder in the process, but the pain was worth it. She should have known he wouldn’t be thwarted so easily. He took her by the upper arms, turned her so her back was to the crowd, her expression hidden from the cameras.

She could have shoved him off; the physicality would have gone a long way to salving her nerves. But not her conscience. She couldn’t bring herself to humiliate him in public. To cut all ties. The notion that she was still holding out hope for some sort of normal father-daughter relationship put an extra snap of disgust—for herself as much as him—in her voice. “Campaign not going well?”

“I’m up against Worthington,” he shot back, his smile going a little grim. “He has three sons, and they’re all serving their country.”

“Too bad you only have one worthless daughter.”

“You wouldn’t be worthless if you’d do your duty.”

Maggie absorbed that blow and wondered why, after all these years, hearing him toss off his subterranean opinion of her so casually should still hurt. But it did.

“How you could fail to understand this after living all your life as a military brat escapes me, Margaret,” he said. “Having a daughter with military wings on her flight suit would trump Worthington and his sons, all three of them.”

“Maybe you should have thought of that when it might have meant something,” she murmured. Again, she tore free of his grip, this time walking away without a backward glance.

“You’ll have to forgive my daughter,” she heard him say, voice raised as he played the proud, loving father and made excuses for what he’d see as her unforgivable behavior. “I’m afraid Margaret has a schedule to keep. She has her own airport here on the island. It’s small, to be sure, but growing by leaps and bounds.”

The crowd parted again to let her through. She kept her eyes, achingly dry and hot, aimed carefully forward, pretended she didn’t hear the murmurs of sympathy, feel the hands that reached out to touch her arm. Sympathy, even the mere idea of it, made her chest tighten painfully, had tears burning in her throat.

Running into Josiah Meeker was just the ticket to put the steel back in her spine. The crowd opened up and there he was: tall, cadaverously thin, with all the warmth of the winter Atlantic and the slime quotient of what washed up on its shore. His gaze slid over her, head to toe and up again, and took her back to a tiny storeroom where she’d been trapped, helpless. Until she kneed Meeker’s balls up into his ribcage and made her escape.