28
Nick’s lovemaking seemed possessive and almost desperate that night. Yet it somehow comforted Claire to be mastered, to let Nick make the moves and decisions.
“I love you, Claire, and always will,” he vowed as he rolled them over and fit her naked back and bottom to his chest and thighs. He nibbled kisses down the nape of her neck as if they would begin all over again. “I’m so sorry we got off to such a rough and dangerous start—with our marriage, I mean.”
“Mmm,” she said, stretching luxuriously. “You are worth it. Know what I thought about you after the first couple of times I met you?”
“That if you got too close to me we’d be fleeing for our lives and hiding out with fake names?”
“Very funny,” she said and poked him gently in the ribs with an elbow, “but not far from the truth that you were probably mad, bad and dangerous to know.”
“The forensic psych/expert witness is right again. I plead guilty to all three of those charges, my love. But I want to tell you this. Once we get Ames in court and both of us—probably Jace too—testify against him, he’s going away for a long, long time. And then you and I will also, maybe on a cruise ship or to a desert island or back here in the winter to hide out again.”
“With two children in tow? Batten down the hatches, believe me.”
He hugged her closer again. His warm breath stirred her hair, and he moved even closer under the cozy covers they’d thrashed to waves. He whispered, “I was relieved to see how happy Lexi was when we were all out back playing fox and geese in the snow tonight. I’ll bet Jace didn’t like it though, that she kept wanting him to be the fox and called him a bad guy.”
“He understood it was a game. But I do think she somehow caught on to the fact he was not nice to Julia at times. Actually, he tried to be too nice.”
“Lexi’s too young to pick up on how he was trying to move in on Julia.”
“I thought so too. Maybe it’s something he said to her, like the night he told her Julia was dead and had fallen off the cliff. I wish he wouldn’t have done that without me there. Who knows how he said it and what she picked up under the surface. For a young child, she’s really good at reading people.”
“Then it’s in the genes,” he said with a little squeeze.
“And her insistence on doing things a certain way is inherited, I know that,” she said and yawned.
“She was a little tyrant if anyone so much as stepped off the circle and crossed paths in the snow we’d cleared. No way was anybody going to cut across the clean areas of snow.” As he spoke, his voice became less lazy and more raspy. He lowered his head to lick the skin along her shoulder, a move she always felt through her belly and clear down to her toes. But she felt so exhausted, so floaty. She’d taken her first dose of night meds, but when Nick had started to caress and kiss her, forget nodding off. Now, darn it, but what a time to have to go to the bathroom.
“Nick?”
“Mmm? Your wish is my command.”
“Bathroom call. Be right back.”
She turned and kissed him, then got up quickly as the chilly air hit her. She padded barefoot and naked, not pausing to grab her slippers or a robe. She made quick work of it, then headed back to bed. As she passed their bedroom window overlooking the backyard, she noted strong moonlight flooding in on the floor. Such a romantic night in so many ways. No howling from above. Bright moonlight on the pattern they had all created by running across the new snow.
She glanced out through the break in the curtain.
“Nick.”
“You okay?”
“The backyard. Someone came in and messed it up, added something to the fox and geese pattern. Lexi will have a fit.”
He threw the covers off and got up, dragging the top comforter with him and wrapping it around them both as they leaned over to peer through the lightly frost-etched glass.
“You’re right,” he said. “What is it? It’s too exact for a dog to have run through. It looks like some kind of cartoon drawing.”
“I can’t tell. Let’s put on robes and go quietly downstairs to turn on the back door light. What if someone’s still out there? And what’s the message?”
They jammed their feet into slippers, pulled on flannel pajamas and sweatshirts, grabbed a flashlight and went downstairs in the dark. In the kitchen, they hovered over the window above the sink as Nick clicked on the back door light.
At the top right corner of the fox and geese square that enclosed the four cross paths within, someone had drawn a stick figure of a man with both arms straight out.
“On his feet,” Nick whispered. “Are those supposed to be cowboy boots?”
“I guess. But look, tumbling over the side of the square, as if he’d pushed her—that other stick figure. It’s a woman falling as if over the edge of a cliff.”
Nick hugged her close in a hard grip.
“But what’s that sticking out of his mouth?” Claire asked.
They heard footsteps and rough breathing behind them and turned as a dark form came in the kitchen. Nick thrust Claire behind him. It was just Jace, but they both jumped anyway.
“I saw it earlier when I was in here to get a sandwich,” he told them. “If you ask me, the thing in the man’s mouth is supposed to be a damned expensive cigar, probably the same kind Kirkpatrick smokes.”
* * *
After closing the curtains, the three of them sat at the kitchen table, drinking hot cider. Nick hoped Claire’s tousled look didn’t set Jace off on one of his jealous snits again, but they needed this quick conference.
“It’s 3:00 a.m. I can’t believe you were still up,” Nick told him.
“I couldn’t sleep and went out in front to watch the stars and moon and clear my head in the cold air. Honestly, I used to think I could navigate by those heavenly signs if the Airbus systems failed. But I saw no one go by and didn’t hear a thing when I was out there.”
Nick had no choice but to believe him, but Jace had seemed out of breath when he first came into the kitchen. And he was still fully dressed with melted snow on his boots.
“So,” Claire said in the awkward silence, “someone is telling us Vern Kirkpatrick shoved Julia off the cliff, right?”
“He sure had a motive,” Jace said.
“And Sheriff Archer said his alibi was not ironclad,” she said, when Nick kept quiet. “But neither were whatever Julia’s ex-husband, Michael, and Liz’s would-be suitor Wade Buxton came up with.”
“Okay, counselor and expert witness,” Jace said, turning to Nick, “I’ve got to level with you.”
For one crazy moment, Nick thought he was going to say that he’d been outside to add the telltale stick figures, because surely not more of a confession than that was coming. It had really been gnawing at him that Jace could have tried to see Julia the afternoon she died.
“Go ahead,” Nick urged when he hesitated.
“The first time I met Kirkpatrick at the airport, he offered me a grunt job to help him load some purchases he planned to have in his possession soon. I blew him off, but after Julia died, decided to tell him I’d help—just to keep an eye on him, maybe get the goods on him to tell the sheriff. He’s full of himself, won’t take no for an answer. He thinks he can do no wrong.”
“The way you described him before,” Claire said, “he sounded to me like he is a classic case of a mask narcissist, and all those things fit. Insecure inside, so if people don’t adore him and go along with his every whim, he attacks them one way or the other.”
“But that’s not the end of it. He drove a wagon to the airport when I was leaving. He had some Gene Autry stuff he didn’t explain or want seen but I recognized. I helped him stash the plastic container with those items near the airport at the site the locals call the Crack in the Island.”
Claire sucked in a big breath. “Jace, you should have told us.”
“Yeah, maybe so. With this artwork in the backyard tonight, I’m starting to think I had a crack in the head to try to get involved with him.”
“Just great,” Nick put in. “You may be aiding and abetting a murderer.”
“It was a way to keep an eye on him, maybe make it up to Julia—hell, you know what I mean—if I could help find her killer. I don’t think she’d slip. She knew the area, her mother had died there, Claire said, and we all saw how sure-footed she was in more ways than one on that rocking ferry that brought us to the island the first time we met her.”
“And you fell for her,” Claire put in after that rush of words and emotion. Then she added, “I didn’t mean it that way—fell for her.”
“Yeah, I did,” Jace said, turning his mug of hot cider in his hands as if to keep warm when Nick saw sweat already beading his upper lip. “I was odd man out in our new little family and didn’t know how I was going to make it through the winter here. I still don’t.”
Nick said, “I see why you tried to get close to Kirkpatrick, but you can be known by the company you keep. He’s leaving soon, isn’t he? Grand Hotel, where he’s evidently hanging out, is closing the day after Halloween.”
“And great timing for that,” Jace muttered. “Ghosts and goblins and witches—maybe some pre-Halloween prankster did that drawing outside, and—”
“The point is,” Nick interrupted, “someone has made a move, as if he or she knows we’re working on who killed Julia. I think Jace and I should take turns keeping an eye on the backyard for the rest of the night—front yard too, maybe—and I’ll call Sheriff Archer at eight in the morning to come look at this. And, Seth, take it from your older brother, Jack, and tell Archer what you’ve told us tonight.”
“He’ll blow my undercover work if he goes to recover the stuff or interviews Kirkpatrick again.”
“Nick,” Claire said, “remember how Mr. Logan was sure he was missing things, and Liz said they weren’t the things she and her dad took to sell? Despite the fact that Mr. Logan makes next to no sense, he did insist he’d never hit someone over the head or shove them off a cliff. But as I told you, people with dementia sometimes project what they’ve done onto someone else. And that smell of cigar smoke in the room—Kirkpatrick must have just been there.”
“Is Julia’s father really a suspect?” Jace asked, looking strangely hopeful, Nick thought.
“I’d say he’s in the second tier of the sheriff’s persons of interest,” Nick said. “Archer is no more accepting of the coroner’s undetermined or accidental-death verdict than we are. After all, the medical examiner didn’t know Julia and only had a battered body to make his ruling. But when we get the sheriff here tomorrow, I’ll try to find out more about who he’s targeting. It sure muddies the waters that Julia’s dealt with criminals for years, even WITSEC witnesses. Like a criminal lawyer who’s made a lot of enemies, she could have too, and some came back to—to haunt her.”
“In short,” Jace said, getting up to slosh the rest of his cider in the sink, “Ames aside, you could have other enemies out there somewhere who would like to settle a score with you. I’ll take the first watch and you come on down around five. I probably couldn’t sleep anyway—and looks to me like you two should give it a try after all you’ve been through.”
Nick saw Claire blush. For a woman who was usually so aware of body language, she’d been frequently brushing back her tousled hair.
“Of course,” Jace went on as he cracked open the kitchen curtain over the sink to peer out again, “now that we’ve got ghost woman on the roof silenced, maybe she got angry and came down to mess things up at ground level.”
Nick didn’t like his words or his tone, but at least he was helping. He pulled out Claire’s chair for her and ushered her upstairs.
* * *
“Who did that, Mommy? They are so bad. I would like to stomp on them! They aren’t very good drawers either! If Daddy—I mean, Uncle Seth—was watching, why didn’t he stop them?”
“No, I said, both your daddy Jack and your uncle Seth were watching it after it happened. They didn’t see who did it, but the sheriff will be here in a few minutes and he will want to find out who did it.”
“Oh,” she said, looking crestfallen. “So Uncle Seth feels bad about it too, just like he did when Julia got dead?”
“Yes, we all felt very bad about that, didn’t we?”
“I could tell he really did. ’Cause when he told me she was gone—then I had to ask, ‘Gone where?’—that he was almost crying and mad at himself. I could tell.”
Claire’s insides flip-flopped. “Did he say anything else about it?”
“He said he was very, very sorry and that people make mistakes. I should remember that, but here I almost forgot. Know what, Mommy?”
“What?” she said, pulling Lexi to her for a hug.
“I know you don’t like my bad friend Lily, but I think Da—Uncle Seth, I mean—might have a pretend friend that does bad things too.”
Claire held her close. She’d resented Nick’s thinking Jace could have hurt Julia, even accidentally. There was so much tension among the three of them, and this whole role-play situation was a powder keg, but could Jace know more than he was saying about Julia’s death too?
She had to admit that she’d much rather believe the possible murderer was Julia’s ex-husband than her own.