By The Sea, Book Three: Laura (25 page)

USA TODAY
bestselling author
Antoinette Stockenberg delivers an original and wonderfully
romantic story of two people -- college lovers separated for twenty
years -- who have the chance to be happy together at last. 
But family, friends, an ex-husband, a teenaged daughter and an
unsolved murder seem destined to keep the lovers star-crossed,
until Dan takes up residence in the Cape Cod lighthouse, with
Maddie's rose-covered cottage just a short walk away ...

****

"Oh, pooh," said Joan in a disappointed
voice. "He has a woman with him."

"What? Let me have those," said Norah,
snatching the binoculars back from Joan with such vigor that she
knocked Joan off balance.

"Watch it!" Joan snapped. The edge in her
usually soft-pitched voice was a clear sign, at least to Maddie,
that Norah had gone over the line again.

He has a woman with him.

Norah stared intently through the
binoculars. After a thoughtful silence she said, "Hard to say. If
she's his lover, she's not a recent one. They seem too used to one
another. She's leaning against the mud shed with her hands in the
pockets of her sundress, mostly listening to him—the wind just blew
her dress up;
great
legs—and nodding once in a while. I get
the sense that she's just soaking him up. As if they go back
together."

Norah looked up for a moment. "I'm right
that he never married?"

Joan said, "Not as far as I know. He made
People
's most-eligible list a few years ago—after the
War—but then he kind of faded. So it's possible he went off and did
something stupid, but I doubt it. We would've read about a wedding,
in
People
if not in
Newsweek.
I imagine he was just
living with someone. Probably her."

Joan rose up on tiptoe, trying for the same
vantage over the café curtains that Norah had. In heels, Joan was
able to manage an inch or two over five feet, but today she was
wearing sandals. She was short. Her two best friends were tall. It
made her peppery sometimes.

"Norah, would you mind?" Joan asked in a
dangerously mild voice. "They're my binoculars, after all."

She reached for them but Norah shooed her
away with her elbow, the way she might a pesky terrier. Maddie
stepped in, as she always did, to keep the peace. She took the
binoculars.

"All right, you two clowns. Have a little
dignity."

With Norah, dignity was always in short
supply. She proved it now by nodding slyly toward the lighthouse.
"Check it out—if you're not too prim."

Probably she'd used the exact same line on
half the men she'd dated; Norah had no reason to be shy. With her
knockout figure, creamy skin, red, red hair and full red lips, she
was the kind of woman who made men take off their wedding rings and
hide them in their hip pockets.

But Maddie was not, and never would be,
Norah.

"Why are you being such a pain, Nor?"

"You're abnormal, you know that? Anyone else
would look. Prim, prim, prim."

With an angry, heavy sigh, Maddie accepted
the binoculars and aimed them in the general direction of the
lighthouse. Her sense of dread ran deep. She did not want to gape
at the man and did not want, most of all, to gape at the woman.
What was the point? It would be like staring into her own
grave.

"Yes. I see him. Yes. He looks like on TV."
She held the binoculars out to Norah. "Happy now?"

"What about the woman? What do you
think?"

"I didn't see any woman," said Maddie,
grateful that a billowing bed sheet hid all but a pair of slender
ankles from view.

"No, she's there, Maddie. I can see her now,
even without the binoculars. Look again," Joan urged.

It was going to be so much worse than Maddie
thought. She sighed and tried to seem bored, then took the glasses
back for another look. This time she was spared nothing. A slender
woman of medium height was facing squarely in their direction,
laughing. The wind was lifting her blunt-cut hair away from her
face and plastering her pale blue sundress against her lithe body.
She was the picture of vitality and high spirits. And the sight of
her filled Maddie with relief.

"It's obviously his sister," she said.

"Ah, his sister. Wait—how would you know?"
Norah demanded.

She walks the way he does... throws her head
back when she laughs the way he does... does that jingle-change
thing in her pocket the way he does. Who else could she be?

Maddie spun a plausible lie. "I overheard it
in the post office yesterday. I remember now."

"I don't believe it. She's half his
age."

"I doubt it."

The two were five years apart. But the
sister looked young for her years, and the brother carried thoughts
of war and savagery with him everywhere he went. Joan was right: he
looked burned out. Maddie could see it in the apathetic lift of his
shoulders after the woman said something. It was such a
tired-looking shrug.

Norah was watching Maddie more carefully
now. She folded her forearms across her implanted breasts and
splayed her red-tipped fingers on her upper arms. "What else did
you manage to ... overhear, in the post office?" The question
dripped with skepticism.

Maddie met her friend's steady gaze with one
almost as good. "That was pretty much it. It was crowded. You know
how little the lobby is. They took the conversation outside."

"Who were they? Man? Woman? Did you
recognize them from town?"

"Two women, as I recall. I didn't bother
turning around to see who. As I've said, I'm not really
interested."

Norah cocked her head. Her lined lips curled
into a faint smile. Her eyes, the color of water found nowhere in
New England, narrowed. "Really."

"Okay, they're getting into the Jeep!" Joan
cried. "Now what?"

"We follow 'em. Let's go!"

Maddie stared agape as the two made a dash
for the half-open Dutch door that led to the seashelled drive of
the Cape Cod cottage. "Are you out of your minds? What do you hope
to accomplish?"

Norah slapped the enormous glove-soft
carryall she'd slung over her shoulder. "I have a camera," she said
on her way out.

"You're going to photograph them?"

"If we don't, the paparazzi will!"

She had her Mercedes in gear before Joan was
able to snap her seat belt shut. The top of the convertible was
down, of course, the better for Norah to be seen. Maddie watched,
boggled, as the two took off in a cloud of dust, Norah pumping her
fist in a war whoop the whole time.

The episode bordered on the surreal: an
educated, beautiful forty-year-old woman and an even more educated
thirty- eight-year-old one, tracking down a media celebrity like
two hound dogs after some felon in the bayou. All they needed was
Maddie in the rumble seat and there they'd be: Three perfect
Stooges.

She closed the lower half of the Dutch door,
and then, because she felt a sudden and entirely irrational chill,
closed the upper half. June meant nothing on the Cape. June could
go from warm and wonderful to bone-chilling cold in the blink of an
eye.

June had done just that.