The Widow (25 page)

“I know what you’re going to say. I’m not jumping to conclusions. I’m keeping an open mind.”

“You’re not on this case. Think for a moment what you’d do if you were in my position. Your father’s the FBI director. Your deceased husband was an FBI agent. There are presently a couple of G-men in town sniffing into the secrets of a high-level State Department appointee.”

“I know, Lou. It’s awkward.”

“Awkward? It’s a damn tangled-up mess is what it is. And I haven’t even gotten to the Garrisons and their history, and Owen and his work. I caught up with Doyle last night. His wife’s got a big job ahead of her as director of this new field academy in Bar Harbor. Fast Rescue’s not an outfit for the fainthearted. Owen has ambitious plans. He doesn’t do anything by half measures—” Lou stopped suddenly, and Abigail realized she must have reddened or something, because he groaned. “Oh, hell. Damn it, Browning.”

She cleared her throat. “Back to the pictures. Have your guys discovered any concrete evidence that Mattie shot them?”

Lou seemed almost relieved that she’d redirected the subject to the investigation at hand. He shook his head. “Nothing so far. Apparently he did burn a bunch of negatives, but his files are just the disaster you’d expect them to be. Maybe worse.”

“If he did take the pictures, he could have given them to someone, sold them. We don’t know if they’ve been in his sole possession all this time. He could have made copies and given them out to a half-dozen different people.”

“Not likely. Someone would have come forward.”

“But possible,” Abigail said. She didn’t wait for Lou to continue to speculate with her. “What about Linc Cooper?”

“He’s home with his family. He should have told us what was going on, but now he has. The FBI was interested in what he had to say. What he did shouldn’t have an impact on Grace’s appointment. It’s just a whiff of scandal. But what she did
herself
—lying all these years about talking to Chris at her uncle’s, not saying anything about her brother—” Lou shrugged, not going on.

Abigail finished for him. “That could be more than a whiff of scandal.” She pointed to his mug. “Finished?”

“Yeah. Doyle makes lousy coffee. This was better.”

“How’re the boys doing?”

“They seem fine. They know Mattie. They’re not afraid of him, even if they should be.”

She dumped out the last of his coffee and put all three mugs into the dishwasher, closing it up with a thud. “What about weapons? Did you find any guns in Mattie’s house?”

“No.”

“You’re not going to tell me what the murder weapon was, are you, Lou?” “I haven’t in seven years. I’m not today. You know I can’t.”

Withholding that kind of detail was standard operating procedure, but Abigail persisted. “An automatic. There were shell casings. I didn’t know what they meant at the time—”

“Abigail,” he warned.

“It wasn’t a lucky shot that killed Chris. The killer knows how to shoot. He likes guns. If he threw the murder weapon into the ocean, then he got himself another just like it.” She walked around to Lou’s side of the peninsula. “That’s my guess, anyway.”

The state detective ignored her completely. “What are you going to do now?”

“Owen and I thought we’d walk up to Ellis’s.” She smiled with feigned innocence. “I have this thing for delphinium.”

“Mattie.”

Mattie stirred amid the thick evergreens that grew along the cliffs where Doe Garrison drowned, listening in case he’d conjured up the voice whispering his name.

“Mattie Young.”

A ghost?

Chris’s ghost?

He brushed pine needles off him and stood up under the low branches of the prickly balsam firs and spruces. He’d made his way down there before dawn, after a rough night up on the ledge. A state cruiser had purred along the private road just after he crossed it and disappeared into the forest. It wasn’t great timing on his part. It was luck. Pure damn luck.

He heard the rustle of dead leaves and underbrush from his own movements, and he smelled the tang of salt in the air from the ocean just below him.

It wasn’t Chris.

Chris is dead. What the hell’s the matter with you?

“I know you’re here, Mattie.”

That voice.

It wasn’t Abigail, or Owen. Doyle. The people he’d betrayed but who wouldn’t hurt him.

It wasn’t any of them.

A cold serenity came over him. He knew what was happening now. He shut his eyes a split second and pictured himself in the ice and snow of Acadia on a soundless, frigid winter afternoon. His winter photography was some of his finest. He liked the island best on the coldest, clearest, sharpest winter days.

He’d trapped himself along the edge of thirty-foot rock cliffs.

There was nowhere to run. Behind him was the ocean. Ahead of him, a killer.

“Mattie.”

He recognized the voice but refused to look to see if he was right.

He’d had his chances, and now they were done. He had nothing more to do in this life.

He would need a miracle to live out the hour.

“Mattie, what are you doing?”

I’m going to Chris.

I’m going to one of the friends I betrayed.

My best friend.

And he turned to meet his killer.

A
bigail stopped at her house to shower, change clothes and clear her head. Owen had agreed to meet her on the steps up to Ellis’s. She needed a few minutes alone—a few minutes to think in the quiet rooms where the man she’d loved and married and lost had lived for most of his short life.

If only the walls could speak, she thought, heading downstairs to the entry, her hair still damp from her shower. She’d pulled on jeans, her good running shoes, a camp shirt and her gun, a .40 caliber Glock. The niceties of jurisdictions and Maine’s gun laws notwithstanding, she doubted Lou Beeler would object.

She spotted Special Agents Ray Capozza and Mary Steele out on her doorstep and yanked open her front door. “What can I do for you?”

“We thought we’d stop by and see how you’re doing,” Capozza said.

“I’m fine. Just washed my hair. I didn’t blow-dry it—”

Steele rolled her eyes. “It’s a courtesy call, Detective Browning. We wanted to let you know that Grace Cooper has withdrawn her name for the State Department job. No reason stated.”

Capozza stared straight at Abigail, his gaze unwavering, hard-ass. She decided she liked him. “Lying to the police in a murder investigation could have something to do with it,” he said. “She told your husband at Ellis Cooper’s party—the day Agent Browning died—that her brother was down here on the water. She believed that was the case. If she’d told the investigators that fact seven years ago—” He shrugged. “Who knows?”

Abigail opened the door wider. “I’m off to meet Owen Garrison in a minute, but would you two care to come inside?”

Steele shook her head. “We have some loose ends we need to tie up.”

“Let us know if we can be of any assistance,” Capozza said. Abigail believed his courtesy had nothing to do with who her father was. The guy just wanted to help. He winked at her. “See you around, Detective.”

“Abigail,” she said.

“Yeah.”

She shut the door after the two federal agents left and headed for the back room, making sure the porch door was locked this time. She stood in the middle of the gutted room and heard the clatter of the tools, as if that summer afternoon so long ago were happening now. She remembered the hit on her head. The split second fear that she was going to die.

And, later, seeing Chris. That awful expression. She remembered the countless times she’d tried to describe it in her journals. He knew who’d smacked her on the head.

Mattie.

Probably, she thought. Almost certainly. But what had happened that day went beyond Mattie Young and his anger at Chris, his drinking, his sense of entitlement.

When he’d gone up to Ellis’s house, Chris had asked about Linc, not because he believed the boy was responsible for the break-in, but because he wanted to make sure Linc was safe. That was all.

“Things are happening on Mt. Desert.”

Her caller. The killer. Why draw her up here? Why now?

Abigail went into the kitchen and dug out her descriptions of the photos that had been left for her and Owen. She’d tried to be as precise as possible.

She read through them, pictured each shot—the people in them, the angles, the shadows, the time of day. Lou would have experts looking at them. They’d have all the right equipment.

Objectivity
.

She thought of the photo of her and Owen on the rocks. She could feel his arms around her, his breath on her as he’d kept her from running to her dead husband, and she could remember how much she’d hated him. It was a visceral reaction, natural. He was the one who’d found Chris. He was the one who’d first realized there was no hope for her husband.

And he was the one who’d had to tell her.

She put her notes away and headed outside, locking her front door behind her. She saw the fat robin back up on its branch and felt a surge of hope that she couldn’t describe or even understand.

Halfway up the driveway, she veered off onto the path through the woods that led to the cliffs where Doe Garrison had drowned. Chris had taken her out there once, but this had never been one of her favorite spots. The transition from woods to cliffs and ocean was too abrupt—downright scary, as far as she was concerned. She wasn’t much on vertical drops unless there was a rail or a window.

Owen, she knew, wouldn’t mind at all.

One of the differences between them, she thought, picking up her pace.

They’d assumed Mattie took the picture of Doe’s body on the dock, after his and the Brownings’ failed attempt to rescue her. But he was just seventeen then, a boy still himself.

Would a teenager snap a picture of a dead girl—a pretty fourteen-year-old he knew?

And why keep such a picture?

Why leave it for her brother?

Mattie wasn’t in the shot. That suggested it was most likely his work.

Abigail paused in the shade of a massive spruce, its lower branches dead sticks poking out of its gnarled trunk. Despite the ravages of the harsh conditions of its exposed spot, the tree had survived.

The angle of the shot of Doe and her traumatized family and friends meant it must have been taken not from a boat or farther out on the dock, but from the parking lot above, perhaps from a car or truck.

She shut her eyes, seeing the horror on the faces of the Garrisons—Owen, his parents, his grandmother. And Jason Cooper, his arm around his young daughter.

Who would take such a picture?

Chris and his grandfather were there, on the sidelines, grim and sad, but not a part of the Garrison and Cooper circle.

Mattie wasn’t there. Definitely. She’d remember.

And Ellis.

Abigail opened her eyes and felt a warm breeze sweep in as if from the center of the island.

Ellis Cooper wasn’t in the picture.

Lou Beeler had never warmed up to Grace Cooper. People said she was nice enough. Smart. Well-connected. But she’d always struck him as a woman wrapped so tight, once she started to unravel, that’d be it. It’d be like unrolling a mummy and finding nothing inside but bits of bones and little piles of dust.

For all her success and riches, she was a woman with no center. Lou was convinced she didn’t really know who she was.

He was relieved not to see any FBI agents parked in the Cooper driveway.

Grace called to him from the front porch. “Lieutenant Beeler,” she said, her voice cool, collected. “I imagine you’re looking for me, aren’t you?”

He walked up the steps, noting that the hanging plants looked parched—missing Mattie Young, no doubt. “Mind if I have a word with you?” he asked.

“Of course not.” She sat on a wicker settee with a little puff-ball of a dog in her lap. But her face was pale, her eyes distant, even as she smiled with an emotionless grace. “Please, sit down.”

Lou shook his head. “I don’t have that much time. I wanted to ask you, Ms. Cooper—” He paused, watching her reaction. She knew why he was there. “When Chris Browning came up to your uncle’s house after Abigail was attacked and spoke to you, why did you tell him your brother was down at the old Garrison foundation?”

“I—I—” She made a choking sound, unable to go on, and fell back against the settee. Her knees went slack, and the little dog slipped down her legs, then jumped off her lap and scampered up onto a nearby rocker.

Lou didn’t relent. “Did you know your brother was on the grounds?”

“No.” She recovered her poise. “I didn’t know. I didn’t lie to Chris.”

“Ms. Cooper—Grace, why did you think your brother was down at the old Garrison place?”

But she couldn’t answer, and Lou realized that she didn’t have to.

He saw her answer in her eyes. The truth had hit her, and hit hard. Just as it did him.

Ellis.

Her uncle had told her.

For the first time in many years, Lou’s knees buckled under him.

Oh, my God.

The two FBI agents pulled over just as Owen started up the steep steps. Special Agent Steele, in the passenger seat, rolled down her window and shouted to him. “You can’t even see those steps from the road. They’re amazing. I guess this island’s full of hidden, amazing spots.” But nothing about her manner suggested she was playing the tourist. “We just saw Detective Browning. She said she’d be along soon.”

Ray Capozza leaned over from the wheel. “You shouldn’t be running around out here by yourself.”

“Probably good advice,” Owen said.

Steele tapped her fingers on the open window. “Advice you’ll ignore.”

He said nothing, and the two agents went on their way. He continued up the steps. He would be able to see Abigail once she started up. He knew every inch of the stone steps, similar to, but not as dramatic as, the more famous steps up to the Thuya Gardens in Northeast Harbor, now open to the public. No such destiny awaited his great-grandfather’s former property.

As he climbed a narrow section of steps, Owen imagined visiting Thuya Gardens with Abigail, hiking every trail on Mt. Desert, kayaking with her—then, with a pang of guilt, realized Chris must have had similar ideas. He shook them off and focused on the task at hand.

When he reached the top of the steps, he saw that Jason Cooper’s car was in the driveway.

Owen looked down the vertical hillside, through the trees toward the road, but Abigail still hadn’t turned up. He walked out to the driveway, feeling the humidity in the air.

He remembered himself charging out the front door and down the steps after his sister.

Twenty-five years ago, if anyone had said one of the Garrison kids would fall off the cliffs and drown, one-hundred percent of the people told would have guessed it would be him.

The front door of the graceful house stood open. He headed up the shaded stone walk. A hummingbird fluttered to a pot of some kind of red flowers, almost as if Doe’s ghost had sent it as a reminder of her.

Owen peered through the screen door. “Hello—anyone home?”

When there was no answer, he pulled open the door and stepped onto the cool tile floor. Since his family had sold the place, he’d seldom been inside, and not just to avoid memories. Ellis was a private man who preferred small get-togethers with family and close friends. The garden party seven years ago had been an aberration, atypical of his nature.

When no one answered, Owen walked back to the kitchen.

Jason stood at the sink, staring out the window at his brother’s gardens.

“Jason? What’s going on?”

The older man didn’t look back from the sink. He said, “Chris suspected there was something weird about Ellis—something beyond eccentric. I never wanted to listen.” He lowered his head, as if in shame. “I accused him once of trailer-trash envy.”

“Jason—”

“I wish I knew what was going on. I wish I’d known all along and had asked the right questions. I thought…” He gulped back a sob. “I thought selling this place made sense. I hoped it would help Ellis—help all of us.”

“Where is he?”

Jason shook his head. “I don’t know.” He placed both his hands on the sink edge and dropped his head down between his arms. “I’m afraid he’s lost in his own obsessions. I’m afraid there’s no way back for him.”

Owen left Jason in the kitchen and quickly checked the living room, the library, and the dining room, but saw no one. He headed down the hall toward the back bedrooms. Not since he was a child had he gone this far into the house. He pushed back memories.

He arrived at Doe’s old room.

Jason came up behind him. “Ellis keeps it locked.”

“Not anymore.”

Owen reared back and kicked the door, splintering it away from the lock on the first try. It bounced open, and he went inside.

The room was as Doe had left it twenty-five years earlier.

The same white throw rugs, the same pink chenille bedspread, the same simple pine furniture.

And there were differences.

Birds, Owen saw. Dozens of stuffed birds stuck up on shelves, hanging from the ceiling. Hawks, eagles, robins, bluebirds, hummingbirds, chickadees.

And guns. They were on display behind a glass cabinet. A rifle, a shotgun, two revolvers and two pistols. Ammunition. A stack of paper targets.

Jason staggered, falling against the doorjamb. “Dear God.”

“Don’t go any farther. We don’t want to touch anything.” Owen put a hand on the older man’s shoulder and steadied him. “We need to get the police in here.”

“What’s he done?” Jason blinked rapidly, his face as pale as death. “My God in heaven. All these years…”

“Ellis was the one in the woods. He could have saved Doe.”

“Believe me, Owen. I had no idea. I knew he was attached to her. But—you know him. He’s always been quiet, introverted. Sensitive. He’s not a predator. He keeps to himself.”

“I wasn’t wrong. There was someone in the woods that day. Doe was upset because of Ellis. He didn’t save her because he knew he could never have her—or because he was afraid she’d expose him.” Owen heard the steeliness in his own voice. “He must have come on to her. God knows what he tried to do to her—did do. And she rejected him. She wasn’t upset because of Grace.”