Page 18 of Light of Day
“Same.”
She laughed and reached for the door handle.
“Before you go, has anyone called in about a missing woman, or anything unusual at all? A hotel guest has disappeared.”
“I haven’t gotten any calls like that. I would have told you. Let’s see…stolen bike, I wrote that one up.” She ticked off items on her fingers. “A break-in at the Norton cottage, but the only thing missing was a case of refried beans, and they weren’t entirely sure about that. An unauthorized party in the south woods, kids setting off firecrackers.”
“The south woods?” That caught his interest, since the south woods were on the way to the shell beach.
“Yeah, I got some complaints about the noise. People thought it might be gunshots, but when I went out there, I just found the MacIntyre brothers and their friends playing with firecrackers. They got a stern lecture, Marigold-style.”
“Scared straight, no doubt.”
“You betcha.”
They parted ways, and Luke decided that it wasn’t too late to swing by Denton Simms’ house. Denton liked to stay up and watch the late news because he had a very public crush on one of the local weathercasters. If his lights were off, Luke would simply go home.
“Local policing at its finest,” Luke murmured to himself. How many real police officers knew their community members’ habits the way he did?
Denton Simms lived in one of the oldest houses on the island, a single-story cedar-sided classic nestled near a popular swimming cove called Simms Cove, though people usually just called it “Swim Cove.” The house had a brick chimney and white gingerbread trim along the roof of the wraparound porch. A wind sock shaped like a bluefish fluttered from the flagpole out front, and two weathered Adirondack chairs faced the cove. On the days he didn’t fish, Denton held court from those chairs, telling stories from his days of harpoon fishing for bluefin tuna.
Luke parked up on the road and walked down the trail to the cove. From there, he crossed a grassy lawn maintained by the Island Trust. This entire cove and its surroundings, all the way to the edge of Denton’s property, had been acquired by the trust to keep the cove accessible to the community. He’d heard that Denton had received an offer for his house as well; it would make a great location for a museum. Word had it that Denton was considering it.
The porch light was on, so Luke knocked on the door. When he got no answer, he walked around the porch to peer in the window. None of the interior lights were on, and he caught no blue flicker from Denton’s giant HDTV flat-screen.
Damn it. He’d have to come back first thing tomorrow.
As he strode back up the hill toward his truck, he caught movement in the sumac bushes to his right. “Hello?” he called. “Denton, is that you?”
The rustling stopped. Maybe it was just a night bird, or an animal. Ignoring the shiver down his spine, he hurried onwards.
9
Over the years,Heather’s mother had held just about every job available on a small island off the coast of Maine. She’d painted houses, she’d picked crabs, she’d bartended, she’d learned to roof, she’d sold muffins at the general store, she’d turned her car into a cab. Heather had quite a few memories of being strapped into her car seat next to a fisherman who’d had a few too many drinks to drive himself home.
One of her jobs had been caring for an elderly man who owned several properties, including one he willed to Sally when he died. Heather remembered dancing around the house with her euphoric mother when she got the news. Then they went to look at it, and all that excitement faded away when they saw that she’d been gifted with a glorified fish-house. Only its indoor plumbing set it apart from the other sheds that sat at the end of Sea Smoke’s fishing docks.
At first Sally had turned it into a hair salon but after she mistakenly doubled the amount of product required for Shannon Simms’ perm, that business fizzled. Word got around fast on Sea Smoke.
Personally, Heather believed that the name she’d chosen had doomed the salon from the start. “Hairballs?” she’d asked her mother incredulously.
“It’s unique.”
“Yes, I get that. But a trip to the salon shouldn’t make you throw up.”
Apparently, it might have, becauseHairballsfolded after three months.
But Sally McPhee had an incredible ability to rise again after every disaster. She did some research and found out that serving beverages could be very profitable. She got rid of the shampoo bowl and installed a commercial coffee machine and a camp stove to make eggs on.
She’d been running the Bloodshot Eyeball Coffee and Breakfast ever since, and this business had become an actual success.
Which probably proved that it wasn’t about the name after all.
Her hours were godawful—she opened the shop at four-thirty in the morning, and kept it open until two in the afternoon. The best thing about it was that it kept her from drinking. In high school, Heather had filled in for her when Sally was too hungover to go in. After she’d left for college, Sally’s only option was not to open when she couldn’t handle it herself, so she’d been mostly sober since then.
By eight o’clock, Sally was already in her pajamas, curled under a blanket on the sagging couch, her TV tuned to a cable show on pirate shipwrecks.
“You know some people think there’s treasure buried on this island?” She tilted her head back to watch Heather move around the kitchen. Whenever Heather visited, she deep-cleaned the kitchen before anything else. A girl had to eat, and she had to feel comfortable with the conditions.
