See You at Sunset (3 page)

She had the same picture in a larger frame in Boston, and also a few casual shots of the two of them on the island. There were no pictures of her husband in uniform, even though a few of her friends thought that was kind of strange. But Holly hated looking at him in his army gear. While she would always be proud of his service to his country, she didn’t want the daily reminder. She didn’t need pictures, because the memories of his ultimate sacrifice were lodged deep inside, in blood and bone. Some days the pain was as real as it was four years ago.

And that wasn’t the way she wanted to remember him.

She picked up the photo and kissed it for what had to be the millionth time.

Turning away from the heartbreaking image, she forced herself to focus on the present. Job one right now was getting the store in shape, which meant getting her aunts to agree to her ideas. Holly desperately wanted them to let her inject some actual cash into renovations too. She could afford it, while her aunts didn’t have a dime to spare.

The old gals had always refused her previous offers of help, but things were different now. The doomsday clock was ticking, thanks to Night Owl. Now it was a matter of how quickly they could transform the general store into a business that would survive and prosper, instead of fading away to nothing more than a few photos preserved in the archives of Seashell Bay’s historical society.

Holly knew she could do it if they’d let her. After all, saving businesses was basically what she did for a living.

The first thing she had to do was make a brutally honest assessment of the current state of affairs. She knew the store was in pretty rough shape, but until she got her eyes on the place—and especially on its financials—she wouldn’t know the true depth or urgency of the problem.

She quickly ditched her city clothes in favor of a yellow tank top, black yoga pants, and yellow Keds—her bee outfit, according to her aunts—and then headed across the narrow gravel path leading to the back of the store. As anxious as she was to get to work, she stopped to gaze for the first time in a year across the sparkling little bay and the strait that separated Seashell Bay from Long Island. The glittering waters looked as placid as a lake in the afternoon sun, and in the distance, she could just make out the gentle curve of Long Island’s popular South Beach. The view never failed to fill Holly with a mix of tranquility and wistfulness. There was no vista more familiar to her than this one, and yet nothing she’d seen anywhere else could move her like this little corner of the world she still called home.

As usual, she had to pull hard on the brass knob of the store’s weathered door to get the lock hardware to line up. She stepped into the storage area, making a mental note to upgrade the locks and the security system. Drew had once told her that cheap dead bolts like the ones at the store could be opened with a pick or a bump key in seconds, often leaving no trace of entry. That had given Holly nightmare visions of some scumbag slipping inside late at night when Florence was working alone in her little office behind the checkout counter.

With the increase in tourism and traffic to the island, it just didn’t pay to take chances.

The storage area looked as well organized as ever, with metal shelf units lining three out of four walls. Beer sales were the store’s bread and butter, so there were always plenty of cases of both local and imported beers on hand. But other goods were kept to a minimum supply of each product. Florence had always been efficient at keeping inventory, and thus costs, down. She knew what her customers wanted and when.

Holly pushed through the swinging door into the retail area. It looked exactly the same as it had last summer—and every year before that. Wooden shelf units of canned goods, chips, bread, cereal, and household necessities like soap and toilet paper occupied the center of the square store. Wine racks, a beer fridge, and a soda cooler took up most of the rear wall, along with souvenir T-shirt racks. There was a sad-looking old chiller with packaged meats and cheeses butting up against the seven-foot-high DVD shelf unit, its old discs crammed haphazardly within the limited space. The checkout counter had metal racks with stuff like candy, gum, lip balm, and batteries. A shorter counter behind the cash register held a two-burner coffeemaker with a storage cabinet and a small refrigerator underneath.

The modern cash register was only two years old and stood out like a sore thumb in the throwback shop. Holly had bought and presented the robust machine to her mystified aunts as an overdue replacement for the manual clunker they’d used for decades. She suspected that few of the new machine’s powerful capabilities were being utilized.

Most items for sale featured small green price stickers laboriously applied each day by Beatrice. Her aunts had plenty of time to create and apply the stickers, and would die before they used a modern scanner at the register. Besides, Florence always maintained that their customers liked their old-fashioned ways.

Repressing a sigh, Holly pushed up the hinged section of the counter and passed through into the cramped office. She’d always reluctantly taken her aunts’ word for the state of the store’s finances. But those days were over now. She was no longer willing to back off in the face of Florence’s unconvincing reassurances that the store was doing
quite all right
. Holly knew she would feel like a jerk for snooping, but it was the only way she could learn the truth and develop a plan.

Unfortunately, Florence was still in the Stone Age when it came to keeping records. Holly had bought her a laptop three years ago and some books on systems and software, but her aunt had eventually confessed that she wouldn’t trust the store’s records to some
darn machine
. Most of the accounts were still kept in bound ledgers, accompanied by folders full of printed receipts. Holly had no intention of wading through that mass of detail today. Everything she needed to know would be in their Portland accountant’s profit and loss statements and balance sheets. Those documents would tell her if she was dealing with a sick patient or a critical one.

Or worse yet, the store could already be effectively DOA. The mere thought of the last possibility made her stomach do a sickening flip.

She dragged the old office chair over to the ancient four-drawer filing cabinet by Florence’s desk. Opening the second drawer, she scanned a jammed row of buff file folders. Holly pulled out the one containing last year’s reports from the CPA and started reading.

Fifteen minutes and two files later, she had a nauseating understanding of the Godzilla-sized disaster that currently loomed over her aunts.

Home for an hour or so until he had to head to Lily’s for dinner, Micah had just popped open a beer and started to check the mail he’d picked up at the post office, when his cell phone rang.

His secretary always set calls to be forwarded to his cell at the end of the day. “Deputy Lancaster,” he answered.

“Jesus, Micah, somebody broke into my house!”

“Fitz?” Micah recognized the young woman’s voice, though it sounded half an octave higher than usual.

“Yeah, it’s me. Sorry, I’m pretty freaked out right now.”

“Okay, but slow down and tell me what happened.”

He heard her suck in a deep breath.

“I got home from work, like, five minutes ago. My foot’s been driving me crazy all afternoon, so I went to take one of my prescription painkillers and damned if the bottle was gone. That freaked the crap out of me, because I knew I’d left it on the bathroom vanity this morning.”

Fitz was a bright and responsible woman. As far as Micah was concerned, her word was gold. “I’ll be there in three minutes. Leave everything exactly as it is.”

“Okay. Thanks, Micah.”

His mind racing, Micah grabbed his hat, locked his door, and hurried out to the cruiser that was parked in his driveway. Unless Enid Fitzsimmons had suddenly gone loopy, it looked like a real crime had just been committed in Seashell Bay.

Micah made a tight turn onto a semi-overgrown path leading to a ramshackle cottage set back a couple of hundred feet from Yellow Grass Road. Fitz’s place was in one of the island’s least desirable locations. The homes on this winding, north-end lane offered no views of anything other than rather scrubby landscape. While most of them were at least well maintained, a few were serious candidates for demolition. Fitz, a young marine mechanic at O’Hanlon’s Boatyard, had told him she bought the old Cavanagh place for pocket change in an estate sale. Since then, she’d been working hard to fix it up herself. She hadn’t done much with the exterior yet, instead focusing on making the interior habitable after years of neglect by the previous owners.

Still wearing her grease-stained work coveralls, the young woman pushed open her screen door as Micah got out of the cruiser. “Can you believe this, Micah? Who the hell would rob
this
dump?” She swept her left hand around in a dramatic gesture.

Micah had to admit that Fitz had a point. It would take a pretty desperate—or stupid—thief to hit on a place that could only be described as modest.

“I know this sucks, Fitz, but I need you to focus,” he said as she waved him to come in. “You can start by telling me if the doors were locked.”

He put the odds of that at about 10 percent.

Fitz rolled her big green eyes. Red-haired and heavily freckled, she was cute rather than pretty, but with her sunny personality and dynamite little body, she never lacked admirers. Micah didn’t date much but had asked Fitz out not long after she arrived from somewhere out west. They’d had one date—dinner at a Vietnamese restaurant in Portland—but nothing had sparked, at least not for him. Then again, no one had been able to ignite any true heat in him for years—no one other than Holly Tyler.

“Like I’d bother,” she scoffed. “How many people on this island lock their damn doors? Hell, one of the reasons I came here was because it was supposed to be ultrasafe. Micah, this is crazy.”

“No point in checking for signs of forced entry then,” he said pointedly.

“Smart-ass,” she grumped.

Micah scanned the small, neatly furnished living room. Nothing seemed out of place, as far as he could tell. “Take me through what you’ve found. What’s missing?”

Fitz slipped past him, taking quick strides down the center hall. Micah followed.

She swung left into a bathroom that was tiny but had been completely redone. There was a new tub and shower combo, a small new vanity with a stone countertop, and updated light fixtures. The walls had been painted sunflower yellow, and fluffy blue towels hung on a rack by the tub.

Micah knew she’d done the impressive reno herself, including the plumbing.

Fitz pointed at the vanity. “The Vicodin was right there beside the liquid soap. I haven’t moved it since I got it from the pharmacy two days ago. I won’t take them at the boatyard, so I just down one in the morning and another as soon as I get home.”

“Anything else gone from the bathroom? Any other meds?”

Fitz shook her head. “Nothing. I was hoping to stop the Vicodin tomorrow, even though the doctor gave me enough for a couple of weeks. It’s making me a little dopey, and I’ve been worried I might do something really dumb at work.”

“Okay, what else is missing? Any cash or jewelry?”

“I don’t keep cash in the house, and I’m not exactly the Bling Queen of Seashell Bay, Micah. There isn’t a damn thing worth stealing. I’ve got better things to spend my money on than that,” she said in a dry tone.

Micah couldn’t recall seeing her wearing any jewelry. And her watch was a Timex with a leather strap. “Like fixing up the place, right? You’re doing a great job.”

She gave him a tiny smile, then slid across the hall to the bedroom. It too had been updated. Blue paint, white roman shades, a sturdy-looking ceiling fan, and some coastal artwork. And a big sleigh bed with matching dresser, no doubt bought secondhand, from the looks of the worn and chipped surfaces.

But unlike the living room and bath, the bedroom was a mess. Clothes were strewn all over the floor, and the drawers from a small nightstand were upended on the bed. Micah glanced at the scattered piles of panties, bras, camisoles, and a single red thong, and then shifted his gaze back to Fitz, who had reddened slightly but shrugged.

“Obviously, he rifled through all those drawers.” She pointed to the dresser. “Tossed my things around pretty good. I don’t know whether he took anything or not. I don’t count my damn underwear.”

“Did he muck around in your kitchen cupboards too? People usually keep some spare cash there or in the bedroom.”

“Yeah, a bunch of the doors were open, but he didn’t make much of a mess there.” Fitz started to look a bit queasy. “God, maybe he’s one of those perverts who like to mess with women’s underwear. I’ve read about creeps like that.” Then she blew out a sigh. “But I guess I’m just being paranoid, right?”

He gave her sympathetic smile. “A bit. Try not to read too much into it, Fitz. I’m sure this guy was looking for cash and drugs. There’s a pretty good market out there for opioids like hydrocodone and fentanyl.”

While he cautioned himself to resist coming to conclusions before he even started his investigation, Micah’s immediate feeling was that it might very well be a kid looking for a free high, not somebody trying to sell the stolen drugs. If money were the thief’s primary objective, he would have passed on a house like this. There certainly were more inviting targets on the island than Fitz’s run-down-looking cottage.

His gut told him somebody might have found out she had a Vicodin prescription and decided to make an easy score while she was at work. Probably knew she was one of a multitude of islanders who never locked their doors.

“When I think about some dirtbag putting his grubby hands all over my clothes, especially my underwear…” Fitz’s eyes started to tear up. “I think I’m going to have to throw it all out. Every single thing.”

Micah got it. Burglary victims always felt violated, and when they knew the thief had handled personal things like intimate clothing, many reacted just like Fitz.

“I hear you, and I’m sorry.” He gave her shoulder a brief, comforting squeeze. “Now, who else knew you were taking Vicodin?”