Whiskey Beach (29 page)

They followed the passage, going down or taking a turn. From the blueprint in his head, Eli judged the panels had once opened in strategic places throughout the house, into parlors, the kitchen, a sitting room, a hallway and down to the depths of the basement.

“Hell. Should’ve moved the shelves barricading the other side first.” But he found the lever, drew the door to him so he and Mike peered through old pots and rusted tools and into the basement.

“You’ve got to unseal this, man. Think of the Halloween parties.”

But he was thinking of something else. “I could set him up,” he murmured.

“Huh?”

“The asshole breaking in here, digging down here. I’ve got to think about this.”

“Stake yourself out in here, lure him in. Classic ambush,” Mike agreed. “Then what?”

“I’m thinking about it.” He closed the door, vowing to move the shelves, formulate a plan.

“Let me know. I wouldn’t mind being in on catching that guy. Maureen’s still pretty freaked,” Mike said as they started back up. “I don’t know if she’ll really relax until they catch the guy, especially when most of us figure he’s the same one who plugged the PI. Stands to reason.”

“Yeah, it does.”

“And when she found out he planted that gun in Abra’s place, she super freaked.”

“Can’t blame her for— What? What gun? What are you talking about?”

“The gun Abra found in her . . . Oh.” After a pained wince, Mike stuffed his hands in his pockets. “Well, shit, she didn’t tell you.”

“No, she damn well didn’t tell me. But you’re going to.”

“Get me another beer and my guts are spilled.”

A
T THE END OF A LONG DAY—TWO CLASSES, A MASSIVE
cleaning job and a pair of massages—Abra pulled up to her cottage.

And just sat.

She didn’t want to go in. She hated knowing she didn’t want to go inside her own home, tend to her own things, use her own shower.

She loved Laughing Gull, and had from the first instant she’d seen it. She wanted that feeling back, the pride, the comfort, the
rightness
of it, and all she felt was dread.

He’d spoiled it, whoever the hell he was, coming into her home, leaving his violence and death behind. A monster in the closet, in the form of a gun.

It left her two choices, she told herself. Let the monster win—give up, sit and brood. Or fight back and fix it.

Put that way, she decided, there wasn’t a choice at all.

She shoved out of the car, muscled out her table, her bag, carted them both to the door. Inside, she leaned her table against the wall before carrying her bag into the living room.

Driving nearly twenty miles up the coast to buy the smudge stick had added onto her already crowded day, but when she took it out of her bag it felt like a positive action.

She’d burn the sage, cleanse her house. If she
felt
her house was cleansed, it
was
cleansed. And once she’d reclaimed her place, she’d get serious about adding a little greenhouse so she could grow her own herbs in bigger quantities. She’d make her own damn smudge sticks, and have fresh herbs year-round for cooking.

Maybe she’d sell them, too. Another enterprise. Create her own potpourri and sachets.

Something to think about.

But for now she did her best to clear her mind, to think only clean, positive thoughts as she lit the sage, held it over an abalone shell for safety and blew out the flame to encourage the smoke. Her home, she thought. The floors, the ceilings, the corners belonged to her.

The process, walking from room to room with the scent of white sage and lavender, calmed her, as did reminding herself what she’d made there, for herself, for others.

Faith, she thought, hope, and the symbols of them forged strength.

Once she’d finished the house, she stepped out onto her little patio, gently waving the smudge stick to send all that hope and faith into the air.

And saw Eli and the dog walking up the beach steps.

It made her feel a little foolish, standing there with her smoking sage as evening settled over the beach, as the man and the happy-faced dog climbed toward her.

To compensate, she stuck the smudge stick in the river rocks around her little Zen fountain where it would burn away naturally and safely.

“What a handsome couple.” Smile in place, she walked over to greet them. “And a nice surprise. I just got home a few minutes ago.”

“What’re you doing?”

“Oh.” She glanced as he did at the smudge stick. “Just a little homey ritual. Kind of a spring cleaning.”

“Burning sage? That’s a ward-off-evil-spirits kind of thing.”

“I think of it as more a clearing out negativity. Did your family get off all right this morning?”

“Yeah.”

“Sorry I couldn’t stay to see them off. Busy day for me.”

Something wrong, she thought, or something not quite right. All she wanted at that moment was quiet, peace and—a rarity for her—solitude. “I still have a lot to catch up on,” she continued. “Why don’t I stop by in the morning before my class, get your shopping list? I can pick up what you need before I come back to do the house.”

“What I need is for you to tell me why I had to hear from Mike that someone put a gun in your house, that the police were here searching. That’s what I need.”

“I didn’t want to bring it up with your family here. I called the police,” she added.

“But not me. You didn’t call me, or tell me.”

“Eli, there wasn’t anything you could do, and with a houseful of people—”

“That’s bullshit.”

Her hackles tingled. The comfort she’d found from the ritual struck against his anger, her own, flint against steel.

“It’s not, and there was no point in me walking into Bluff House on Saturday announcing I’d just found a murder weapon in my incense box and had cops tromping all over my house.”

“There was every point in telling me. Or there damn sure should have been.”

“Well, I don’t agree. And it was my problem, my decision.”

“Your problem?” Insult punched through temper. “That’s how it is? You can come into my place with pots of soup, massage tables, Jesus, dogs. You can walk in, in the middle of the night, to close a fucking window and fight off an assault, but when somebody plants a gun on you, tries to implicate you in a murder, it’s your problem? A murder most likely connected to me. But that’s none of my business?”

“I didn’t say that.” Even to her own ears the defense sounded weak. “I didn’t mean that.”

“What do you mean?”

“I didn’t want to dump all this on you and your family.”

“You’re in this because you’re involved with me. And you pushed and wheedled your way in.”

“Pushed and wheedled?” Her own insult bloomed so bright and hot, she whirled away to try to capture some of the smoke, and the calm, then immediately decided she’d have needed a smudge stick the size of Whiskey Beach Light to manage it. “Wheedled?”

“Damn right you did, from the minute I came back here. Now you’re in, and you don’t want to dump? You don’t give anybody else a chance to dump. You’re there with the shovel before the first clod hits the ground. But when it falls on you, you don’t trust me enough to help.”

“God. God! It isn’t about trust. It’s about timing.”

“If that were true, you’d have found the time to tell me. You found it to tell Maureen.”

“She was—”

“Instead of finding the time, you’re up here lighting sage on fire and waving around a smoking stick.”

“Don’t make fun of my process.”

“I don’t care if you burn a field of sage or sacrifice a chicken. I care you didn’t tell me you were in trouble.”

“I’m not in trouble. The police know it wasn’t my gun. I called Vinnie the minute I found it.”

“But not me.”

“No.” She sighed, wondering how trying to do the right thing could go so horribly wrong. “I didn’t.”

“My family left this morning, but you didn’t tell me. You weren’t going to tell me now.”

“I needed to wave my smoking stick around and get comfortable in my house again. It’s getting cold. I want to go in.”

“Fine. Go in and pack a bag.”

“Eli, I just want to be alone and quiet.”

“You can be alone and quiet at Bluff House. It’s a big place. You’re not staying here by yourself until this whole goddamn mess is over.”

“This is my house.” Her eyes stung, and she wished she could blame it on the thinning, sluggish smoke. “I’m not letting some bastard drive me out of my house.”

“Then we’ll bunk here.”

“I don’t want you to bunk here.”

“If you don’t want us in, we’ll stay out here, but we stay.”

“Oh, for God’s sake.” She turned on her heel, strode back inside. She said nothing when he, with a slightly hesitant Barbie, followed her in.

Instead she went straight into the kitchen, poured herself a glass from an uncorked bottle of Shiraz.

“I know how to take care of myself.”

“No question. You know how to take care of yourself and everybody else. You don’t know how, apparently, to let someone take care of you. That’s conceit.”

She slapped the glass on the counter. “It’s independence and capability.”

“To a point, it is. Then it tips over into conceit, and stubbornness. You’ve tipped. This wasn’t like you had a leaky pipe, so you grabbed a wrench or called a plumber instead of the guy you’re sleeping with. Add the guy you’re sleeping with is involved with this whole clusterfuck. And he’s a lawyer.”

“I called a lawyer,” she said, then immediately wished she hadn’t.

“Great. Good.” Eli shoved his hands in his pockets, paced a couple of circles. “So you talked to the cops, a lawyer, your neighbors. Anybody else other than me, of course.”

She shook her head. “I didn’t want to spoil your family’s visit. It seemed pointless for you, or any of you, to worry.”

“You were worried.”

“I needed to . . . Yes, all right. Yes, I’ve been worried.”

“I need you to tell me everything that happened, in detail. I need you to tell me what you said to the police, what they said to you. Everything you can remember.”

“Because you’re a lawyer.”

The long, quiet look he sent her accomplished what words didn’t. It made her feel foolish. It made her feel wrong.

“Because we’re involved.” His tone, quiet as the look, finished the job. “Because this started with me or with Bluff House, or both. And because I’m a lawyer.”

“All right. I’ll pack first.” When he lifted his eyebrows, she shrugged. “It’s too cold for you to sleep outside. And I know he’s got no reason to come back here again. He has reasons to break into Bluff House again. Or it feels like it. So I’ll pack some things and go with you.”

Compromise? he wondered. Isn’t this what his grandmother had spoken of? That give-and-take on both sides to find a balance.

“Good.”

When she walked away, he picked up her unfinished wine. “We won that battle,” he told Barbie. “But I don’t think we’ve won the war. Yet.”

He let her have quiet on the drive down, and stayed downstairs when she went up to unpack. If she put her things in another bedroom, he’d deal with it later. For now, it was enough to know she was with him, and safe.

In the kitchen, he poked in the fridge, the freezer. Leftover ham, he calculated, and plenty of sides. Even he should be able to put a decent enough meal together.

By the time she came down, he had the Monday night hodgepodge meal set up in the breakfast area.

“You can fill me in while we eat.”

“All right.” She sat, oddly comforted when Barbie elected to curl up by her feet instead of Eli’s. “I’m sorry I made you feel I didn’t trust you. That wasn’t it.”

“It’s part of it, but we’ll get into that later. Tell me exactly what happened. Step by step.”

His response only dampened her already soggy mood. “I wanted to meditate,” she began, and told him everything in as precise a manner as she could.

“You never touched the gun?”

“No. It fell when I dropped the box, and I left it there.”

“As far as you know, they didn’t find any prints that shouldn’t have been there?”

“No, just the fibers.”

“And the police haven’t contacted you since?”

“Vinnie called me today, just to check in. He said they should have the ballistic results tomorrow or Wednesday, but more likely Wednesday.”

“What about the gun itself? Was it registered?”

“He didn’t tell me. I think he has to be careful what he says to me. But they know it wasn’t mine. I’ve never owned a gun. I’ve never even held a gun. And if it was the gun used to kill Kirby Duncan, they know I was here, with you.”

Handily covering each other, Eli thought. Just what would Wolfe make of that? “What did your lawyer say?”

“To call him if they wanted to question me again, and that he’d contact Detective Corbett directly. I’m not worried about being a murder suspect. Nobody thinks I killed Duncan.”

“I could’ve planted the gun in your place.”

“That would be stupid, which you’re not.”

“I could be using you for sex and patsy potential.”

For the first time in what felt like hours, she smiled. “No more sex if you make me your patsy. And that’s just not logical as it only turns the light back on, makes them look at you again. Which is exactly what whoever did plant it wanted, and why they suddenly made that anonymous call to Wolfe. The fact is, really, all this reeks of setup, and Corbett’s not an idiot.”

“No, I don’t think he is. But there’s another angle. It’s possible you’ve had contact with the killer three times now. Here, in the bar and now with him planting the gun at your cottage. That’s something to worry about, and you know it. You’re not an idiot either.”

“I can’t do anything about that but be careful.”

“You could leave, go visit your mother for a while. You won’t,” he added before she could speak. “And I don’t blame you. But it’s an option. Another option is to trust me.”

Hearing him say it, knowing she’d given him cause to say it, made her absolutely miserable. “Eli, I do trust you.”

“Not where it gets sticky, you don’t. I don’t know if I blame you for that, either. Men have let you down. Your father. It’s one thing for it not to work out between him and your mother, but he’s still your father. And he chose not to be one, not to be a real part of your life. He let you down.”

“I don’t dwell on it.”

“That’s healthy of you, but it’s there.”

When he let that hang in the air, she admitted defeat. “Yes, it’s there. I don’t really matter to him, and never have. I don’t dwell on it, but it’s there.”

“You don’t dwell because it’s unproductive, and you like to produce.”

“Interesting way to put it.” Her lips curved again. “And true.”

“And you don’t dwell because you know it’s his loss. Then there’s the bastard who hurt you. That’s letting you down big-time. You cared about him, trusted him, let him in, then he turned on you. He violated you.”