With Every Breath

With

Every

Breath

Beverly Bird

HarperPaperbacks
A Division of HarperCollinsPublishers

HarperPaperbacks

A Division of HarperCollinsPublishers
10 East 53rd Street, New York, N.Y. 10022-5299

If you purchased this book without a cover, you should be aware that this book is stolen property. It was reported as "unsold and destroyed" to the publisher and neither the author nor the publisher has received any payment for this "stripped book."

This is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogues are products of the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 1997 by Beverly Bird All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

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ISBN 0-06-101113-4

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Cover illustration by Joe Burleson

First HarperPaperbacks printing: January 1997

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♦
10 987654321

For my father, long overdue but no less sincere for it.

PROLOGUE

May 1972

"Man, I do
not
like it up here," Hector complained. The Ford’s vents were open, the windows were rolled down, and the day was none too warm to begin with, but his small, pinched face shone with nervous perspiration.

Dave Bramnick moved his gaze off the boulevard—a misnomer if ever there was one—to look over at him. In the four years that Hector Marks had worked under him, he hadn’t liked much of anything yet, but in this case Dave tended to agree with him.

"You know what I think?" Hector went on. "I think when the mainlanders talk down the island, it ain’t the
big
island they’re speaking of. No, sir. It’s up here. It’s The Wick."

"Yup," Dave answered, looking ahead at the two-lane road again. That was nobody’s new opinion.

"Folks up here are crazy out of their minds. It’s all that inbreeding."

"Hasn’t been none of that in a while now."

Two centuries ago they had sure enough fiddled around with their kin up on The Wick, Dave thought. He’d give Hector that. There’d been only a handful of English settlers up here back then. They’d landed on Candle Island thinking they’d found North America, then one of them had wandered over to the other side to discover that there were twelve more miles of ocean between them and what was to become the state of Maine.

They hadn’t even really landed on the
island,
but on the detached spit of land just to the north of it. It had taken another half century or so for whalers to discover and settle the big part of Candle. But after that, Dave reckoned, once they had neighbors, The Wick people probably stopped diddling around with their grandmas for lack of anyone else.

With the dawn of the twentieth century, somebody had finally figured out to build a bridge over the inlet, joining the big part of Candle with The Wick. And in the early fifties an enterprising guy by the name of Harry Reiter had started running a ferry between Jonesport, on the mainland, and the southernmost end of Candle. Now everybody was one big happy family, except The Wick’s old reputation still hung over it like a pall.

Dave was the chief of police, with three officers under him. If they had trouble, it almost always came from up on The Wick, with somebody getting drunk and trying to shoot somebody else, or a Wick kid coming down onto the big island to steal something out of the drugstore. The old-timers up there still clung to their English accents a bit, too. But, then, the whole island did that.

He rolled the patrol car up onto the bridge, and Hector kept muttering. "Just my dumb luck to be on shift today."

"Could be Beacher’s dumb luck to have disappeared," Dave suggested. The tires
tha-lumped
over the

seams in the bridge paving, and the seams came every ten feet or so, making his voice hitch.

"He probably passed out dead drunk in the dunes somewhere," Hector guessed. Then he brightened. "Or maybe they all did
finally start shootin’ each other. Crazy Wick fools. I swear to God, they’re all born with shotguns in their hands."

"Maybe," Dave said mildly. Actually, while he thought that The Wick folks might shoot a mainlander given half a chance, they generally only pretended to go after their own.

The car began thumping harder and faster as they came down off the bridge. There was only one road on The Wick, barely paved, wandering around the tiny island’s perimeter in a rough circle. There were maybe twenty houses on the road, and nothing but dunes and reeds and marshes in the middle. Dave turned onto the east side of The Wick. The patrol car bumped its way upward as the cracked asphalt rose again over a rocky promontory on the southeast end of the island. It was a huge pile of boulders that looked for all the world like God had gotten thoroughly annoyed about something when He’d been building the world, and He’d just flung them down. The fly-off had scattered a handful more boulders up and down the beach.

Dave descended the crest and cruised around The Wick once, sort of scoping it out. Then he stopped in front of Beacher Brogan’s place. Hector kept mumbling as Dave got out of the car. As far as Wick houses went, the Brogan place was one of the better ones. Beacher had pretty steady work. He fished off Lowell Shiffer’s boat, docked down on the big island, and he showed up most days, too. If it wasn’t for fishing, the whole of Candle would probably have gone bankrupt years before.

The Brogan house, though hardly grand, was clean and in good repair. Beacher took good care of it when he wasn’t in one of his drinking spells, and he always patched up the shattered windows and the holes in the walls that appeared whenever he was.

Dave stepped up onto the wraparound deck. The weathered wood sounded hollow beneath his bootheels. He got the feeling that the house was abandoned and empty. Lowell Shiffer had reported that Beacher hadn’t been in to work in three days, but his drunks rarely lost him more than one. And usually Beacher’s binges tended to be a good month apart. Lowell said he’d had one no more than ten days ago.

Even so, Dave thought, Beacher had a wife and a kid, and even if he was passed out dead drunk again, one of them ought to be around somewhere.

Nobody was around.

Dave hadn’t noticed another living soul since they’d come up onto The Wick. Curtains had shifted at the windows of the other cottages as the police car moved up the road, but he hadn’t actually seen any faces. Folks were no doubt wondering who Dave was looking for this time. Or maybe, given the unnatural quiet of the Brogan place, they already knew.

Dave banged on the screen door and waited for the sound of footsteps inside, not really expecting to hear them. "Hey, Hector," he called back to the car. "Call in to the station, get Derek to check with the school. See if the kid’s been attending."

Hector wasted no time getting back into the squad car. He kept watching the dunes as though expecting a gun-wielding, inbred Englishman to come raving out of the reeds behind the house at any time, loaded for bear.

Dave moved over to the big, bay window and peered inside. A picture over the sofa was hanging crookedly on the wall, and its glass was cracked. Could be from Beacher’s previous week’s drunk, or it could be more recent.

"The kid ain’t been in school, either," Hector called up from the car.

Dave nodded, unsurprised.

He tried the door. It was locked. He used the butt end of his service revolver to strike a single blow to the knob, then he fished into the resulting hole with one big, gnarled finger to spring the lock free completely.

He stepped into the living room. Hector close behind him. The smell hit them first.

Hector groaned and backpedaled fast, out the door again, and Dave walked thoughtfully into the living room. Not death, he thought. That wasn’t what he smelled, not exactly. It was more metallic, the cloying reek of blood.

Old blood, he thought, sniffing.

He moved down the hall into the bedrooms, then came back and peered into the dining room. Nothing was particularly out of whack.

He stepped into the kitchen, and that was where he found it. The blood was spattered all over the pristine white of the refrigerator. There was a bigger, drying puddle in the center of the floor, streaks shooting out from it.

Dave stepped over it to try the handle on the back door. It was locked, too.

Then he heard a sound that made the hairs on his nape stand up.

"Dance, little baby, dance up high. Never mind, baby, your buddy is by. Crow and caper, caper and crow, there, little baby, there you go!"

A soft, sweet voice, breathlessly singing. Dave had been thinking that maybe Beacher had finally killed both Annabel and the kid, that it had been a particularly

bad drunk, then he’d woken up sober and seen what he’d done. He’d thought Beacher probably just took off ahead of the law, locking ail the doors nice and careful behind him. He followed the young voice to the pantry, and he knew before he opened the door that he was going to find the Brogan kid inside.

She was crouched in the back, dressed only in panties, crammed into a little space left between a bucket and some canned goods. She stopped singing when she saw him and gave a deep, shuddering sigh.

The smell was overwhelming in there, not just the blood, but excrement and urine, and Dave knew that she’d probably been in there the whole three days, singing, singing. Blood matted her short blond hair.

Dave Bramnick hunkered down in the pantry door. "It’s okay, honey," he said quietly. "Come on, you can come out of there now."

Nothing.

"Come on out and tell us what happened."

She acknowledged him by looking into his eyes. Dave felt the hairs on his nape stir again. Something cold settled into his bowels. In all his forty-six years, it was the first time he’d ever looked into anybody's eyes and seen absolutely nothing.

She was a pretty little thing, but she studied him with a total absence of expression, like those angels that the old masters painted centuries ago. There was something vapid about her face now. He was no psychiatrist, but he could pretty much guess what had happened here—to the kid, at least. She’d kept herself going through three days of hiding, singing to herself, and now that it was over, now that somebody had come, she had given up.

Dave eased her gently out of the pantry. She was as limp as a rag doll.

He held her for a moment, then he set her on her

feet, half-expecting her to crumple, but she stood there, staring beyond him, staring at nothing.

He tried again, though he pretty much knew he wasn’t going to get anything out of her.

"Where’s your daddy, honey? Where did your mommy go?"

"Jesus H. Christ!" Hector cried out, finally coming into the kitchen behind him. "What
happened
?"

Dave shook his head and picked up the little girl once more. "Take her down to Doe Carlson on the big island. She’ll clean her up and look after her until we . . . until I can make some sense of this. Better send Derek and Charlie up here, too."

"You want me to call the county?" Hector’s Adam’s apple worked up, down, up, down, and his voice had a strangled sound.
Christ,
Dave thought,
just watch him puke and ruin any evidence that might be lying around.

"They won’t come if we don’t got a body," he reminded him. "Blood don’t count. Blood and missing persons are our babies. Go on now."

Hector didn’t vomit. He took the kid and stepped backward, right into the puddle of blood. His heel skidded out from under him. He landed hard, the girl on top of him, clinging to him, and she didn’t make a sound. But Hector bleated like a lamb.

"Jesus," Dave muttered. But before he could go on, Hector had regained his feet and fled, with an odd, choking sound.

In the silence of their wake, Dave looked around the kitchen again. The county’s opinion notwithstanding, he was pretty sure that after two centuries of shotguns and inbreeding and whalers, Candle Island had finally seen its first murder.

Chapter 1

September 1997

The sea flung itself against the bow of the ferry as though enraged by its presence. Spray plumed and hung over their heads for a split second, suspended in the sun, then the cold mist settled over them. Maddie laughed and wiped her sleeve over her face.