The Widow - Carla Neggers [21]
“You’re the only person the killer fears.”
Had the killer feared Chris?
Abigail crossed the quiet, isolated road to the driveway entrance she shared with Owen, then turned onto her own driveway, feeling the wind pick up as she got closer to the water.
She’d come up here with questions and something of a mission, but no plan.
What she needed was a plan.
She’d paint, and she’d come up with one.
Linc Cooper pounded onto Owen’s deck in a state, pacing, starting to speak then stopping again. Owen tried to remember when he’d last seen him. Two years, at least. At the time, Linc had just dropped out—or, more plausibly, had just been kicked out—of Brown. He was smart, and most people expected him to get himself together one of these days.
Lincoln James Cooper had everything—except, Owen thought, what any kid needed most, which was a family who believed in him and considered him more than an afterthought. Linc was supposed to reflect his father’s and his sister’s successes and dreams. Whether he had any of his own didn’t seem to matter. It wasn’t necessarily what anyone intended or wanted. It was just the way the Cooper family worked.
Owen’s own family was more straightforward. “Just don’t get killed,” they’d tell him.
Finally, Linc plopped down on a wooden chair and looked up at Owen without meeting his eye. “I want you to teach me what you know. Show me how to do search-and-rescue. Take me on. You’re not doing anything this summer—that’s what I hear, anyway.”
“Linc—”
“I’d pay you. You’re the best, Owen. I want to learn from you.”
“It’s not about the money. Why don’t you apply for a spot in the field academy? We’ll be doing a full range of training.”
The kid shook his head, not even considering the idea. “That’d never work. My family would never let me take time off from school to do SAR training.”
“Don’t put words in their mouths. Besides, you’re over eighteen—”
“You think that matters?” Linc slumped in his chair and kicked out his legs, looking defeated. “My family’s not like yours. I can’t just go my own way.”
“You are going your own way. You’re choosing your own course now.”
He snorted. “Whatever.”
Owen smiled at the twenty-year-old. “Don’t give up so easily. If you disagree with me, fight for your position—”
“I don’t want to fight for anything.” His eyes teared up unexpectedly, and he shot to his feet, turning his back to Owen and looking out at the water. “I’m just tired of being a weak-kneed loser.”
“Get your stuff together.” Owen glanced at his watch. “Meet me here at one o’clock. We’ll go on a hike. Take things from there.”
“You don’t have to—”
“If you’re not here at one, I leave without you.”
Linc shifted back to him and nodded. “I’ll be here.”
He jumped down from the deck and ran back to his rattletrap of a car with more energy, his foul mood and unfocused irritability and defeatism at bay. Owen remembered being twenty. He’d gone against his family’s expectations, but they’d supported his need to figure out his own life.
He watched a cormorant dive into the water just off his rocky point. He had no idea where he’d take Linc, but he liked the idea of getting out on the island. Seeing Abigail yesterday—knowing she was barely a quarter mile up the rocks from him—had thrown him off.
Nothing about her was uncomplicated.
Except, he thought, her determination to find her husband’s killer. That was straightforward, clear and unchanging.
And it was why she was on Mt. Desert.
It was always why she was there.
CHAPTER 8
Abigail dropped onto the wooden bench in a booth across from Lou Beeler, who’d arrived at the tiny harbor restaurant ahead of her. He already had a mug of black coffee in front of him. “Thanks for coming,” he said.
“I’m glad you called. I’d just finished trimming the entry.”
“Painting?”
She nodded. “Helps me think.”
“Keeps you out of trouble, too.”
There was that. A waitress with the face of a heavy smoker came for Abigail’s order. “I’ll have whatever Lou here