The Widow - Carla Neggers [8]
Scoop frowned at her. “You burned your journals?”
“They weren’t evidence.” She shrugged. “They’re where I dumped my emotions.”
“Oh. Okay, then.” Obviously not wanting more details, Scoop pointed with his beer at the stack of files. “These your files on your husband’s murder?”
“My notes, newspaper articles, photographs, sketches. Everything I could pull together on my own, without stepping on toes.”
Bob grabbed a beer for himself. “You tell the Maine police about the call?”
“Yes.”
“And?”
“Unimpressed but investigating.”
“What about Daddy?”
She looked at the stack of files. She’d never asked her father to go through them with her. He’d never offered. He wouldn’t want to encourage her to investigate Chris’s death on her own. “No. I haven’t talked to him.”
Scoop took a seat at the table and lifted a file from the pile.
Abigail swallowed. “It’s been a long time. It’s a very cold case.”
“Then let’s heat it up and see what happens.”
“Guys…are you sure?”
Bob slung an arm over her shoulder. “That’s the thing you still have to get through your head, kid.” He winked at her. “You’re not alone.”
CHAPTER 3
Owen Garrison wasn’t one for suntan lotion and picnic baskets and lazy days on a beach. After forty-five minutes on Sand Beach, he was restless. The horseshoe-shaped beach was a rare stretch of sand carved out of Mt. Desert Island’s granite coastline, the water turquoise on the sunny early July afternoon.
Compared to Maine’s more expansive beaches to the south—York, Ogunquit, Wells—it wasn’t crowded at all.
But Owen paced in the sand, which clung to everything, as he kept an eye on Sean and Ian Alden, eleven and nine, towheaded boys who’d known no other home but the fourteen-mile-wide island. Their father was the local police chief. Owen had complicated Doyle and the boys’lives when he’d asked KatieAlden to head up the proposed Fast Rescue field academy in Bar Harbor. He wanted it up and running by fall, and Katie, a paramedic and search-and-rescue specialist, had taken on the challenge. She’d left for six weeks of training in London two days ago. The boys were doing fine, but Doyle was still sulking about not having her around for most of the summer.
Owen was just off a two-week operation in South Asia following a 7.5-magnitude earthquake and figured the least he could do was help watch the boys once in a while.
A kid—maybe Sean or Ian—squealed. Before Owen realized what was happening, he was jerked back into the past, remembering his sister on this same beach, running into the water and out again, squealing in delight, flapping her arms against the power of the waves and the shock of the cold water.
“Come on, Owen. Don’t be a chicken! You get used to the cold.”
But you didn’t, he knew. You might not feel it, but the cold would wear on your body, weaken it.
The day his sister drowned, the water temperature was fifty-five degrees. Early-stage hypothermia had tired her more quickly, shortening the time she could tread water amid the waves and wait for rescue.
Owen, helpless to save her, had watched Doe slip under the water.
Enough.
He snatched up two towels from the heap of stuff the Alden boys had insisted on carting down to the beach. He waved to them. “Time to warm up.”
They didn’t argue, although Owen had no idea whether they cooperated because of something they heard in his tone or because they’d had their fill of waves. Unlike most of their fellow beachgoers, Sean and Ian were wet from head to toe—and they were blue-lipped and shivering. Owen draped towels over them and opened up a blanket, spreading it out on the sticky sand.
“Sit. Wrap up good. Give yourselves a chance to warm up.”
Ian, the younger boy, skinnier than his brother, sat on the blanket and tucked his knees up under him, encasing his entire body in the oversized towel.
“Do you boys know what to do if you get stuck out in cold water?” Owen asked. He was in jeans and a polo shirt. Nice and dry.
Sean, his teeth chattering, sat cross-legged on the blanket. “Yell for help?”
“You