On Fire Read online

  Praise for the novels of Carla Neggers

  “Readers have come to expect excellence from Neggers, and she delivers it here. The pairing of aristocratic spy Will with butt-kicking heroine Lizzie is inspired, and the multistrand plot is extremely absorbing.”

  —RT Book Reviews on The Mist

  “When it comes to romance, adventure and suspense, nobody delivers like Carla Neggers.”

  —Jayne Ann Krentz

  “Suspense, romance and the rocky Maine coast—what more could a reader ask? Carla Neggers writes a story so vivid you can smell the salt air and feel the mist on your skin.”

  —Tess Gerritsen on The Harbor

  “Well-drawn characters, complex plotting and plenty of wry humor are the hallmarks of Neggers’s books.”

  —RT Book Reviews on Cold Pursuit

  “Neggers’s engaging romantic mystery neatly blends fiction with authentic detail.”

  —Publishers Weekly on Tempting Fate

  “Readers will be turning the pages so fast their fingers will burn…a winner!”

  —Susan Elizabeth Phillips on Betrayals

  “[A] tight, twisty and exceedingly well-told thriller…a surefire winner.”

  —Providence Journal on The Angel

  “No one does romantic suspense better!”

  —Janet Evanovich

  Also by CARLA NEGGERS

  COLD RIVER

  THE MIST

  BETRAYALS

  COLD PURSUIT

  TEMPTING FATE

  THE ANGEL

  ABANDON

  CUT AND RUN

  THE WIDOW

  BREAKWATER

  DARK SKY

  THE RAPIDS

  NIGHT’S LANDING

  COLD RIDGE

  ON THE EDGE

  “Shelter Island”

  THE HARBOR

  STONEBROOK COTTAGE

  THE CABIN

  THE CARRIAGE HOUSE

  THE WATERFALL

  ON FIRE

  KISS THE MOON

  CLAIM THE CROWN

  Look for Carla Neggers’s next novel

  THE WHISPER

  available JULY 2010

  CARLA NEGGERS

  ON FIRE

  To my nieces and nephews: Blythe, Sarah Mae,

  Tommy, Rose, Chris, Timothy, David,

  Sarah Elizabeth, Emily, Dan, McKinzie, Scarlett

  and Marena…and to Kate and Zachary…

  you’re a great bunch!

  Contents

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Prologue

  Riley St. Joe sloshed through three inches of frigid seawater. The Encounter pitched and rolled under her, its old metal hull moaning and creaking as it took on more water. Trapped like rats on a sinking ship, she thought. Her stab at humor caught her by surprise—but it helped keep her on her feet as she made her way to her grandfather. They were in the diving compartment deep in the bowels of the ship, a raging engine fire and catastrophic flooding cutting them off from the rest of the crew.

  After three decades at sea, the Encounter—the old minesweeper Emile Labreque and Bennett Granger had had refitted as an oceanographic vessel—was going down in the North Atlantic. There was nothing Riley could do about it. More to the point, there was nothing her grandfather, the stubborn, brilliant, visionary oceanographer Emile Labreque, could do about it.

  She grabbed his thin arm. He was seventy-five, wiry and fit, and he had to know what was happening. He knew his ship better than anyone. He stared at the watertight door that had shut fast against the fire and flooding, sealing them in the bowels of the ship. “Emile, we have to take the submersible,” she shouted. “We don’t have any choice.”

  “I’m not going anywhere. The pumps will handle the flooding. The crew will put the fire out.”

  “The pumps won’t do anything, and if the crew’s smart, they’re getting into the life rafts now. Emile, the Encounter’s sinking. If we stay here, we’ll go down with it.”

  He tore his arm from her grip. His dark eyes were wild, his lined, leathery face and white hair all part of the legend that was Emile Labreque. He took a deep breath. “You go. Take the submersible. Get out.”

  “Not without you.”

  “I need to see to the crew.”

  “You can’t. Even if you could get the doors open, the fire’s too intense. And if you didn’t fry to a crisp, you’d drown. Sam will have to see to the crew.” Sam Cassain was the ship’s captain, but Emile would consider the Encounter and her crew his own responsibility. Riley struggled to stay on her feet. Rats. We’re trapped like rats. She fought off panic. “Emile—damn it, you know I’m right.”

  He knew. He knew better than she that the Encounter was lost. An engine explosion, a spreading fire, a hull breach—they had only minutes. “The submersible’s only built for one,” he said.

  “It’ll handle two. Sam would have sent out an SOS by now. The Coast Guard’s probably already on their way. They’ll pick us up before we run out of air.”

  “We’ll have three, maybe four hours at most.”

  “It’ll be enough.”

  Emile placed a palm on the watertight door, shut his eyes a moment. The Encounter was as famous as he was, the base for his oceanographic research, the documentaries he’d taped, the books he’d written. Now, its day was done.

  He turned to her. “We’re out of time. Let’s go.”

  Five hours later, Riley numbly accepted a blanket from a Coast Guard crewman and wrapped it around herself. The crewman was saying something, but she couldn’t make out his words. She’d stopped shaking. Her eyelids were heavy, her heart rate steady. But her hands were clammy and very white, and she simply couldn’t make out what he was trying to tell her.

  I must be in shock.

  Her throat burned and ached from tension and fatigue, from gasping for air as oxygen slowly ran out in the tiny, cramped submersible she and Emile had shared for almost four endless hours.

  “My grandfather.” She didn’t know if her words came out. “How is he?”

  The crewman frowned as if she’d made no sense.

  “Emile—my grandfather.”

  “We’re going to get you some help, okay?” The crewman touched her arm through the blanket. “Just hold on.”

  “I’m not hurt.” She felt as if she were shouting, but couldn’t hear her own words. “The crew—are they all right? They made it to the lifeboats?”

  “Miss St. Joe—”

  Something in his face, his tone, sent a stab of dread straight through her. Oh God. “How many? How many died?”

  The eyes of the nearby crew turned toward her, and she realized she must have shouted this time. The crewman winced. He was Coast Guard all the way. Every death at sea pained him. He said nothing, and Riley knew. There had been deaths aboard the Encounter. Not everyone had made it off alive.

  A man yelled, and she looked up and saw three crewmen holding back Sam Cassain. He was tall and tawny-haired, a thickly built man, a firebrand, a good captain with a propensity for mouthing off. He would speak first, think later.

  Riley saw her crewman grimace, as if he wanted to protect her from Sam’s words. Too late. She could make them out clearly.

  “Five died,” Sam yelled. “Five. And it’s y
our goddamned grandfather’s fault. The great Emile Labreque. He’s responsible. He knows it.”

  “Who?” Riley clenched the blanket tightly around her, her fingers rigid, her stomach lurching. “Who died? Sam, for God’s sake—”

  He couldn’t have heard her, but he shouted, “Bennett Granger’s dead. He fried in the fire. He never had a chance to make it to the lifeboats. Think Emile should be the one to tell your sister, your brother-in-law?”

  Riley couldn’t speak. Bile rose in her throat. Bennett Granger was the chief benefactor and cofounder of the Boston Center for Oceanographic Research. He and her grandfather had been friends for fifty years. His son had married Emile’s granddaughter, Riley’s sister. God. Who would tell Matthew and Sig?

  “Get him out of here,” her crewman shouted.

  “You mark my words, Riley St. Joe,” Sam said, his voice deadly. “I warned Emile. I told him the Encounter was an old girl and we needed to take more precautions. He wouldn’t listen. His mission always came first. Now five people are dead. That’s on his shoulders, not mine.”

  Riley struggled to get to her feet. The crewman held her by the elbow, keeping her from going after Sam—or from passing out. “Don’t,” he said softly. “There’ll be an investigation. This will all sort itself out in due time.”

  “But Emile—my grandfather—”

  “He’s in the infirmary. He’ll be okay.”

  Every part of her, mind and body, was spent. She couldn’t even lick her parched lips. “The fire was an accident. It wasn’t Emile’s fault. It wasn’t anybody’s fault.”

  The crewman made no response, but his eyes told her everything. He agreed with Sam Cassain. He believed Emile Labreque was responsible for the explosion and the fire that sank the Encounter and killed five people.

  Riley clutched the folds of her blanket. Bennett. Oh, God. She wished she could start the day over and save the Encounter, save Bennett, save the crew. But the old ship was gone, and five people were dead, and Emile…her grandfather, she thought, was doomed.

  One

  Riley ignored the slight tremble in her hands and jammed the two ends of her high-performance paddle together. She zipped up her life vest. There was no reason to be nervous. She’d kayaked the coves and inlets of Schoodic Peninsula since she was six years old. Today’s conditions were near perfect: a bright, clear, still September morning, halfway between low tide and high tide.

  She squinted at her grandfather, who’d come down from his cottage to the short stretch of gravelly beach to see her off. “Come with me,” she said.

  He shook his head. “You go on. You need to get back out on the water.”

  “I’ve been out on the water. Caroline Granger had us onto her yacht for a cocktail party Friday night.”

  “Cocktails.” Emile snorted. “That’s not getting out on the water.”

  She knew what he meant. She hadn’t been on a boat, a ship, even a kayak, since the Encounter disaster a year ago. On the Granger yacht off Mount Desert Island Friday night, she couldn’t make herself go below. She’d never been claustrophobic, not until the watertight doors had shut her and Emile into the diving compartment, not until the two of them had endured the hot, cramped, terrifying hours in the experimental submersible.

  This had to end, she told herself. She was a scientist, director of marine and aquatic animal recovery and rehabilitation at the Boston Center for Oceanographic Research. She couldn’t get spooked about the water.

  “I shouldn’t kayak without a partner.”

  Emile shrugged. “You’ll stay close to shore. Just watch out for fog rolling in later.”

  “You’re sure you won’t come with me?” she asked him.

  “I can kayak anytime I want.”

  One of the perks of his exile, he seemed to be saying. After the disaster of the Encounter, Emile Labreque had shocked the world by retiring to the Maine fishing village where his family had settled generations earlier. It had been his home base for years; he owned a small cottage, where Riley and her sister had spent summers growing up. He looked after a small, private nature preserve on a part-time basis. The last hurrah of a legend.

  He eyed Riley as she dragged her shocking pink, siton-top ocean kayak to the water’s edge. He wore his trademark black Henley and khakis, and at seventy-six, he was as alert and intense as ever. She’d inherited his lean, wiry physique, his dark hair and eyes, his sharp features—and, some said, his single-mindedness.

  “You’re planning to stop on the island?”

  She nodded. “I packed a lunch. If the fog doesn’t roll in, I’d like to have a little picnic on the rocks, like the old days.”

  He gazed out at the water. The bay sparkled in the morning sun. Labreque Island was farther up the point, almost at the mouth of the bay—a tiny, windswept landscape of rock, evergreens and sand that had been in Emile’s family since the turn of the century.

  “I should warn you. John Straker’s staying at the cottage.”

  “Straker? Why? What’s he doing back here?”

  “He took a couple of bullets a while back. He came home to recuperate. I let him use the cottage on the island.”

  Riley digested this news as if it were a hair ball. John Straker wasn’t one of her favorite people. He’d left the peninsula years ago to join the FBI. A lot of people in his home village couldn’t believe the FBI had accepted him. She’d only seen him a few times since. “Who shot him, criminals or his friends?”

  “A fugitive who took a couple of teenagers hostage. It had something to do with domestic terrorism.”

  “Right up Straker’s alley. Anyone else hurt?”

  Emile shook his head. “You know, John’s not much company on a good day.”

  “This is true. I’ll just have to keep to the other side of the island. He won’t even know I’m there. I didn’t realize the cottage on the island was still inhabitable.”

  “He’s fixed it up a bit. Not much.”

  “How long’s he been out there?”

  “Since April.”

  She shuddered, then grinned at her grandfather. “Well, tough. I’m not afraid of John Straker. Will you be here when I get back?”

  “I doubt it.”

  She hesitated, debating. “I’m stopping in Camden on my way back to Boston. Is there anything you want me to tell Mom and Sig?”

  “No.”

  Riley nodded without comment. Perhaps, she thought, too much had been said already. Her mother and sister—Emile’s only daughter and older granddaughter—blamed him for the Encounter, for Bennett Granger’s death, for the deaths of four crew members and friends, for Riley’s near death. For Emile’s near death and the shattering of a lifetime’s reputation.

  Of course, everyone blamed Emile for the Encounter. Except Riley. Sam Cassain’s assessment of what had happened—his conviction that Emile had cut too many safety corners—wasn’t enough for her. She needed hard evidence before she could damn her grandfather to the pits of hell. But she was in a distinct minority.

  Emile wished her well and started back along the path up to his rustic cottage. Corea, Prospect Harbor, Winter Harbor, Schoodic Point. These were the places of her childhood, tucked onto a jagged, granite-bound peninsula, one of dozens that shaped and extended Maine’s scenic coastline. Riley knew all its inlets, bays and coves. It was here she’d discovered her own love for the ocean, one that had nothing to do with being a Labreque or a St. Joe but only with being herself.

  It was here, too, that she’d drawn blood in her one and only act of out-and-out violence, when she’d hurled a rock at John Straker. He was sixteen, she was twelve, and he’d deserved it. His own mother had said so as she’d handed him a dish towel for the blood and hauled him down to the doctor’s office. He’d required six stitches to sew up the slit Riley had left above his right eye. She wondered if he’d had to explain the scar to the FBI. Amazing they’d let him in. Bonked on the head by a twelve-year-old. It couldn’t bode well.

  Now he’d been shot
. Domestic terrorism. She grimaced. Well, she had no intention of letting a cranky, shot-up FBI agent ruin her picnic on her favorite island.

  She slid her kayak into the incoming tide. Given the warm weather, she’d opted against a wet suit and wore her Tevas without socks. Maine water was never warm, but she’d be fine. Her shirt and drawstring pants were of a quick-drying fabric, and she’d filled two dry packs with all the essentials. One held her picnic lunch. The other held everything she might need if she got stranded for any reason: waterproof matches, rope, emergency thermal blanket that folded up into a tiny square, rations she’d eat only in an emergency, aluminum foil, portable first-aid kit, flashlight, compass, charts, whistle, marine band radio, extra water and her jackknife. And duct tape. She’d zipped an extra compass, matches and a water bottle into her life vest, in case she got separated from her kayak.

  All in all, she deemed herself ready for anything, even a recuperating John Straker.

  She laid her paddle across her kayak and walked into the ankle-deep water, which wasn’t as cold as she’d expected. Maybe sixty-five degrees. Downright balmy for this stretch of Maine. She dropped into her seat, did her mental checklist and set off into deeper water, her strokes even and sure, all uneasiness gone. This was what she needed. A solo kayak trip in the clean, brisk Maine air, along the familiar rockbound coast with its evergreens, birches, wild blueberry bushes and summer cottages. The water was smooth, glasslike, the air so still she could hear the dipping of her paddle, the cry of gulls, the putter of distant lobster boats.

  Yes, she thought. Emile was right. She needed to get back out on the water.

  Two hours later, she was tired, hungry and exhilarated. A fog bank had formed on the eastern horizon, but she thought she’d be finished with her picnic and safely back at Emile’s before it arrived. The swells and the wind had picked up on the ocean side of Labreque Island, but she worked with them, not against them, as she paddled parallel to shore, looking for a landing spot. The island was a mere five acres of sand, rock, pine, spruce and a few intrepid beeches and birches, all of which took a pounding from the North Atlantic winds, surf and storms. The ocean side had imposing rock ledges, and the water tended to be choppier—but Emile’s ancient cottage, and thus John Straker, was on the bay side.