More Than Words: Stories of Strength Read online

  Physically.

  It was his third close call that year. The sheer randomness of this latest one had gotten to him. He wasn’t a target. The witness wasn’t a suspect in the murder, wasn’t trying to kill him or anyone else, said he had the .38 for his own protection—never mind that he was now charged with carrying a concealed weapon, possession of a weapon in violation of his probation, and assault with a deadly weapon.

  Over dinner with Jess last night, after he’d been debriefed, Brendan had admitted he didn’t think he’d get this one out of his mind that easily. He kept seeing the gun fall out of the backpack. He kept feeling himself yell, “Gun!” and jump back, an act that had saved his life. The heat of the bullet, the reaction of his partner, the paramedics—he remembered everything, and it played like a movie in his head, over and over.

  “In the blink of an eye,” he said, “that would have been all she wrote on the life of Brendan O’Malley.”

  He’d wanted to be alone that night.

  When Jess called to check on him in the morning, he blamed his moroseness the evening before on the shrinks and too much wine and said he was heading off on his own for the weekend.

  She’d talked to a few people, who all agreed it might not be a good idea for him to be alone right now. He needed his support network. Family and friends. Time to process what was, after all, a scary incident, no matter that it had a happy ending.

  Not that Detective O’Malley would listen to her or anyone else.

  Jess wandered back out to the dining room and flipped through the brochures and guidebooks on Nova Scotia. She’d never been to the Canadian Maritime Provinces—she’d only been to Canada a few times, including the usual high-school French-class trip to Montreal in Quebec.

  The brochures were inviting. The pictures of the rocky coastline, the ocean, cliffs, beaches, kayakers, fishing boats, harbors, quaint inns and restaurants. The Lighthouse Route. Cape Breton Island. The Evangeline Trail.

  So many possibilities.

  How would she ever find him?

  No one had shot at her lately, but Jess could feel the effects of her months of nonstop work. She’d just finished a major trial and could afford to take a few days off. She knew better than to get in too deep with O’Malley, but she had to admit she’d fantasized about going somewhere with him. She kept telling herself that she was well aware he wasn’t the type for long-term commitments—she had her eyes wide-open. She didn’t mind if they just had some fun together.

  He’d mentioned getting out of town together for a few days. Casually, not with anything specific in mind, but it at least suggested that the only reason he hadn’t invited her to go with him to Nova Scotia was the shooting. It had only been a day. He wouldn’t want to inflict himself on her.

  She noticed that he’d circled a bed-and-breakfast listed on a Web site printout.

  The Wild Raspberry B and B.

  Cute. Cheeky, even. Jess smiled to herself and, before she could talk herself out of it, dialed the Wild Raspberry’s number.

  A woman answered.

  Jess reminded herself she was a prosecutor accustomed to delicate situations. For the most part, it was best to come to the point. “Hello—a friend of mine has a reservation with you this weekend. Brendan O’Malley.”

  “Right. He’s not due to arrive until tomorrow.”

  “Thanks,” Jess said, hanging up.

  Of course.

  He was in moose country. That meant he’d gone farther north than Portland, Maine, and wasn’t taking the ferry to Nova Scotia from there. He must have decided to drive up to Mount Desert Island and catch the ferry out of Bar Harbor. He had to be booked on one of the ferries, since it would take forever for him to drive all the way up through Maine and New Brunswick.

  Jess dug some more on the dining-room table and found a printout of the ferry schedule from Bar Harbor to Yarmouth, Nova Scotia.

  Bingo.

  If she hurried, she could make the overnight ferry from Portland, about two hours north of Boston, and maybe even beat O’Malley to the Wild Raspberry.

  After he checked into a small, tidy motel in Bar Harbor on Maine’s Mount Desert Island, Brendan O’Malley walked over to the cheapest-looking restaurant he could find and ordered fried shrimp and beer. There was fresh raspberry pie on the dessert menu, but he passed. Once he got to Nova Scotia, he’d be staying at a place with a name like Wild Raspberry, so he figured he’d have another chance.

  He touched the bandage on the left side of his forehead, just above his eyebrow.

  Man. Talk about luck.

  The graze didn’t hurt at all. He could take the bandage off anytime. He figured he’d let it fall off in the shower.

  His brother Mike had arrived at the scene. “Brendan—damn. You are one lucky cop. How many of your nine lives have you used up now?”

  “Eleven.”

  Gallows humor, but Mike understood. He’d had his share of brushes with death in his work. They both counted on their training, their experience, the people who backed them up—they didn’t want to count on luck.

  Luck was unpredictable. Fickle.

  And it could run out.

  Brendan shook off any hint of encroaching self-pity and paid for his dinner. He’d have to walk all the way to Nova Scotia to burn off the fried shrimp, but he settled for an evening stroll along Bar Harbor’s pretty streets, not overly crowded with summer tourists. He had a reservation on the morning Cat ferry, which shortened the normal six-hour trip from Bar Harbor across the Gulf of Maine to less than three hours.

  Marianne Wells, the owner of the Wild Raspberry, had assured him he’d have peace and quiet at her B and B. She only had three guest rooms. One was free, one was occupied by a hiker, and then there was the room she’d reserved for him.

  O’Malley had debated pitching a tent somewhere on the coast for a few days, but Jess would have regarded that as total nut behavior under the circumstances and hunted him down for sure—or, more likely, sent someone after him. There wasn’t much that could pry her away from her job as a county prosecutor. She was a worse workaholic than he was.

  A disaster in the making. That was what their relationship was.

  Except he couldn’t imagine not having Jess Stewart in his life. She’d been there so long—forever, it seemed.

  He didn’t want to screw things up by falling for her.

  Mike had said she’d looked worried when she’d talked him into giving her the key to his place. Brendan doubted it. Jess had been a cop for five years, earning her law degree part-time. She wasn’t a worrier. She just didn’t like it that he’d skipped out on her.

  What the hell, he didn’t owe her anything. He didn’t even know how they’d ended up dating. He’d always thought of her as a kind of kid sister.

  Mike hadn’t bought that one. “There isn’t one thing O’Malley about her. You’re in denial, brother.”

  Ten years Brendan had known Stewart, and not until two months ago had he seriously thought about sleeping with her. Maybe she was right, and they’d both been struck by some crazy fairy with a weird sense of humor.

  They’d gone to dinner and the movies a few times. Jess had dragged him on a tour of the Old North Church because he was from Boston and he’d never seen it, and that just couldn’t stand another minute as far as she was concerned. But she was a native Bostonian, and had she ever been to a Bruins hockey game? One time, when she was ten. It barely counted.

  O’Malley found a flat stone and skipped it into the smooth, gray water of the harbor. He had to stop thinking about Attorney Stewart. Their relationship wasn’t going anywhere. They’d slept together that one time a couple weeks ago, before the shooting, but that had just been one of those things. Spontaneous, unplanned, inevitable.

  He’d been such a mush, too. He couldn’t believe it.

  He heaved a long sigh, feeling a headache coming on that had nothing to do with the bullet that had missed his brain pan by not very much at all.

  Back at his motel,
he flopped on his sagging double bed and stared at the ceiling.

  Nova Scotia. He could just skip it and hang out on Mount Desert Island for a few days—except the same instinct that had prompted him to jump back a half-step yesterday, thus saving his life, told him to head east. He’d been gathering brochures on Nova Scotia for weeks, checking out the tourist sites on the Internet, poring over maps, all with some vague idea that he should go there.

  Maybe it was karma or something.

  With his head bandaged up last night and his brother’s talk of using up his nine lives, he’d stared at the lodging list he’d printed off the Internet, picked out a B and B that looked good and called.

  Now here he was, on his way. Alone.

  Jess could have a point that he shouldn’t be alone.

  “Too late.”

  He hit the power button on the TV remote and checked out what was going on in the world, feeling isolated and removed and suddenly really irritated with himself. But he was nothing if not stubborn, and he needed a few days to pull his head together, not just about the shooting, but about Jess.

  He thought of her dark eyes and her cute butt and decided the bullet yesterday was the universe giving him a wake-up call. What did he think he was doing, falling for Jessica Stewart?

  He had no intention of tucking tail and going home.

  CHAPTER TWO

  The overnight ferry from Portland, Maine, to Yarmouth, on Nova Scotia’s southwest shore, was surprisingly smooth—and fun. Jess hadn’t been anywhere in so long, she made an adventure of it. When she arrived back on land, she followed the directions to the Wild Raspberry B and B, which, she soon discovered, was on Nova Scotia’s South Shore, a breathtaking stretch of Canada’s eastern coastline of rocks, cliffs, narrow, sandy beaches and picturesque villages.

  “Forget O’Malley,” she muttered to herself. “I want to go hiking!”

  She’d at least had the presence of mind to pack trail shoes and hiking clothes on her quick stop back at her condo last night. Now it was a sunny, glorious morning, and she debated leaving Brendan to his own devices—his determined solitude—and finding another place to stay. He wouldn’t even have to know she was there.

  But she continued north along what was aptly named the Lighthouse Route and kept forcing herself not to stop, kept warning herself to stay on task. Finally she came to a small cove near historic Lunenburg, named a UNESCO World Heritage Site because of its pristine British colonial architecture and rich seafaring heritage, and found her way to the Wild Raspberry.

  It wasn’t a renovated colonial building like those in Lunenburg, which Jess had read about on the ferry. The Wild Raspberry was, fittingly, a small Victorian house, complete with a tiny guest cottage, that perched on a knoll across from the water. A tangle of rose and raspberry vines covered a fence along one side of the gravel driveway. The house itself was painted gray and trimmed in raspberry and white, and had porches in front and back that were crammed with brightly cushioned white wicker furniture and graced with hanging baskets of fuchsias and white petunias.

  Jess parked at the far end of the small parking area—so that O’Malley wouldn’t spot her the minute he pulled into the driveway. As she got her suitcase out of the back of her car, she could smell that it was low tide.

  And she could hear laughter coming from the back of the house, toward the guest cottage.

  Women’s laughter. Unrestrained, spirited laughter.

  It was so infectious, Jess couldn’t help but smile as she made her way up a stone walk to the side entrance, where an enormous stone urn of four or five different colors of petunias greeted her. There was also—of course—a Welcome sign featuring a raspberry vine.

  She thought of O’Malley’s rat hole apartment. How had he picked this charming, cheerful place?

  She sighed. “Because he got shot in the head yesterday.”

  A forty-something woman in hiking shorts, a tank top and sports sandals came from behind the house. She had short, curly brown hair streaked with gray and a smile that matched the buoyant mood of the B and B. “May I help you?”

  “I’m Jessica Stewart—”

  “I thought so. Welcome! I’m Marianne Wells. Please, come inside. Make yourself comfortable. I can help you with your bags—I just need to say goodbye to some friends.”

  “Don’t let me interrupt. I’m in no hurry.”

  “Oh, we were just finishing up. We meet every week.”

  As Marianne turned back to rejoin her friends, Jess noticed a faint three-inch scar near her hostess’s right eye. A weekly get-together with women friends—it wasn’t something Jess took the time to do. Given her busy schedule, her friendships were more catch-as-catch-can.

  The side door led into a cozy sitting area decorated cottage-style, with an early-twentieth-century glass-and-oak curio filled with squat jars of raspberry jam, raspberry-peach jam and raspberry-rhubarb jam, all with handmade labels. There was raspberry honey in a tall, slender jar, and a collection of quirky raspberry sugar pots and creamers.

  “I’ve told all my friends no more raspberry anything,” Marianne Wells said as she came into the small room. “You should see what I have in storage. It can get overwhelming.”

  “I have an aunt who made the mistake of letting people know she collects frogs. Now she’s got frog-everything. Frog towels, frog soaps, frog statues, frog magnets. Frogs for every room. She even has a frog clock.”

  Marianne laughed, the scar fading as her eyes crinkled in good humor. “I know what you mean. It’s fun to collect something, though. You must want to see your room. Come on, I’ll show you upstairs.”

  As she started down the hall, following her hostess, Jess noticed a bulletin board above a rolltop desk with a small, prominent sign on it:

  The Courage to Click. Shelternet.ca.

  Shelternet can help you find a link to a shelter or a helpline in your area.

  From her experience both as a police officer and a prosecutor, Jess immediately recognized Shelternet as a resource for victims of abuse, one that Marianne Wells obviously wanted people coming through her B and B to know about.

  Instinctively Jess thought of the scar above Marianne’s eye and guessed she must have been a victim of domestic abuse at one time, then reminded herself that she didn’t know—and shouldn’t jump to conclusions.

  But Marianne paused on the stairs and glanced back at Jess. “Clicking on Shelternet helped save my life.”

  “I’m a prosecutor in Boston. I didn’t mean to make you uncomfortable. I just couldn’t help noticing—”

  “I’m not uncomfortable. If that sign prompts just one person to take action—well, that’s why it’s there. If a woman in an abusive relationship walks into this inn, I know that she’ll walk out of here with that Web site address in her head. Shelternet. ca.” Her smile didn’t quite reach her eyes, but she seemed to mean for it to. “I don’t mind that you noticed it. Not at all. I’m not ashamed of what I’ve been through. I used to be, but not anymore.”

  Jess smiled back at her. “I hope you’ll tell me more about Shelternet while I’m here.”

  “Gladly.”

  They continued up the white-painted stairs to a large, airy room overlooking the water. The decor was Victorian cottage, with lots of white and vibrant accents, nothing stuffy or uptight. There was a private bathroom—with raspberry-colored towels—and upscale scented toiletries that surely would be a waste on O’Malley.

  Marianne pointed out the television, how to work the windows, where to find extra linens. “My friend Pat comes in to clean every morning. Her grandmother lived in this house before I bought it. I’ve made a lot of changes, but Pat approves. You’ll like her.”

  “I’m sure I will,” Jess said.

  “There’s one other guest room on this floor and a room on the third floor in what was once the attic. A long-term guest is staying there. Brendan O’Malley will be staying on this floor. He’s not here yet. I thought you two might have made arrangements to arrive toge
ther.”

  Jess felt a twinge of guilt. When she’d called back to make a reservation, Marianne had recognized her voice from her previous call about O’Malley. “Uh, no.”

  Marianne frowned. “But you are friends, right?”

  “Yes. Yes, definitely.” Which, Jess thought, didn’t mean he’d jump up and down with joy to see her. But as a survivor of abuse, Marianne Wells would be sensitive to such matters—and properly so. “We’ve known each other since I was a police recruit.”

  “You’re a former police officer?”

  Jess nodded. “And O’Malley—Brendan is a detective.”

  Her hostess seemed satisfied. “Is there anything I can get you right now?”

  “No, nothing. The room’s lovely. Thank you.”

  “We serve afternoon tea at three, on the back porch if the weather’s good, and a full breakfast in the dining room starting at seven. If there’s anything special you’d like to request, please don’t hesitate to let me know.”

  Jess debated warning Marianne that Brendan O’Malley wasn’t expecting to find her here, but decided there was no point in complicating the woman’s life just yet—or stirring up any old fears. O’Malley would behave. It wasn’t as if he’d be really irritated that Jess had followed him.

  On the other hand, he’d had a rotten week. Everything might irritate him.

  After Marianne left her to her own devices, Jess unpacked, opened the windows and took a bath to the sound of the ocean, listening for O’Malley’s arrival.

  O’Malley waited in the hall while Marianne Wells pushed open the door to his second-floor room. The place was nice, a little quaint, probably, for his tastes, but maybe the bright colors would improve his mood. At least Marianne—she’d already told him to call her by her first name—was dressed for climbing on the rocky coastline. And the other guest, the one in the attic, was a guy.

  The scar on Marianne’s face looked like it was from a knife wound, but Brendan figured he was in a frame of mind to come to the worst conclusion. She could have slid off a sled as a kid and cut her face on ice.