The Widow Read online

Chris’s voice. When he had jumped out of the dark and clamped a hand on Linc’s shoulder, Linc had wet his pants. Chris hadn’t relented.

  Thirteen years old, and Linc had never felt such shame as when he looked into his idol’s eyes and saw that he knew everything.

  “You have nothing to prove to anyone, Linc. Not to me. Not to your father or to your sister.”

  He’d wanted to be like Chris Browning. It didn’t matter that Chris was so much older. Linc wanted to be self-reliant, capable. Chris had no family money to fall back on. His parents had died when he was a baby. He’d made his own way in the world.

  “What kind of man do you want to be?”

  Linc sat on a stone bench on a narrow landing on the steep steps. How many times had he thought about finding Abigail Browning and telling her everything he knew about the night before she was attacked, before her husband was killed?

  Telling her what he’d done seven years ago as a stupid kid.

  He heard footsteps above him on the steps and looked up just as Mattie Young came into view. Chris’s friend, the Coopers’ yardman, the local drunk. A creep.

  Mattie jumped the last two steps onto the landing. “Hey, Linc, my boy.” He grinned, smug, sarcastic. “Fancy meeting you here.”

  There wasn’t any “fancy” to it, and Mattie knew it-he’d provided the when, where, the why. And the consequences of not showing up.

  Deliberately, just to rub Mattie’s nose in the disparities between them, Linc had put on an expensive sweater and khakis for their little meeting, and he’d shaved. Mattie had come down the steps from working in Ellis’s gardens, but he would have been a mess, regardless. He’d tied his stringy, greasy hair into a ponytail and wore a stained T-shirt and torn, frayed jeans that sagged on his scrawny frame.

  He pulled a pack of cigarettes from his back pocket and tapped one out. “Your crazy uncle has me moving a rhododendron. He doesn’t think it’s thriving where it is. It looks fine to me.” He stuck the cigarette between his lips. “What the hell about me? I’d like to thrive.”

  “Then stop smoking. That’d help.”

  “Sarcastic little shit, aren’t you, considering the spot you’re in?”

  Linc felt his jaw set hard. “I hate your guts.”

  Mattie laughed. “Feeling’s mutual, kid. You got my best friend killed-”

  “Your best friend? You didn’t even go to his wedding. You were in a ditch somewhere sleeping off a couple bottles of cheap booze.”

  “So I was.” Using a small disposable lighter, Mattie lit his cigarette, inhaling deeply before returning lighter and pack to his pocket. “Do you have my money?”

  “A thousand. I can’t get my hands on ten grand at once without drawing attention to myself. I told you-”

  “Show me the thousand.”

  Linc reached into his day pack, dropped at his feet, and withdrew a sealed envelope. His stomach rolled over. Sweat erupted on his back. He couldn’t believe what he was doing, but what choice did he have? Especially now, with his sister Grace’s State Department appointment in the works.

  He handed the envelope to Mattie. “Go ahead and count it if you want. It’s all there.”

  “I don’t need to count it. If you’re lying, I know where you live, don’t I?”

  “You’re scum. I don’t know what the Brownings ever saw in you. They were good guys. You’re a piece of shit.”

  Mattie didn’t react with his usual anger and defensiveness. “Chris and his grandfather looked past my mistakes. They saw the real me. I’m getting back into my photography.” He folded the bulging envelope, squeezing it into the palm of his hand as if it held all his answers-as if it wasn’t just money. “Your money’s going for a good cause. Think of it as your penance and my new beginning.”

  Linc snorted. “The real you is a bottom-feeding lowlife. It always has been. It always will be.”

  “I never stole from the people who cared about me.”

  Shame rippled through Linc, and his legs weakened under him. “If you’re so good, why don’t you tell the police what you know? About me. The burglaries. Why blackmail me?”

  “A guy like me doesn’t get many second chances.”

  “Why did you wait until now?”

  “I wasn’t going to put the squeeze on a teenager. And now-the timing’s right. You’re not going to the police, not with your sister’s big appointment hanging in the balance.” Mattie grinned, the sarcasm-the pleasure he took in what he was doing-back. “What do you think Grace would say if she could see her baby brother now?”

  Linc couldn’t bear to think about Grace’s disappointment. Eighteen years older, more like an aunt than a sister, she was the only child of their father and his first wife, a marriage that had ended the summer Doe Garrison had drowned. He and Grace had no other siblings. It was just the two of them.

  Mattie blew cigarette smoke out of his nose. “Relax, kid. I’m not greedy. Once I have my ten grand, we’re square.”

  He was forty-two but looked older. Grace said she remembered when he was a talented, promising photographer. But Mattie Young had hit the self-destruct button a long time ago.

  “I returned all the items I stole,” Linc said, hating the meekness in his voice. “Why punish me?”

  “Why shouldn’t I?” Mattie gave him a knowing look. “Don’t you punish yourself?”

  Linc didn’t answer.

  “And you didn’t return everything, did you? Abigail’s necklace is still missing.”

  “I told you. I didn’t steal it. I didn’t attack her. I didn’t kill Chris.”

  “Who’ll believe you without proof of who did steal the necklace and attack her, of who did kill Chris?” Mattie dropped his half-smoked cigarette onto the stone and crushed it under his cheap work boot. “I need to get back to your uncle’s rhodie. Work on the rest of my money. I want it within the next few days. All of it.”

  “I’ll get it just to watch you piss it away.”

  “All that anger. It’ll eat you alive if you let it.”

  “I hope you choke on your own vomit.”

  Mattie shrugged. “You’re not alone.” He squatted down, picked up the crushed cigarette and tucked it into a front pocket as he rose. “Best to cover my tracks. Your uncle doesn’t let me smoke on the grounds. If he or your father or sister finds out about the money, what will you tell them? Do you remember your cover story?”

  Linc didn’t want to argue with him anymore. “I’ll tell them I bought some of your old photographs.”

  “Very good,” Mattie said, then smiled. “See you soon.”

  After his blackmailer left, Linc turned and faced the water, looking down at the near-vertical hillside. Juts of exposed granite ledge, moss, bare roots of trees-spruce, pine, fir, a few beeches and birches-clung to its thin, acidic soil.

  “I’m on my honeymoon, Linc. You and your shenanigans aren’t even on the list of things I want to be thinking about this week.”

  Linc gulped in a shallow breath. He felt hollowed out, a shell of everything he wanted to become. He was twenty now, and he hadn’t succeeded at anything yet-except video games and getting kicked out of schools.

  And begging his father’s forgiveness.

  Avoiding his sister’s disappointment.

  What would the scandal of what he’d done seven years ago-of what he was doing now, paying off a blackmailer-do to Grace’s appointment? The FBI was running a background check on her. It could take several months. She’d already begged Linc to behave, which was part of the reason he was on Mt. Desert for the summer.

  But Mattie Young had approached Linc three days ago and demanded ten thousand dollars in exchange for his silence, changing everything.

  “I believe in you. Don’t disappoint me.”

  Countless times, at his lowest depths, Linc had used Chris’s words to give himself courage-to try again after yet another failure.

  Linc knew what his dead friend would have him do.

  Tell everything. Confess.

/>   Not let Mattie confuse and manipulate him.

  But Linc also knew he wouldn’t come clean.

  He couldn’t tell anyone about the blackmail-or what he had done that had gotten him into this mess.

  CHAPTER 7

  Grace Cooper stepped carefully in the lush grass of her uncle’s backyard, as if she didn’t want to leave footprints. “Ellis has worked very hard to make these gardens look natural. It seems contradictory, doesn’t it?”

  Abigail smiled, enjoying her tour of the award-winning gardens. “Everything’s so beautiful. I’m lucky if I can keep a pot of geraniums alive.”

  “I know how you feel,” Grace said with a laugh.

  Ellis was transplanting a bush with Mattie Young and had left his niece to deal with his unexpected guest, suggesting a quick garden tour. At thirty-eight, Grace was striking with her fine blond hair and strong features. Her eyes, a clear, pale blue, were her best feature. She was gracious and politely reserved.

  The mix of perennials and annuals, their colors and textures contrasting here, complementing there, sparkled and glistened in the clear and crisp morning air. Abigail had walked up from her house, yesterday afternoon’s escapade on the rocks with her journal ashes and Owen Garrison behind her.

  Grace leaned over and brushed her fingertips over a perfect dark pink foxglove. “These gardens are Ellis’s pride and joy. It won’t be easy for him to give them up.”

  “Give them up?”

  “Oh. I assumed you’d heard. We’re selling the property.”

  “This place?” Abigail didn’t hide her surprise. “No, I hadn’t heard.”

  And Grace would know she hadn’t heard. It was just her way of reminding Abigail that she didn’t know everything about the Coopers. Abigail had no illusions about her relationship with them. It wasn’t unfriendly, but they were aware she kept track of them-and that she did so because of their connections to Chris. They’d known him all his life. Ellis had held a garden party here the day she was attacked and robbed and Chris was killed. Someone had burglarized them and a handful of their friends that summer, although whether it was the same person who attacked her and stole her necklace remained an open question.

  “The timing’s right,” Grace continued. “Linc and I aren’t children anymore. My father can only get away for a few weeks in the summer. Keeping two houses here just doesn’t make as much sense these days.”

  “Why not sell your place on Somes Sound?”

  She shrugged, moving past sprays of coral bells and painted daisies. “It’s right on the water, and it’s really the family place more than this is. Ellis agrees. I think he wants to buy his own place. He’s so much younger than my father-he didn’t have the money when my father bought this property from the Garrisons.”

  “Won’t Ellis miss his gardens, especially?”

  “I imagine so, but he’s become quite the amateur landscape designer-I’m sure he’d love to get his fingers into something new. And there’s not much more he can do here.”

  “But it wasn’t his idea to put the home on the market?”

  “He trusts my father on these matters.” Grace paused, then smiled as she moved on to a sun-filled garden “room” of peonies. “We all trust my father.”

  “He’s a smart man,” Abigail said.

  “That he is. And you-why are you here?”

  “In Maine? I’m painting.” She and Lou Beeler had agreed to limit the number of people they told about the anonymous call. “I’ve already been to the hardware store this morning.”

  “Good for you. I hope you’ll join us for lunch one day while you’re here. I’m sure my father would love to see you. And Linc’s here-”

  “I saw him on the steps while Mattie had a cigarette.”

  Grace rolled her eyes. “Mattie knows Ellis doesn’t allow smoking on the grounds. Well, Linc won’t tell.”

  “Neither will I. I’m not here to stir up trouble.”

  “Aren’t you?” But she added quickly, “I have to go. I have calls to make. Take all the time you want looking at the gardens. Ellis will be flattered.”

  “Congratulations on your appointment.”

  She brightened. “Thank you. I’m thrilled. It’s a tremendous honor, and I look forward to the work.” She started back to her uncle’s house, then stopped and glanced back. “It’s good to see you, Abigail. I mean that.”

  With Grace’s departure, Abigail walked over to a small garden shed at the far end of the yard. Mature herbs and tall wildflowers grew to its small, four-paned windows. As a young bride, new to Maine, new to Garrison wealth, Polly Garrison supposedly had insisted on keeping chickens.

  Abigail peeked behind the shed-sure enough, there was a boarded-up, chicken-sized door.

  Mattie Young dragged a hose toward the shed. “Hey, Abigail, how’s it going?”

  “Great. Beautiful day. You?”

  “Paying the bills.”

  “I was just talking to Grace. I hadn’t realized the Coopers were putting this place on the market.”

  “Not the Coopers. Daddy Jason.”

  “But Ellis-”

  “He goes along. Can’t afford to piss off big brother, you know?” Mattie coiled the hose into a heap under a water line at a corner of the shed. “Makes no difference to me. New owners will need a yardman.”

  Abigail didn’t respond. She’d lost patience with Mattie’s chronic bitterness and cynicism a long time ago. Even Chris, who’d stood by his childhood friend through one self-indulgent, self-destructive screwup after another, had finally written Mattie off after he didn’t show up for their wedding.

  “I hadn’t realized Linc was up here,” she said. “I saw you two talking-”

  “We’re allowed to talk.” He caught himself, stepping back from the house. “Sorry. It’s just-you’re a cop. Every time you ask a question, I think I’m being interrogated.”

  “That’s understandable,” she said, neutral.

  He picked at a mosquito bite on his wrist. “Linc’s at a loose end this summer. I think he’s bummed about his dad selling this place. He’s never known a time when it wasn’t in his family. He doesn’t remember when the Garrisons owned it.”

  “I hadn’t thought of it that way. But the Coopers’ house on Somes Sound is even bigger and fancier-”

  “Don’t I know it?” Mattie grinned, but he didn’t manage to take any of the edge off his put-upon attitude. “I mow their yard every week.”

  Portly Ellis Cooper joined them. He was neatly dressed in khakis and a bright blue golf shirt, a retractable walking stick tucked under one arm. His favorite pastime was to wander in his five acres of gardens. His property also backed up onto woodland trails that led into Acadia and down the steps and across the private drive, included the cliffs where Doe Garrison had drowned. Ellis could roam to his heart’s content.

  “Abigail-my apologies for not greeting you sooner. I wanted to finish in the garden and wash up before saying hello.” He put out a hand and shook hers warmly. “Wonderful to see you.”

  “You, too, Ellis. I don’t think I’ve ever seen your gardens this gorgeous.”

  “We had a cool spring. Everything seems to have blossomed at once. Did Grace give you the grand tour?”

  “She did. I should let you all get back to your day. Is Linc still here? I haven’t had a chance to say hello-”

  “He took off a few minutes ago,” Mattie said.

  Ellis seemed faintly irritated at his yardman’s interruption, but he hooked his arm into Abigail’s, smiling at her. “I’ll walk with you. You came up the steps, didn’t you? I was worried the fog would settle in for a few days, but it blew out almost as fast as it blew in.”

  When they reached the front of the house, he unhooked his arm from Abigail’s, and she grinned at him. “You’d have made a good bouncer in another life.”

  He laughed. “I’m just a political consultant and gardener.”

  “I don’t know how good a consultant you are, but you’re obviously quite
the gardener.”

  “Grace told you we’re selling the place? I could continue here forever, but I have to admit I’m excited about the prospect of a fresh start somewhere. Keeping up five acres of gardens is a huge responsibility. I’ve naturalized more and more in recent years, but it’s still a lot of work.”

  “You and Mattie manage everything yourselves?”

  “I bring in specialists from time to time. Mattie-well, you know what he’s like. He’s just reliable enough and just hardworking enough that I can’t fire him. I don’t think he’s drinking, not right now. The truth is, I feel sorry for him.” Ellis’s expression softened. “Chris’s death shattered him. He’s never been the same.”

  “He’d started drinking again before Chris was killed.”

  “True, but he was starting to turn himself around that summer-or so most of us thought. Hard to believe it’s been seven years. Jason thinks it’s been long enough not to affect prospective buyers. Even if Chris wasn’t killed on the property, it was close-” He stopped himself, looked stricken. “Oh, Abigail. I’m so sorry. I know it must seem like yesterday to you. I didn’t mean-”

  “It’s okay, Ellis. Forget it.”

  Abigail was accustomed to people getting tongue-tied around her. She wondered if it’d be different if she’d remarried, if she’d been older when she was widowed.

  She said goodbye to Ellis and followed a shaded stone path surrounded by thyme to the steps. Abigail imagined Owen’s eccentric great-grandfather taking the time, the money and the energy to have the steps carved into the granite hillside-all to get to a teahouse. He wasn’t in the same league as his superrich Maine neighbors like the Rockefellers, but he’d had vision and optimism, a trait most people said his great-grandson shared, although Abigail doubted Edgar Garrison’d had a two-inch scar under his eye from a bar fight.

  As she descended the zigzag of steps, a slight breeze stirring, Abigail wondered if she should give serious thought to selling her own Mt. Desert Island house. With Lou Beeler’s retirement in the fall, would the dozens of state and local detectives who’d worked on her husband’s seven-year-old murder continue? Who would have his dedication, his interest?