Carrie Alexander - Count on a Cop Page 9

  She glanced at Sean apologetically. “I don’t have to like them, you know. I’m here to do a job.”

  With a shrug, he offered his elbow. She took it and they strolled along the low stone wall that overlooked the sea cliffs. Other guests had also wandered outside, but they stayed clustered on the terrace.

  Connie and Sean continued walking along the peninsula until they stood at the edge of the cliff. The jagged rocks and crashing surf were dramatic. Behind them, the stately home was accentuated by a cinematographer’s dream backdrop of tall trees and the faded remnants of a gorgeous sunset.

  She felt as though they’d been plunked into a Technicolor Alfred Hitchcock movie. Only a murder was missing.

  The thought made her shiver.

  “Here.” Sean loosened her sweater from around her shoulders and held it out for her.

  “Thanks.” His hands splayed across her shoulders, staying there even after she’d slid her arms into the sleeves. He moved a step closer. She sensed his body heat, and yearned to press back against him and luxuriate in it.

  She shoved her sweater sleeves up past her elbows, felt the tingle of her skin responding even to her own touch. She’d been that quickly aroused.

  She leaned forward to stare down at the dizzying drop. The dark sea swelled, crashed, foamed.

  Her stomach lurched. They were so near the edge. One push was all it would take.

  She swayed, although her feet remained firmly planted. I’m falling.

  But not off the cliff. One small push and she’d be tumbling headlong into love, regardless of its dangers.

  “Careful.” Sean caught hold of her, both hands locked firmly around her upper arms. “Too much wine?”

  She spun around, almost collapsing against his chest in the heady rush of everything she was feeling. Sensations she’d forgotten had resurfaced, reminders of what it was like not to fall apart but to fall into. Into wondrously unfamiliar depths. A swan dive toward a turbulent sea.

  He rocked back a little but held on. “Why is danger so enticing even when you’re scared?” she asked, catching her breath.

  His grip steadied her. “Is it?”

  “Sometimes. I was looking over the edge, thinking what it would be like to fall—” She broke off with a shudder. “Or to be pushed.”

  “Not by me, I hope.”

  “Not really.”

  “Not really? But maybe?”

  She produced a light laugh. “Well, you are the mysterious stranger in this scenario.”

  After a glance toward the terrace where the party guests were silhouetted against the house, busy with their own dramas, Sean put his face near hers. Their noses bumped. A spark leaped in Connie’s veins.

  “Solitary and unknown I’ll admit to, but not strange.” For a moment, his palms flattened as they stroked down her arms. Then his fingers curled around her elbows. He drew her closer. A low moan came from deep in his throat and his thumbs tightened on the softer flesh of her inner arms.

  “Not strange,” she agreed. Closing her eyes, welcoming the pressure.

  She had the fleeting sensation of their breath combining, then felt the warm velvet touch of his lips. New lips. Strange lips. But lovely ones, Connie thought with a sigh as he withdrew, ending the kiss much too soon.

  “I didn’t come here for this,” he said in a guttural voice.

  She gave her head a little shake to clear it. What did he mean? This was their kiss, but what was here? The walk? The party? The island?

  Did it matter, when she was going at a hundred miles an hour, and he was putting on the brakes?

  “That’s all right.” She took a step back, leaving his chest with a light pat. It took her a couple of seconds to grab hold of herself, recognize that the wine had gone to her head. “Neither did I,” she added.

  I didn’t come for this, but I’d stay for it.

  “I’m not in a place…” He cleared his throat. “I’m not looking to meet anyone right now.”

  “Yes. Bad timing all around.”

  “Well. You’re agreeable.”

  She raised her eyebrows. “I should argue?”

  She almost laughed. Because she knew that as much as he wanted to retreat, and she’d wanted to avoid the temptation altogether, they’d started something that would be extremely difficult to ignore. If she was falling, he’d have to admit to taking a pretty big stumble, at the very least.

  Sean shook his head, but now there was a grin plucking at his mouth. “Can’t you even act disappointed, just a little, as a salve to my ego?”

  “Pffft. I don’t cater to men’s egos.”

  “Well,” he said once more, considering. “I like that.”

  She took a different sort of leap. “I like you.”

  His eyes got dark, his expression serious again. But his regard wasn’t cool this time, unless she counted a cold so cold it burned.

  “I like you, too.” Gingerly, he reached for her hand. “And that’s why I’m taking you home. Straight home.”

  “Home?” she said, unable to resist teasing him as he pulled her along beside him. “Would you be referring to Pine Cone Cottage?”

  He glowered in the direction of the dark forest. “You know what I meant.”

  Let him plunk me on the doorstep, she thought as they cut past the gardens and the maze and the pale curve of driveway. The pink-ribboned sky had turned to a rosy dusk.

  This time.

  “IT’S NOT ONLY ABOUT SEEING,” Sean said. “You have to train your other senses, too.”

  “Like feeling,” Pippa said. “Touch.” She stooped and picked up a pinecone. “It’s sharp and dry. But this part is sticky.”

  They stood at the edge of the forest on the Sheffield estate, in sight of Connie, who was up at the garden overseeing the final preparations for the party tomorrow. After sticking close to her mother the entire morning, Pippa had needed distraction. Connie had waylaid Sean near the front gate as he completed his morning walk around the island. After lunch in the guesthouse, she’d begged him to stick around and amuse her daughter for an hour or two.

  Despite all his talk of preferring isolation, he hadn’t been able to think of a good reason to say no.

  Pippa dropped the cone and rubbed her fingers on her shorts. “We feel stuff all the time. How does that help to solve crimes?”

  “A detective could be examining a crime scene and miss a clue if he or she didn’t feel, for instance, that the floor was gritty with sand. Which might mean that the perpetrator had come off the beach.”

  Pippa dropped to one knee and scribbled in her notebook. He saw that she’d written Use all your senses! and had underlined it.

  “What else?” she asked.

  “Hearing. You want to be able to identify all types of sounds and learn how far they carry, given the conditions.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Sound carries farther at night. Rain or wind will obscure it. Fog distorts it.”

  Frowning, Pippa tilted her face toward him. The dappled sunshine glanced off her eyeglasses. “I don’t like fog. It’s creepy.”

  “That’s only because you’re not familiar with it, and it makes you more aware of sounds you usually miss.”

  “Like footsteps!”

  “Right. Did you know that the sound of footsteps carries farther on a paved road than a dirt one?”

  “Pffft.” The sound Pippa made reminded him of Connie the previous night, when she’d been trying to convince him she was detached and levelheaded despite the preternaturally vivid color in her eyes and cheeks. Her arousal had been alluring…nearly disarming. He’d spent the remainder of the night reminding himself why he was better off alone.

  “Tell me something that’s not obvious.” Pippa stood, the notebook folded open and tucked against her arm.

  “Depending on the situation, voices in a normal conversation might carry about three hundred yards, while solo footsteps carry only forty. A scream—” He stopped. Better not to get into screams and g
unshots.

  Pippa took the eraser end of her pencil out of her mouth. “Double?”

  “More like sixteen hundred yards. If you’re ever in trouble, scream as loud as you can.”

  “Ob-vee-ous,” she said, but made a note.

  “Sound carries well on water. You might hear someone rowing from as far as two thousand yards.” He smiled. “But that’s only if you’re not surrounded by the crashing waves at Whitlock’s Arrow at the time.”

  Pippa nodded, too absorbed in writing to respond. “What else?”

  “Let me think.” He gave a wave to Connie and walked with her daughter along the edge of the forest until they reached a dirt path that led them toward the water. “Vehicle headlights, two to five miles, depending on the terrain. A small bonfire, four miles. Flashlights can be seen at just over a mile.”

  Pippa looked up when she stumbled over a tree root that had buckled the path. “How come you know all this?”

  “I trained.” The thicket of spruce and pine thinned out, giving way to the wild blue vista of ocean and sky.

  They stopped at a clearing where pink rocks thrust out of the earth, interspersed with patches of nodding daisies and buttercups. “Like I’m training right now?”

  “Not quite. You’re getting an early start. I didn’t do it on my own.” He walked to the sloping edge of the clearing, thinking of his father and brothers, his sister, Jannie. The standards they’d set were a double-edged sword.

  “After I graduated from college, I enrolled in the MSP academy in Framingham. MSP—that’s Massachusetts State Police. But the academy’s in New Braintree now.”

  “New Braintree.” She giggled, reminding him that she was just a kid. “A tree with a brain. That sounds kinda funny.”

  “Massachusetts has lots of funny names. Uxbridge, Assonet, Chicopee,” he recited. As a trooper who’d been assigned to several posts over the years, he knew the state backward and forward. “There’s even a small town called Florida. And another called Orange.”

  Sean gazed over the ocean. The color of the water reminded him of Connie. Her clear, sparkling eyes. He didn’t know whether it was her or the sun or the island as a whole, but…The world didn’t seem as dark and dismal as he’d believed.

  Behind him, Pippa plopped onto a rock. She turned a page in her notebook. “Keep telling me.”

  She was worse with the curiosity than Josh had been as a little boy, when he’d barraged Sean with questions about why the grass was green and birds had feathers. Later, the questions were even more impossible. Why are you getting a divorce? Don’t you want me?

  At least he knew how to answer Pippa.

  “How about you tell me?” He swung around. “Which do you think could be seen from farther away—a lit match or cigarette?”

  She poked her tongue into her cheek. “A match.”

  “Why?”

  “Um, I guess because it burns hotter. And it’s, like, a bigger flame.” Pippa eyed him almost belligerently. “Do you smoke?”

  “Never.”

  “My mom used to.” She ducked her head down and scratched at the rock with her pencil. The change in her demeanor was marked. “When…when my dad was sick.”

  “She was probably stressed.”

  Pippa sucked her lips inward. Her glistening eyes lifted to Sean’s. “I made her quit.”

  “Good for you.”

  “But she used to cheat. After he died. She tried to keep it a secret, but I could smell the smoke on her.”

  “There you go,” Sean said. “You used your sense of smell and drew a reasonable conclusion.”

  The thunderclouds in Pippa’s expression parted.

  “But what if your conclusion had been wrong?” he asked. “What if she was meeting every day with someone who smoked and that was what you smelled?”

  “Phooey. I didn’t think of that.”

  “Observation is only one part of being a good investigator. You also have to analyze your facts and apply critical thinking to the why and where and how of them. Never jump to conclusions.”

  “Ho-kay,” Pippa said with a little sigh. She yanked up a daisy by the roots and began to peel off its petals, asking after a while, “Do you think that if I don’t become a private detective like Trixie that I could be a police officer instead?”

  “You sure could.” He paused, uncertain whether Connie wanted him to encourage Pippa quite that much. “But, you know, you’ve got a lot of time to decide.”

  There’d been no question that he would follow his family’s trooper tradition, but young girls were probably different. His brother Bobby’s oldest daughter was only in junior high and she’d already gone from wanting to be a NASA physicist to a fashion designer.

  And then life threw its own curves at you, such as the one Connie had taken when she’d lost her husband.

  Or the one he’d faced. So far he’d only had vague thoughts of actually quitting his job, but he had little enthusiasm remaining for it, either. His father had said that would return, but then the old man had never been involved in a shooting, not in thirty-some years of active duty.

  “Can we go down to the shore?” Pippa closed the cover and folded her abused notebook into a tube, which she wedged into the deep pocket of her khaki shorts. “I want to see what sounds carry best on the water. I bet cracking rocks together would make a good Morse code.”

  Sean agreed. He followed Pippa down a narrow path to the pebble-strewn shore. A line of kelp marked the high tide. The smell of it was strong in his nose. Boats from the nearby harbor speckled the indigo sea, a rainbow of spinnakers bellied by the wind. He took it all in—the knife-edge glance of sunshine, the breeze on his face, the child happily splashing in the shallows with her sneakers tossed over her shoulder.

  Babysitting a ten-year-old hadn’t been in his vacation plan. But he was gradually gaining the clarity to see that Pippa—and Connie—might fit well into his recovery.

  THE FULL DAY of vigorous exercise, sun and salt wind had worked its tonic on Sean. By evening, he was sapped, and his leg was stiff and feeling the strain of too much walking. A quiet night was what he needed.

  Quiet…and, finally, alone.

  Avoiding all thoughts of red-haired gardeners and how they kissed, he got a beer from Alice Potter’s fridge and a thriller from her bookshelf.

  With nightfall, a chill had crept into the cottage. After a moment of debate, he got back up and started a small blaze in the fireplace with short lengths of logs from a woodpile out back. The fire didn’t give off much heat, but it was enough to warm the room.

  He settled down. It wasn’t so bad, being alone.

  Spending the afternoon with Pippa had made him think more than ever about his son, Josh, living so far away in California. A few shared holidays and one month in the summer wasn’t enough time together.

  But August was coming. He’d have fully recovered by then. This time he’d find a way to break down the barrier of the boy’s hurt and resentment.

  Maybe he’d even say, “What the hell,” quit the job and move to California to be with his son. But what would they have, then? Weekends? Shuttling Josh back and forth between homes?

  Was that any better?

  Sean threw the book across the room. It hit the wall and dropped with a thunk.

  He was instantly sorry. He had better control than to pitch a fit like a thirteen-year-old. Josh had been angry last summer, and Sean hadn’t known how to handle the boy. He’d even kicked a hole in the wall of their Cape Cod beach house when Sean had said he couldn’t go motor biking with some kids he’d met in town. The rent had been expensive, but the house had been cheap, with walls made of thin plasterboard and the smell of rot in the air.

  And yet it had been the best Sean could do, something he’d waited for all year. Just the two of them. He’d ended up cutting the beach visit short and taking Josh to his parents’ house instead. They knew how to soothe a savage teenager.

  Sean stretched out on the couch. A pain shot through hi
s leg, but he ignored it. Was that what this time alone was about? The chance to beat himself up without distraction? That seemed like a waste. Maybe this was actually his chance to make a decision to commit himself fully to his son.

  A few minutes later, his cell phone went off. He had no use for it here and hadn’t been carrying it, but his mother was bound and determined to check in every few days.

  Feeling as creaky as an old-timer, he got off the couch and found the phone in the pocket of a discarded jacket. Flipping it open, he saw that the number of the caller was unfamiliar.

  Connie answered his hello. Tension in her voice. “Is Pippa there with you?” she asked, without preamble, then gave an awkward chuckle. “By chance?”

  “Of course not. It’s almost nine.”

  “I didn’t think so.” She let out a breath. “But there was no one else to call.”

  “Pippa’s missing? What about Peregrine House?”

  “I tried there. Got one of the staff, and they haven’t seen her since this morning.”

  “She wouldn’t go to the shore. Not after…”

  “I don’t—I don’t think so.” Connie’s voice trembled. “Oh, Sean. I just don’t know! She was in her room, reading before getting ready for bed. I didn’t go up right away, so I can’t say exactly how long she’s been gone. Why would she go out at night? She doesn’t even like the dark. And it’s getting dark out there. Very dark.”

  Sean thought of their conversation that day, about sounds on the water and voices carrying at night. Matches and flashlights in the dark.

  Pippa might have gotten it into her head to test a few theories.

  Damn his big mouth.

  “Listen,” he said. “Sit tight. I’m on my way.”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Pippa Bradford’s Book of Curious Observations

  LEARN MORSE CODE and sign language. Mr. Rafferty says three short, three long, three short is SOS. We practiced on the beach and stones worked lots better than sticks. But I wish I had a secret code like Trixie. I wish I had a friend like Honey to share it. Mr. R. is cool and I don’t think he’s a criminal anymore, but he still doesn’t count.