Suspicion

“I did. You know what his horoscope said the day we closed escrow? ‘A new start will prove beneficial.’ Listen, love, I just know things are going to start looking up for you. I feel it right here.” She tapped her chest. “The sun’s going to come out again, you’ll see.”

I’d settle for feeling normal again, Ava thought.

“Let me go in and do a bit of exploring,” Lil said when they were back at the real-estate office. “Place has been rented for so long I’m not sure who owns it anymore. I’ll find out though, luv, and give you a ring this afternoon.”

CHAPTER TWO

SCOTT STOOD IN THE cereal aisle at Von’s trying to remember whether Ellie ate Cheerios or Rice Krispies. He picked up the Cheerios, dropped the carton in the basket and then, in a fit of indecision, set it back on the shelf. Maybe she didn’t even eat cereal. Why, he asked himself, hadn’t he paid more attention? His ex-wife’s voice supplied the answer. Because you don’t pay attention, period, Scott. You’ve never been there for me, and you haven’t been there for Ellie for God knows how long.

He dumped both the Cheerios and the Rice Krispies into the basket and moved on down the aisle. Things were about to change. Ellie’s two-week visit wouldn’t be long enough to completely mend the rift in their relationship, but it was a start. He’d spent the morning cleaning and vacuuming his apartment, bought new sheets and a set of dishes and made a list of all the things they would do while she was on Catalina—a glass-bottom-boat ride, snorkeling, horseback riding in the interior. It was going to be a good visit.

His cell phone rang as he wheeled his basket to the cash register. Laura. His ex-wife had called every day since he’d arrived on the island. Some days she called twice. Usually—within earshot of Ellie, he was certain—she’d start with a list of his various transgressions and shortcomings and then she’d put Ellie on the phone. By that time, not surprisingly, his daughter was hostile and surly.

“Ellie, I know you want to go to Spain,” he said now. They’d had this conversation before. “But I don’t have the money to send you. I didn’t go to Europe until I’d graduated from college.”

“You could afford it if you still worked at the Times.” Ellie’s voice was full of indignation. “You didn’t have to quit.”

Phone shoved between his head and shoulder, Scott unloaded the basket.

“It’s not my fault you wanted to go live on some stupid island,” Ellie continued.

“You’re going to love it here, El.” Scott tried to divert her. “It’s really beautiful. We’ll go swimming, snorkeling. I’ve already bought you a bike.”

“I might not come.”

His hand froze around a can of green beans. “What do you mean? It’s all set up.”

“Mom wants me to go to Cleveland with her to see Grandma.”

He took a breath. “Is that what you want to do?”

“I don’t know.” She sighed. “Mom gets kind of lonely. I feel bad for her.”

He finished unloading the groceries, pulled out his bill-fold and waited for the cashier to ring up the total. He recognized Laura’s tactic, but he had little taste for making Ellie a pawn in her parents’ game. Better just to back off.

“Fifty-two fifty,” the cashier said.

He fished out a twenty and a ten, then realized that was all the cash he had. As he wrote out a check, he tried to remember exactly how much he had left in his checking account. The shopping expedition in preparation for Ellie’s visit had pretty much blown his monthly budget.

“Listen, Ellie,” he told his daughter, “I’m going to be disappointed if you don’t come, but I’ll leave it up to you to do what you think is best.”

“Sure, Dad,” she said listlessly. “Whatever.”

After he’d carried the groceries to his apartment, he headed back to the Argonaut and the letter he’d been trying to write to the people of Catalina. His thoughts kept drifting to Ellie and the obscure feeling that by not insisting she come to Catalina, instead of accompanying her mother to Cleveland, he’d somehow let her down.

More trouble still was the vague sense of relief he felt now that the trip was in doubt. While he loved Ellie unreservedly, the fear of not being able to pull things off and failing somehow to make her happy was a weight on his shoulders. He got up from the desk, poured a mug of coffee and sat down again. She’d told him once that he “sucked” as a dad and maybe she was right. Retreat and distance came easily to him, a little too easily. Qualities that probably didn’t do much to reassure his daughter.

He looked up from his musings to see Ava Lynsky standing in the doorway. She looked different, though, her hair or something. It took him a moment to realize it wasn’t Ava. Actually, she looked like a less-vivid version of Ava. Same build, same fine bone structure, but her hair was short and choppy, and in contrast to Ava’s Snow White coloring, this woman had the tanned complexion of someone who spent a lot of time outdoors. Her feet were clad in hiking boots and she wore jeans and a sleeveless cotton shirt.

She glanced around the cramped offices of the Catalina Island Argonaut, where undelivered stacks of last week’s newspaper vied for space with the mountain bike he’d just acquired, the small brown fridge where the previous publisher had kept her peppermint schnapps and a precarious mountain of boxes still to be unpacked.

“So you’re the new publisher, huh?” She stuck out her hand. “Ingrid Lynsky. You met my sister this morning. My father asked me to pass on a message to you. He’s supposed to give you a tour this afternoon?”

“At four,” Scott said.

“Don’t look for him before five,” Ingrid said. “My father overcommits. If he has enough time in the day to do four things, he’ll try to squeeze in six. Everybody is inconvenienced, but hey, that’s Dr. Sam for you.”

Scott scratched his ear. He could still hear Ellie telling him he sucked. “You’re not a member of the Dr. Sam fan club?” he asked Ingrid. “I thought everyone on Catalina subscribed to it.”

Ingrid laughed. “Oh, did I give you the wrong impression? I’m sorry. Dr. Sam’s a saint. Most people have to take a boat to the mainland. My father can walk.”

Scott looked at her.

Ingrid looked straight back at him, her gaze steady and unflinching. “Anyway,” she said, “just so you know, he’ll be late.”

“HOPE YOU’RE NOT expecting to make any money with that paper,” Sam Lynsky said as he pulled his Jeep back onto the road. He’d breezed into Scott’s office at five-thirty with a convoluted tale about being stopped a dozen times as he tried to get away from the hospital and everyone wanting a minute of his time. “The Argonaut’s never turned a profit in forty years. How come you bought it?”

“Escape,” Scott said before he had time to think about it. “Things on the mainland were getting ugly.”

Dr. Sam rounded the curve of Abalone Point and headed toward Pebbly Beach. “No family?”

“Divorced.” Scott glanced at the doctor, a youthful-looking sixty-year-old with white hair curling from under a red baseball cap, neat mustache and a clear blue steady-eyed gaze. “I have a fourteen-year-old daughter.”

“You going to make enough to get by?”

“I’m counting on the newspaper to provide some revenue.” He’d seen the publisher’s account books. Maybe not much by Lynsky’s standards, but he could get by. “And I’ve got some freelance assignments lined up.”

He rested an arm on the window ledge. If his head weren’t full of Ellie, he’d enjoy this tour, he thought as they turned onto Wrigley Terrace Road. Avalon Bay was behind them now, and the grey-green mountains that ringed Catalina filled the view through the windshield. The wind off the ocean felt bracing.

“That’s the old William Wrigley home up there on your left.” Lynsky waved his arm at a palatial white structure nestled in the hills. “Built in the 1920s as a summer home. Before that the Wrigleys would come over in June and stay at the St. Catherine’s Hotel. The story goes, Mrs. Wrigley woke up one morning and said, ‘I would like to live there.’ It’s a hotel these days, but when I was a boy… Hold on.”

Scott grabbed the Jeep’s roll bar as Lynsky executed a sudden hairpin curve. The doctor’s driving was a tad hair-raising.

Lynsky glanced at Scott and laughed. “You think that’s bad? In my great-grandfather’s days, before the Bannings started building real roads, they’d run stage coaches from Avalon over to the Isthmus. Six horses, galloping down the summit, hooves flying. Wooden wheels.” He shook his head. “We’re too soft these days. Want everything too easy. Where’s the challenge? Where’s the spirit? You said you’re divorced?”

“Right.”

“How long were you married?”

“Fifteen years.”

“I was married,” Dr. Sam said, “nearly forty years. Not a natural state, though, marriage. Society forces you into it, but it’s not natural. Used to have a collection of toilet paper until my wife got rid of it. Toilet paper from every country I ever visited and barf bags, empty, of course, from every flight I ever took. She threw them all out. Sorry I ever got married,” he said.

“Wouldn’t do it again, huh?”

“‘Thus grief still treads upon the heels of pleasure…’” Lynsky steered the Jeep across a stretch of brush-filled terrain. “‘Married in haste, we may repent at leisure.’”

Lynsky careered around a bend, sending Scott slamming into the passenger door. He gave up on trying to take notes. Between the doctor’s driving, his nonstop monologue and conversational threads introduced, then left dangling, he felt disoriented. Now the harbor was a dizzying drop-off to his left and they were hurtling along a mountainous ridge road, then down a canyon and up again to a view of the Pacific spread out like a blue silk sheet far below.