Suspicion

“Sure, honey.” The volunteer gave Ava a quick hug. “Take care, sweetie.”

As she left the hospital and walked down Avalon Canyon Road into town, Ava considered the merits of Ingrid’s solitary existence. No need for constant reassurance or pretending to be something you weren’t. If Ingrid felt morose or out of sorts, she just dug in her garden or rode horses until she was in the mood for human contact again.

Hands in the pockets of her denim jacket, Ava turned onto Sumner—past the tiny house and summer rentals that had once been tent sites owned by her grandfather—and onto Crescent, now thronged with tourists disembarking from the Catalina Express.

She stopped to look at a dress in the window of Island Fashions, a clingy pistachio-colored shift that would look great if she could lose the ten pounds she’d gained in the past two months. A minute on the lips, forever on the hips. Diana’s voice, taunting her. You should see me now, Mom, she thought. In the window she could see the reflected parade of passersby. A small stout man separated himself from the rest. He’d spotted her.

Too late to pretend she hadn’t seen him, she turned to smile at the mayor of Avalon. A sixtyish man in a tropical shirt, with a bald head and plump pink face and chins that dissolved into his neck. A sweetheart, but she couldn’t look at him without thinking of a melting ice-cream cone.

“…so hard for you,” he was saying now. “The council thought that one of your beautiful art pieces would be a fitting tribute to your mother.” He patted her arm and made room for a couple of straw-hatted tourists. “No pressure, though. We’d never want to do that. How you doing, anyway, honey?”

“Fine. Busy of course.”

“Well, that’s good.” His eyes lingered on her for a moment. “You know Muriel was just saying this morning—she runs the grief-counseling program at the hospital, you know—anyway, she was saying that all most people really need is someone to listen to them.”

Ava kept smiling. “It’s great that they have someone as dedicated as Muriel.”

“She’s a good listener,” the mayor said. “A real good listener.”

“Tell her I said hi,” Ava said.

“Will do. And, Ava, you take care now. And when you’re ready to think about that piece for your mother, bless her soul, you just give me a call.”

“Right,” Ava said. She crossed the road and walked along the seafront, killing time until she returned to the hospital to meet her father. A crowd of little girls in pigtails and Crayola-colored clothes were giggling and hitting each other with their backpacks. She caught the eye of one of them and winked. She kept walking, past the signs hawking rides in glass-bottom boats, past Olaf’s ice-cream store, past the guides hawking tours of the Casino and Jeep excursions into the interior. It was hard to walk through Avalon without running into someone she knew, but she’d discovered that if she kept her head down people were sometimes reluctant to approach her.

Which suited her just fine. Anything to avoid The Look. People had started treating her differently after Rob died. They’d smile and chat, but there was a new solicitousness in their voices. A caution, as though they were dealing with a convalescent who might relapse. They’d peer into her eyes as though to make sure someone was really there. Now, since her mother’s death, it was happening again.

She hated it. They meant well, but she hated it. Either she avoided people completely or, when that wasn’t possible, she became so impossibly bright and chipper that she was always expecting someone to rap her on the head and say, “Knock it off. We know you’re hurting. Just admit it.”

But she couldn’t. Instead, she’d breeze around doing her happier-than-thou schtick until she couldn’t stand herself anymore. Then she’d go home, wrap herself up in an old afghan her grandmother had knitted, pig out on whatever was on hand—amazingly, ice cream was always on hand—and fall asleep watching a cheesy movie on late-night TV. Then wake up hours later, screaming because she’d seen her mother’s face again staring up at her from beneath the water. I’m not happy, Ava. I haven’t been for some time.

BACK AT THE HOSPITAL, she found her father in his small office, just off the main corridor, waiting for the next patient. Dr. Sam Lynsky III wore a gold paper crown and a white lab coat over jeans.

“That place was falling apart when your grandmother had it,” he said after she told him about the cottage. “It needs to be torn down.”

“I can fix it up.” Ava folded her arms over her chest, ready to do battle. “Don’t give me a hard time about it, Dad. What’s it to you if I want to live there?”

“Ava, I am rattling around in a two-million-dollar property that was and still is your home. It’s lonely and unwelcoming and far too large, and I’d like nothing more than to come home in the evening to my daughter’s company—both my daughters, but I realize that’s asking too much. I can’t imagine how it could be a question of privacy, but—”

“It’s full of Mom,” Ava blurted, exactly the kind of reasoning she hadn’t intended to use. “Maybe it doesn’t bother you, Dad. Maybe you’re getting on just fine without her, but I can’t take it.”

“Ava.” Sam leaned back in his chair. “Your inability to deal with your mother’s death is hardly a plausible reason to buy a ramshackle piece of property. At some point, you’ll need to accept what happened. In the meantime, there are any number of other houses on the island.”

“Maybe so,” Ava said. “But I want that one.”

“Jerry the pharmacist is going to sell his place.” Sam had emptied a canvas briefcase onto the consulting-room floor. “Got the information in here somewhere… Oh, here’s something you might be interested in.” He tossed a brochure at Ava.

Ava glanced at the glossy ad for a Los Angeles gallery. “Dad, what does this have to do with Grandma’s cottage?”

“Nothing. Just pointing out the sort of marketing you need to do. Never going to get anywhere painting three tiles a week. Need to think big.”

Ava fumed inwardly. Her father kept digging, papers flying all around him. He wasn’t a large man, but with his extravagant gestures and nonstop barrage of words, he always seemed to make a room feel too small.

“Jerry’s house would be a smart buy,” he said. “Now where did I put that piece of paper?”

He continued to shuffle through papers as he told her what a wise investment the pharmacist’s house would be. Her father had bought and sold plenty of real estate in his life, and he could be quite persuasive on financial matters. In fact, as she listened to him, she found herself thinking that maybe the pharmacist’s house was indeed the way to go. On the verge of saying she’d take a look, she stopped herself. Sam eventually wore everyone down. This time he wouldn’t prevail.

“Dad, just give me an answer on the cottage. I don’t feel like sitting here while you turn everything upside down. Lil said I could move in—”

“Hold on a minute.” He stopped to examine a piece of paper. “Asthma Foundation holding some fancy-schmancy conference in L.A. Waste of time and money. What they should do—”

“I don’t give a damn what they should do.” In one move Ava scooped up all his papers and shoved them back in the bag. “I want Grandma’s cottage.”

“How are you going to pay for it?”

“I have money.” She felt her face color. She knew, as her father certainly did, that she had money from Rob’s insurance and in her trust fund. Although work was picking up, her commissions were by no means steady and she barely scraped by on what she made.

“Big commission?”

“Dammit, Dad, why do you have to make everything so difficult? The place is empty, I could move in tonight and rent it until the buy closes.” She saw him wavering. “Come on. I really want the cottage.”

“A lesson in life,” her father said, “is that we don’t always get what we want.”

The intercom on his desk buzzed to indicate a patient was waiting. “I’ll let you know,” he said. “I might decide to tear the place down.”

Ava left, slamming the door behind her, and walked back down the hill into town. He’d let her have the place, she knew that, but not before he’d made a huge and unnecessary production of it. Not so long ago she’d loved him so unreservedly it frightened her. Lately everything he did irritated her. And then she’d feel guilty. Guilt and irritation, an endless seesaw. And the irony was that all he was doing, all he’d ever done, was be himself. How her mother had stood it for forty years, she had no idea.

CHAPTER THREE

“DR. SAM?” The waitress at the Beehive smiled at Scott. “No, haven’t seen him this morning. Kind of early yet. He doesn’t usually come in till later.”

Scott glanced at his watch. Lynsky had said eight-thirty, and it was now nearly nine. He ordered coffee and decided to give the doctor another fifteen minutes. The check Lynsky had given him the day before was still on his desk, but Ellie had asked him again about the school trip to Spain. When he called her tonight, it would be terrific to tell her she could go.

“Here you are.” The waitress set a cup down in front of him. “The thing with Dr. Sam is, you never know from one minute to the next what he’s going to do.” She chuckled. “Just part of the guy’s charm, I guess.”

By nine-fifteen, the doctor still hadn’t arrived, and Scott walked back to the Argonaut and began writing a piece about an upcoming fishing tournament. He’d just finished it when his phone rang.

“You can run but you can’t hide,” Mark, his former colleague from the Times said. “Listen, Carolyn and I had a big bust-up—”

“Jeez, let me alert the national media.” Scott’s younger sister, Carolyn had been dating Mark for a year, most of it marked by big bust-ups. The surprise was that they’d even gotten together in the first place. Carolyn, whose favorite color was black, was deep into the club scene. Mark, when he wasn’t chasing a story or reading a book, was writing a police-procedural novel, which he hoped to sell for enough money to allow him to leave the Times. He was an introvert; Carolyn craved excitement. They fought about everything. “So what was it this time? She got a tattoo you didn’t like?”

“Close. She’s dyed her hair orange. God, I tell you. I thought burgundy was bad. Listen, I could use a change of scenery. Feel like having a house guest for a day or so?”

MARK CAUGHT THE ten-fifteen Catalina Express from Long Beach, and Scott met him at the pier; by noon, they were eating fried fish and chips at a white plastic table on the patio of the Casino Dock Café, looking out at a scene that Ava might have painted. To their left the terra-cotta roof of the Casino; below them Avalon’s version of a traffic jam—kayaks, dinghies and fishing boats, leaving, arriving, or just tooling around.

“Well, sure, I’d rather be stuck in traffic on the Golden State Freeway, stressed out because I was late for the mayor’s press briefing.” Scott emptied the rest of a pitcher of beer into their glasses. “I mean, this is pretty damn hard to take.”

It was all impossibly picturesque. The wheeling gulls, the sparkling blue ocean and, just for a touch of color, a chugging red Harbor Patrol boat. So beautiful that, although he couldn’t drop the note of mockery when he spoke to Mark about his new life, he suspected deep down that he’d already succumbed to the island’s legendary spell. Now if he could just work things out with Ellie.