The Harbor

His room at the inn had pink soap and pink-flowered wallpaper, and its four-poster bed was a first for J.B. The place was run by Lottie Martin, who had to be the sourest woman in the state of Maine. He always greeted her cheerfully just to watch her squirm. When he opened his door and saw that his room had been tossed, he knew she wouldn’t be happy.

He wasn’t happy.

It was a gentle toss, not a ransacking. If he hadn’t worked undercover for the past five years and become accustomed to imprinting on his mind how he’d left things, he might not even have noticed.

It helped that the perpetrator had spilled his afternoon tea on the carpet.

He knew he’d done tea for a reason. The daily afternoon ritual was served on the screened porch and featured three kinds of tea and an array of tiny muffins, shortbread and scones. He’d sneaked a cup of Irish Breakfast up to his room.

He knelt down. The stain was still damp.

Interesting.

The cottage-style bureau where he’d unpacked his clothes had been gone through. His empty suitcase. The stacks of books and magazines he’d picked up to while away the hours. Nothing was quite where he’d left it.

His visitor had even pawed through his bathroom.

And locked up afterward. Which required a key to the old-fashioned door.

Also interesting.

Lottie Martin didn’t strike him as the type to snoop. On the other hand, curiosity about him had risen steadily among local residents since he’d arrived in pretty Goose Harbor.

Nothing was missing. His gun was locked in his Jeep.

He left everything as it was and headed down to the front desk. Old Lottie was there in a corduroy jumper and turtleneck, her iron-gray hair pinned up in a bun that made her look like Auntie Em, except thinner. J.B. figured she’d opened the inn so she could surround herself with antiques and live in an old house. Guests were simply a necessary evil. Or at least he was.

“I heard Zoe West was back in town,” he said, then made an educated guess. “I thought I saw her car pull out of here.” He hadn’t, but Lottie Martin didn’t know that. “She’s staying here? You’d think she’d stay with her sister, wouldn’t you?”

Lottie took the bait. “She is staying with her sister. She stopped by to say hello. I’ve been friends with her family for years.”

“Did she ever work for you?”

“Just one summer.”

Long enough to help herself to a pass key. She probably had it in her old room, which meant she’d stopped at the house first and Christina had been covering for her. That explained some of her agitation. She was keeping the FBI agent occupied while her big sister searched his room to make sure his story added up. Bruce had called Christina on his cell phone from his truck to say he and J.B. were on their way with the door. The sisters could have cooked up their plan then.

He’d guess it was Zoe’s idea. While she was in full screwup mode, why not break into an FBI agent’s room?

“I spilled tea in my room,” he told Lottie Martin.

She frowned. “On the carpet?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

She seemed to think he was being sarcastic. “No harm done, I’m sure.” Her teeth were half clenched as she spoke. “Mr. McGrath, I have a problem with your room. This is terribly awkward. I wanted to catch you sooner—” She paused, fixing her gray eyes on him. “I’m afraid you’ll have to check out. I found a room for you in Kennebunkport. It was no mean feat since this is peak foliage weekend. I’m sure you’ll be pleased with it.”

“You giving me the boot because of the spilled tea?”

“No, of course not.”

“Because Zoe West was here and you think I’m to blame?”

“Trouble does have a way of following her these days, but no, that’s not the reason. There’s a problem with the room, that’s all. It happens in these old houses.” She jotted down the name and number of the Kennebunkport inn and passed it to him. “I’ll pick up the tab myself to make up for the inconvenience.”

J.B. had to hand it to her. As socially inept and sour as she was, she’d just smoothly maneuvered him right out of her inn. He wondered if Zoe West had said anything to her, or if old Lottie had simply put the ex-detective’s visit, the spilled tea and the fact that her guest was an FBI agent together and decided to toss him to avoid any trouble. She must have heard about the break-in at the West house by now.

In her place, he’d probably do the same.

He took the paper with the Kennebunkport information on it. “I’ll pay my own way. Thanks. You know, my ancestors came here in the seventeenth century. Maybe we’re cousins.”

She didn’t like that any more than Bruce Young had.

J.B. returned to his room and packed up. He had no idea where he was going, but it wasn’t to Kennebunkport. Bruce’d probably put him up, but Bruce had dogs that looked as if they’d have the run of the place. Bruce was also part of whatever it was that had happened in Goose Harbor a year ago. After she’d found her father’s body, Zoe West had run into the water and waved down the nearest lobster boat. Bruce Young’s. He’d notified the Maine marine patrol.

It was a cold night, and dark, the clouds blocking out the moon and any stars. J.B. could taste the salt in the air, feel the dampness of an approaching storm. He dumped his stuff in the back of his Jeep and drove down to the docks, parking in the town lot. The small, protected harbor was mostly rockbound, lined with houses, with Main Street running parallel to the water above the docks. In daylight on a clear day, Olivia West’s house was visible on its point on the northeast edge of the harbor. According to town gossip, she’d left it to Zoe. Christina inherited money to buy the small clapboard building on the waterfront behind him, a run-down clam shack she’d converted into her charming café.

If he left now, J.B. figured he could be back in Washington, D.C., by morning. He had an apartment there. He didn’t know what he’d be doing next with the bureau, but he expected it wouldn’t involve undercover work, at least not anytime soon. There was talk of having him train new undercover agents. Yeah. He could give them pointers on how to kill a man in front of his children with your throat cut and bleeding, then how to live with yourself afterward. It didn’t matter that he’d done what he had to do, that he’d had no other choice. But wasn’t that the point? Leave yourself options. Always leave yourself options.

A puff of fog floated off the water and enveloped him as if it meant to, as if he was its target. He walked across the nearly empty parking lot to the intersection of Ocean Drive. If he turned left, it’d take him to Main Street and Goose Harbor village. Right, along the northeast edge of the harbor, past Olivia West’s house and the nature preserve named for her.

Olivia West’s house was unoccupied, sitting on its lonely point like something out of an Alfred Hitchcock movie. Bruce said Zoe kept the lights and heat on and had it cleaned once a month, but didn’t know what to do with it.

J.B. did. He’d sleep there tonight.

Bruce had also said that Olivia West had never bothered to get a lock for the porch door. J.B. could walk right in. And why shouldn’t he? Zoe West had gotten him tossed from his inn. He figured she owed him a night’s lodging.

Three (#ulink_8b1ed0d1-f188-52a0-b5d2-ae51c68b065e)

Christina paced in the kitchen and alternated between horror and delight at what her sister had done. Zoe was just relieved Special Agent McGrath hadn’t walked in while she was searching his room. She didn’t know where she’d be if he had, but it wouldn’t be in her sister’s kitchen eating hummus and red onion on pita. Lottie Martin, fortunately, had seemed content to pretend she didn’t know what was going on. She would be curious about McGrath herself, and she wouldn’t want to get in Zoe’s way.

Not that she’d found much of anything.

Knocking over the tea had nearly done her in. She was a better cop than a sneak, and she didn’t exactly have the law on her side. More to the point, no way would J. B. McGrath not remember having spilled tea on Lottie Martin’s carpet. He’d see the stain and know it wasn’t his doing.

So long as he didn’t realize it was her doing, Zoe thought she was all right. She’d slipped out, relocked the door with her pass key and managed to get out of the inn without incident.

“I can’t believe you actually did it,” Christina said. “God, Zoe, what were you thinking?”

“I was thinking he wasn’t a real FBI agent.”

“If he’d caught you—”

“He didn’t. And I didn’t steal anything out of his room. Relax, I’m in the clear. Otherwise there’d be a cruiser in the driveway right now.”

“Or him. You haven’t met him.”

Zoe stretched out her legs and munched on her pita sandwich. Christina had made the hummus herself, from scratch. Over the past year, she’d added her own touches to the kitchen—baskets and brightly colored towels, gourmet gadgets, a hand-thrown pottery bowl their father would have considered extravagant. But Zoe could still feel his presence, as if he might walk in from the garden with an armload of tomatoes and chuckle at how agitated his two daughters were. He was the steadiest man Zoe had ever known. He took everything in stride. She thought she took after him, but in the days after his death, and then her great-aunt’s, Zoe knew she’d been a total madwoman.