Breakwater

12

Despite her many years as a nurse, Maura Scanlon couldn’t stop thinking about what pretty Alicia Miller must have looked like when Quinn had found her dead, drowned, on the beach.

Thank heavens I didn’t have to see her.

Maura rubbed lotion into her hands, rough from her work in the garden. Unable to eat supper, she’d gone into the backyard and divided daylilies, not wearing gloves, relishing the feel of the dirt-letting it remind her of life, not death. She’d had to use a brush to get the dirt out from under her nails. She hadn’t gotten all of it.

“Quinn Harlowe hasn’t gone back to Washington yet,” Don said, joining his wife in the kitchen. “I thought she might head back tonight, but her car’s still in the driveway.”

“She’ll probably rest tonight and leave in the morning. She should go back to her work, her friends. There’s nothing for her here.”

Maura sat at the round oak table that had belonged to her mother. Alexandria, where she and Don had lived their entire lives, suddenly seemed so far away. She rubbed a long-existing crack in the table as if it were some kind of genie lamp. Three wishes. If only I’d be granted three wishes. Right here, right now, I’d bring that poor girl back to life.

“Can I get you anything?” Don asked.

“No, thanks.”

They had cleaned up the supper dishes. Don had eaten very little, his appetite, too, curtailed by the trauma of the day. Maura looked out the window by the table, but it was dark now and she only saw her reflection. She and her husband enjoyed the simplicity of their lives in Yorkville. They didn’t care about riches or a jam-packed social life. Taking their coffee onto the porch on a warm morning and watching the bay was enough to satisfy them.

“Do you suppose it’ll ever be the same here?” Maura asked, hearing the haunted tone in her voice.

“Of course it will.”

“The FBI-Don, we were interrogated by the FBI.”

He tried to smile. “‘Interrogated’ is a bit strong, don’t you think? It’ll get better with time, Maura. The shock of what happened today will ease.”

“If only we’d been here-”

“There still might have been nothing we could have done. The water’s cold. Even if we’d seen Alicia out on the bay in the storm, once she fell in, she wouldn’t have lasted long. As a nurse, you know that.”

“No one’s suggested she died of hypothermia-she drowned.” Although, as Maura well knew, hypothermia could have contributed to her drowning.

“We weren’t there. We couldn’t have saved her.” Don pulled out a chair and sat down heavily, his gentle eyes troubled. “And if she was intent upon killing herself…”

“You don’t believe her death was an accident?”

“I don’t know what to believe.”

Maura pumped out more of the pink lotion she’d bought on sale in a bottle big enough to last through summer. “Should we have told the authorities about her and Oliver Crawford?”

“Special Agent Kowalski never asked-”

“He asked us if there was anything we could think of that might help them understand what happened. So did the local police.”

Don shook his head. “I see no reasonable purpose served by spreading gossip. We don’t know for a fact that Oliver Crawford and Alicia Miller were having an affair.”

“We know he visited her at the cottage.”

“We don’t know if he ever stayed the night.”

Maura squirted another dab of lotion into her palm and rubbed it in, then pushed the bottle into the center of the table. “Neither of us likes spying on the neighbors.”

“Oh, Maura, we weren’t spying-”

“It feels like spying when we know such things. If Oliver Crawford had wanted people to know he was visiting Alicia, he wouldn’t have been so sneaky about it.”

“Perhaps he saw it as being discreet, not sneaky.” As always, her husband kept his tone even. “He’s friends with Gerard Lattimore, and he’s-he was Alicia’s boss. They could have been discussing something about him. A surprise birthday party, maybe.”

“A surprise birthday party?” Maura laughed. “That’s rich, Don. I don’t like Crawford or Lattimore. I saw their type often enough at the hospital. Their hunger for power and ambition goes right to their pores. Neither holds any interest for me, even less so as I get older.”

Don smiled, taking her hand. “A good thing, because I’ve never been powerful or particularly ambitious. Maura-”

She set her jaw. “I still think Oliver Crawford and Alicia were having an affair, but I agree we shouldn’t be spreading rumors and gossip. If her death were a homicide, that would be one thing.”

“Even if you’re right about the affair, if Alicia committed suicide, it wasn’t Crawford’s fault. It wasn’t anyone’s fault.”

Including mine, Maura thought. But she’d seen the signs of depression in Alicia, worsening in the weeks since she’d starting coming to Yorkville-and over the weekend, the increased agitation.

“I knew something was wrong,” she whispered. “I should have taken her to the hospital myself and insist she get checked out. Accident or not, she wouldn’t have taken such a risk in those conditions if she’d had her head screwed on straight.”

“We’ll take a long walk tomorrow. It’ll help.”

Maura knew he was right. Self-recriminations and speculation would get them nowhere, and they had their own lives to lead.