ALSO BY LORETH ANNE WHITE
A Dark Lure
The Slow Burn of Silence
Wild Country
Manhunter
Cold Case Affair
Shadow Soldiers
The Heart of a Mercenary
A Sultans Ransom
Rules of Engagement
Seducing the Mercenary
The Heart of a Renegade
Sahara Kings
The Sheiks Command
Sheiks Revenge
Surgeon Sheiks Rescue
Guarding the Princess
Sheiks Captive in Desert Knights with Linda Conrad
More by Loreth Anne White
Melting the Ice
Safe Passage
The Sheik Who Loved Me
Breaking Free
Her 24-Hour Protector
The Missing Colton
The Perfect Outsider
Saving Christmas in the Covert Christmas anthology
Letters to Ellie a novella in the SEAL of My Dreams anthology
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the authors imagination or are used fictitiously.
Text copyright 2015 Loreth Anne White
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.
Published by Montlake Romance, Seattle
www.apub.com
Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Montlake Romance are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.
ISBN-13: 9781503949669
ISBN-10: 1503949664
Cover design by Jason Blackburn
This one is for the folk at Kellys Brighton Marina.
CONTENTS
MEGGIE
We are not dispassionate viewers of the world. Witnesses and detectives are heavily influenced by what they expect to see, what they want to see, and what they actually see. The more ambiguous the latter, the more influential the first two. Similarly, what we remember depends upon what we believethe human mind is not an objective recorder of information...
~ MJ Brogan, Sins Not Forgotten
The white bookshelf in the living room was where my sister kept her goldfish in a little aquarium with a plastic coral reef under which they could hide, silvery bubbles trailing gently to the surface, perfectly regulated temperature and oxygen content. It worried me, as a child, those little orange fish trapped in their box, mouths gasping, eyes beseeching through the glass for a way to swim free. Dont be stupid, Meggie, my sister would say. They live in a perfect world. There are no predators in their water, like the poor wild fish have to deal with in the sea. But Sherry didnt know that sometimes the predator lives right there. Among us. In that perfectly regulated world. And he looks just like all the other fish in the bowl...
Meg lifted her hands from the keyboard and tried to rub blood back into her fingers. She was cold to the bone, working in fingerless gloves at the tiny camper table. Wind off the Pacific buffeted her rig, and rain thick with slush thucked against the windows. Outside the sky was black and thunder growled. The docks groaned and heaved against moorings as the waters in the bay crept insidiously higher, waves slapping and chuckling over the lip of the deck, over the sandbags, slinking toward the marina buildings that she and Noah had vacated an hour ago. The phone lines were down. Power was out all the way up the coast. The storm and tsunami surge moving in.
She was writing to keep her mind off waiting, as a way of moving forward. Writing this story because its what shed set out to dothe sole reason shed returned to Shelter Bay.
But shed not known how much it would take out of her, and it still was not done exacting its toll.
Every now and then, the faint beam of the lighthouse managed to penetrate the fog in its Cyclopean sweep, an omniscient, mythological giant that loomed high on the black rocks at Shelter Headwarning sailors of the jagged maw below. The foghorn put out its haunting moana sad, sonorous sound that tugged at Megs soul, full with the mystery and lore of shipwrecks and sailors lost at sea.
Her camper was packed and ready to move to higher ground if the surge rose any higher. Noah was finally sleepingshe could hear from the deep, steady rhythm of his breathing as he lay tucked up in her sleeping bag. The child was exhausted, and Meg wanted to remain with him at the marina as long as she could because his father was still out there. On the water, alone, searching for his brother.
The Coast Guard was no help. They were deluged with distress calls from boaters up and down the coast caught by the dramatic shift in weather and the sudden tsunami warning, and there was a Japanese tanker adrift farther north, pushing dangerously toward the rocks near Cannon Beach.
Meg scrubbed her gloved hands over her face, a greasy sickness bubbling in her stomach at the thought of Blake. Of what had happened between them. The secrets those Sutton brothers had kept from her all those years.
Secrets that had killed her family.
If it wasnt for Noah, she wouldnt be here now. Shed be back in Seattle. But as much as she hated Blake at this moment, she was not about to abandon his young son. Shed wait until she got a call from him on her cell, or until he returned.
If he returned...
She forced her focus back to her laptop. Not much time left until her battery died. Shed been writing her book out of sequence, puzzle chunks coming together bit by bit as shed interviewed the principals involved with Sherrys murder.
The fish in Sherrys bowl died before the end of that summer. My parents forgot to feed them. And then they forgot me.
I died, too, that summer. In a different way.
So did the town.
Before Sherrys murder, Shelter Bay was a picture-perfect postcard town. A place where tourists flocked for holidays and ate ice cream and rode horses on the beach and laughed around campfires in the state park. Where kids left bikes in the road and those bikes would still be there come morning. Where neighbors never locked doors and shared hot apple pies over fences. Sherrys death tore open a community, exposing a shocking black gut. It made enemies of friends and turned justice gray. Our innocence was stolen that day. And it didnt stop therelike a pane of glass that had been smashed, the cracks from the first violent stroke feathered insidiously out over the ensuing months to create a web of even deeper, more dangerous fissures that ended up swallowing two families whole. And taking yet more life.
That hot August day started like one hundred others, with the rise of the sun and the screech of gulls as the salmon boats went out. With the soft clunk of wood on wood as small crab boats jostled for space, nudging each other playfully along the docks of Bull Suttons Marina. With a crisp wind lifting spindrift from the crests of rolling breakers, and bending the dune grasses that grew in white sand along the miles of spit. With sandpipers and black oystercatchers scuttling along the foam scallops left on hard-packed beaches by waves withdrawing from the shore only to rise up and pound back down again.
It had been a summer full of watermelons and sunblock and backyard barbecues, of purple blackberry smiles, of sea salt tingling on sun-warmed skin, of burning knees skinned raw in pursuit of tree houses and yet higher boughs. Of brightly painted buoys, and crab pots, and driftwood art. Of fresh local cheese from Chillmook farms, and the briny scent of pink crabs being boiled fresh from the bay.
