Storm Surge (18 page)

Someone stood right beside the door. Liam moved like lightning beside her, reaching past out the window and grabbing shirt in his fist. “Who the fuck are you?”

“Wait. Liam, wait! I know him.” Paige pushed back in her seat, giving Liam room to withdraw. The man next to the car tugged on his shirt front to smooth it down. He bent from the waist, peering in at Paige.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t figure on scaring anybody. Did I hear you say you know me?”

“Yes,” Paige answered, moving closer so he could see her. “We met the other day. I was asking about your mother. I’m Paige Waters.”

“Yeah, right,” the younger Woodward said. “I remember that. How’re you doing? Enjoying the show?”

Liam leaned forward again, an arm across the dashboard. “Did you want something here?”

“What? Oh, yeah, forgot.”

Paige wondered if Felicia’s son had been drinking. She was sure of it when he stumbled a bit, digging around in his pocket. Not drunk, but having himself a good time on the Fourth. Paige wondered if perhaps he had spoken with his mother and she’d given him a message for her. How he’d known to find her in Liam’s white Jeep was a mystery unless, of course, he’d seen them pull in. It hadn’t been dark then.

But no, that couldn’t be right, either. When she’d spoken to him a few seconds ago, he hadn’t known her. “Billy? It is Billy, right? I think that was on your name tag.”

“Yep,” he said, “Billy. Hold on, I’ve got it right here.”

“Got what?” Paige wriggled closer to the door edge, squinting at his antics in the dark.

Billy pulled something small from his pocket with a flourish. “Here. He said to give this to you. I didn’t know it was you, though. He just said, ‘give this to that lady in the Jeep over there.’”

Taking her hand, he pressed a square of thick paper into Paige’s palm. Before Paige could say anything in response, he strode away into the dark with a wave. Paige dropped the door to the glove box open for light and unfurled her fingers.

“Who was that?” Liam asked.

“Billy Woodward. The third, I guess. And someone Dan needs to speak with.”

“Why is that?”

Paige held up her shaking hand. “This is a photo of my mother. A photo which, up until the night the bookmark went missing, I’d wager resided in my wallet.”

Liam swore, a string of words all in keeping with the one he’d uttered in his recent demand for Billy’s identity, and then he flung open the door. Yanking his keys out of his pocket, he tossed them in her direction. “Lock it up. I’ll be back.”

As soon as he vanished into the night, Paige secured the doors to the Jeep and closed the windows, barely leaving enough space at the top for circulation. She clasped the photo to her breast, teeth firmly entrenched in her lip. Damn it, damn it, damn it.

Outside, the fireworks continued unabated, the revelers unaware of the drama that took place in their small corner of the field. She had convinced herself the bookmark theft was a sick quirk. Pilfering her mother’s photo indicated, as Liam had once suggested, a far more personal involvement. A vendetta, perhaps. But why? Could this be something to do with her father? Was that why Dan had been asking her questions about his associates? What in heaven’s name could her dad have been involved in?

In her anxiety, Paige had begun rocking in the car seat. She forced herself to count to ten, out loud and slowly. Hysterics would do no one any good. Panic was not her usual method of coping. Disbelief? Loads. And rage? Yeah, that too.

Reaching for the door handle, Paige noted a flaring light stabbing into her peripheral line of vision. Well beyond the harbor, a party boat had sent up a rocket in private celebration, orange sparks spreading in an umbrella in the sky above. She recognized the reflected beauty on the rippling water despite her agitation, but summarily dismissed her admiration. She needed to find Liam. She wouldn’t have him hunting through the people on the hilltop on her behalf by himself.

Another rocket went up over the water. The car to her left started its engine and rolled out of place. People standing beneath the sky moved aside. She heard another car and then another, headlights coming on all around. Liam appeared at the door, sliding on the grass. She let him in.

“Why are people leaving?”

“Buckle up,” he said. “That’s a distress call out there.”

Paige couldn’t tell what Liam thought or felt. Concentration had settled over his features like a mask. The knuckles on the hand wrapped around the wheel were the color of bone. With the other, he shifted through gears in rapid succession. Paige’s fingers dug into the seat on either side. She thought about her father.

“Liam?”

“I have to do this, Paige. I’ve seen these signals go up numerous times since I’ve moved to Alcina Cove, and I’ve ignored them. It’s killed me, but I can’t help thinking—”

“About that night you tried to save my father? Coming home and finding your family gone?”

“Yes.”

Liam slowed the Jeep as they neared the harbor. Red and blue strobe lights cut through the night, reflecting across the onlookers’ faces in a jarring hue. Paige’s heart leapt with the same rhythmic intensity as the shadows jumping like animation across building fronts. The area was already a mass of activity, mostly official from what she could tell, with the Marine Patrol in the forefront to keep the growing crowd cordoned off and under control. Liam swung the Jeep into what wouldn’t have been a parking spot on a normal day and propelled himself from the vehicle before he’d fully opened the door.

“Stay here.”

Paige was getting a little sick of those words and, as usual, did not heed them. She snatched the keys he’d left dangling from the ignition and clambered out, locking the Jeep behind her. She had to sprint to catch up to him.

He glanced down at her as she appeared at his elbow. “I told you—”

“Yeah, I heard you. Word to the wise. Don’t give me orders. They tend to backfire.”

He said nothing but she glimpsed a flicker in the muscle of his jaw. She hoped it was amusement.

A man in a dark T-shirt with an emblem emblazoned across the breast and a radio to his mouth held up a flashlight as they approached, not shining the beam at them but indicating that he wanted them to stop where they were. Paige obliged but Liam continued forward, speaking close to the man’s ear in a rapid exchange. Paige couldn’t hear a word of it, but twice they glanced back in her direction. Not waiting for the third time, she joined them.

“We can go on,” Liam said. “Are you sure you want to do this?”

“Are you?”

His brows lowered in a brief frown and then he squeezed her upper arm. “Yep.”

He took her hand and tugged her forward through the turmoil. People ran back and forth shouting into radios, yelling across open space, coordinating the rescue effort. Floodlights lit the docks. Paige saw small boats cutting slowly through the water, searchlights on their bows that slashed a direct beam across the rippling, dark harbor for employment, she supposed, in seeking survivors if the ship went down. Farther out, a larger vessel—a Coast Guard search and rescue craft —had already reached the signaling ship. She and Liam were stopped again, this time by a man in uniform.

“If you’re short-handed, I can pilot a boat.” Releasing her hand, Liam pulled his wallet out of his pocket and displayed identification for the man standing by the barrier. The uniformed official nodded in response.

“You can go down,” he said. “Might not be necessary, but the help is appreciated. You, miss, will have to stay here.”

“Understood,” Paige answered and stepped back. Liam passed a grazing kiss across her forehead before moving with a long, swift stride toward the far end of the dock. “Take care, Liam,” she whispered at his departing back. He was a brave man, choosing to face his fears this way. At least the sea wasn’t choppy. Whatever had disabled the ship, it wasn’t something likely to threaten the rescuers.

With a nod at the official, Paige moved from the main activity. No need to be in the way. She couldn’t do anything to help. She only hoped Liam would be all right. After what he’d told her concerning his attempts to save her father, this scenario had to be dredging up some troubling memories.

She, on the other hand, had nothing to compare it to, despite the circumstances of her father’s demise. She hadn’t been there, hadn’t sat by his bedside. Sometimes it seemed less than real because of that. An orphaned adult. No parents, no brothers or sisters. She did have an aunt out in California and planned, perhaps next year, to visit, but in the meantime, with the exception of her friends left behind in Tennessee, she was alone.

“Good God, don’t start feeling sorry for yourself on that account.” The sound of her own voice startled her and she glanced around. From about a dozen feet away a man nodded in her direction. The cigarette in his mouth smoldered with a deep ruddy glow in the shadows. “Sorry,” she said. “Sometimes I talk to myself.”

He gave a short laugh and went back to gazing toward the water, smoke drifting up into the bright light beaming over the fence at his back. Paige reached into her pocket to fish out the photograph Billy Woodward gave her. She suspected he would be found blameless in this whole thing once Dan spoke with him, but Billy might be able to provide a more complete description of the perpetrator. Of course, a description, even a sketch, would be worthless if they didn’t come up with an identity to attach to the face.

Holding the photo close, Paige was able to make out Debra Waters’ features in the tangled crossing of shadow and light. Her mom hadn’t been one for photos. But this one the woman had liked. The picture had been taken in July, the year before her mom had gotten sick. At a barbecue. And the laughter had reached Debra’s eyes in a way it rarely did. Paige had always imagined her mom as the stronger one of the pair of them. Lately, she’d begun to wonder if Debra hadn’t just been good at hiding her weaknesses. Maybe that was all anyone could hope for, really. Not revealing to others your fragility, your fears.

“You believe in ghosts?”

“Bloody hell,” Paige cried as she recoiled, the photo fluttering from her fingers. She bent and snatched the snapshot back as she sidled away from the speaker. She smelled the cigarette smoke and realized the man she’d apologized to had moved up next to her without her knowing it. She had to be more careful. Liam would be pissed, and rightly so.

“Why do you ask?” She shoved the photo back into her pocket, taking a moment to collect herself. The stranger stood with his back to the floodlight, his hair in a halo around his shadowed face.

“Because I’ve seen them. I see one now.”

Paige glanced toward the water where the boats were running in slow formation like geese in flight, perhaps with Liam manning one. Although not a believer in any sort of mystical occurrences before her arrival back in Alcina Cove, she now felt she had reason to reassess her beliefs. Had the man at her side some uncanny knowledge of death out on the sea this night? She asked him as much. He laughed, startling her. She whipped around to face him.

“Something’s funny about this situation?” she demanded.

“You probably don’t see it, I expect.”

The fine hairs shifted at Paige’s nape beneath her ponytail. She shivered. “What? The humor or the ghost?”

“You never look in the mirror? See what’s staring back at you?”

“I see myself in the mirror. Nothing else.” Paige started walking backward in the direction of the uniformed man at the barricade. “Whatever you see is your business.”

The man lifted the cigarette from his side and took another drag, the ember flaring. Smoke curled above his head. “We’re talking about you. What you see. Don’t you see your dead mama? You’re the spitting image.”

A sudden, searing rage surged through her. Paige clenched her hands into fists and took two steps toward the man. “Who are you? Tell me. Tell me who you are and what you want.”

He sniggered. “You don’t seem much scared right now. But you will be.”

“Of you? I don’t think so.”

“I can make you scared. I can hurt you, Paige Waters. Don’t you ever doubt it.”

Paige launched herself at the man as he turned away. She landed on his back with one arm around his throat, knocking him to his knees with the impact of her body against his spine. Aiming a punch at the side of his head, her knuckles slammed into his skull with a sickening crunch as a finger snapped. In the next instant, she was sailing through the air, crashing up against the fence, bouncing to the ground. His foot came down, hard, on the bone of her hip near the small of her back, causing sharp pain to shoot down her leg. Blood and agony whistled in her ears as she tried, without breath in her lungs, to move, to defend herself. Pounding footfalls bounced on the earth beneath her grazed cheek. She heard the man above her snarl as one last kick caught her in the thigh before he ran.

* * * *

“Jesus, Paige, what were you thinking?”

Paige looked from Liam, who had spoken, to Dan, who had not. “I wasn’t,” she said. “Not for one second.” She touched the ace bandage on her hand. Her finger hadn’t broken, only jammed.

“You know I can’t charge him with assault if we find him,” Dan said. He almost sounded amused. “You attacked him, and he could, reasonably, claim self defense.”

“He kicked her on the ground!”

“Liam,” said Paige quietly. “He knows that. I think Dan is only trying to make a point.”

“No better look at him this time,” Dan commented, not as question, but in reiteration of a previously stated fact.

“No,” Paige said. “I’m wondering if he stages it that way. If he does, that makes him creepier than ever.”

“He knew her name, Stauffer. He knows who she is.”

Paige raised her gaze again to Liam, finding him and Dan in the middle of some kind of eyeball showdown. Shifting on the hospital bed, Paige grimaced at the pain in her hip. “He knew my mom, too, apparently. Let’s not forget that. I’m sure they weren’t buddies, but he knew of her. Maybe there was some kind of obsession there?” Paige blew out a sudden breath. “Again with the looks? What gives with you two?”