Amber Beach (13 page)

“I am.”

“Then why are you ignoring all that luscious crabmeat?”

Jake’s slow smile brought every one of Honor’s female
senses to red alert.

“I’m not ignoring it”, he said. “I’m anticipating it. Different thing entirely. Then I’ll savor it. Three times the pleasure
that way.”

“And only a third the calories. All the same…”

He saw the look in her eyes as she measured the pile of crab on his plate.

“Don’t even think about it”, he said.

“What?”

“Stealing some crab.”

“It wouldn’t be stealing if you gave it to me.” Smiling, he slid his fork into the crab to give her some. Then he realized what he was doing and stopped. That old Donovan magic. People turned themselves inside out for it.

“That wide-eyed charm may work with your other men, but it won’t get the job done with me”, Jake said, forking the crab into his own mouth.

She stared at him in disbelief. “Wide-eyed charm?”

He grunted and chewed crab.

The idea of being thought charming silenced Honor more effectively than a hand over her mouth. None of the men in her life had accused her of being charming. Stubborn, impulsive, too smart for her own good; yes. Charming? Never.

“Thank you”, she said.

His head came up swiftly. Before he could ask her why she responded to his insult with thanks, the phone rang.

Honor jumped as though she had been stung. She stood up so quickly that Jake had to catch her chair before it toppled over. The phone barely finished its second summons before she grabbed the receiver.

“Archer?” she asked breathlessly.

No one answered.

“Hello?”

Silence.

She slammed the receiver back into the cradle.

Jake’s eyes narrowed. He was beginning to understand that Honor was strung a lot tighter than she looked with her teasing amber-green eyes, quick smile, and casual, silky brown hair. At the moment she was rather pale, her mouth was drawn in anger or fear, and she held her hands clenched together as though to keep them from shaking.

Fear, not
anger.
Something had frightened the charming Ms. Donovan.

He had an unexpected urge to put his arms around her, to soothe and protect her. Ruthlessly he swept the impulse aside and concentrated on what had dragged him to Amber Beach in the first place. Murder, robbery, treachery, and Kyle Donovan.

“Problems?” Jake asked.

“Are cops into this kind of harassment?” Honor asked tightly.

“What kind?”

“One-sided phone calls.”

Adrenaline stirred beneath Jake’s calm surface. He had wondered if he was the only one outside the law who had an interest in Ms. Donovan.

“Heavy breathing?” he asked.

“No. Just the kind of silence that makes your hair stand on end.”

He pushed out her chair with his foot. She took the hint and sat down. Even though her appetite had vanished, the
wine looked really good. She reached for it, took a drink, and
then another.

“Maybe the caller is a woman”, Jake said.

“What makes you say that?”

“This is your brother’s cottage, right?”

“Yes.”

“Your missing brother, right?” Jake asked, careful to sound like someone who had only read the newspaper accounts of one Kyle Donovan. Honor nodded.

“Then the explanation is simple”, Jake said. “Someone who looks like Kyle would be scraping women off all the time. Hearing your voice on the phone would be an unhappy shock for a girl whose motor was humming and ready to go.”

“I’m a girl and I don’t think Kyle is sexy.”

“Siblings don’t count. They don’t see things the same way normal people do.”

Kyle sure hadn’t, Jake thought sourly. He had mentioned his great-sense-of-humor, dead-bright twin sisters, but he hadn’t said that Honor had a sweet little body and a way of looking at a man that made him feel ten feet tall and solid as
a stone cliff.

“Besides, how do you know what Kyle looks like?” she
asked.

Jake hesitated just long enough to call himself a fool for not thinking that far down the road. Then he remembered the picture in the local paper. A passport photo, likely.

“Newspaper”, he said. “They ran a photo.”

“Not a good one.”

She was right, but admitting it wouldn’t help his cause any.

“Siblings”, he retorted. “Can’t see worth a damn.”

Honor’s smile was wan. He could tell that she wasn’t buying the lovelorn explanation for the phone caller.

“Have you been getting a lot of calls?” he asked after a moment.

“For a while there were reporters who wouldn’t take no for an answer, but that dropped off in the past few days.”

“How many times have you picked up the phone and no one answered?”

“Oh, five or six times.”

“A day?” he asked, startled.

“No. In the last week.”

“The phone system is going to hell.”

“Maybe.” But she didn’t sound convinced.

The fear lying beneath Honor’s careful smile made Jake wish that he had no more on his mind than helping her. That damned Donovan charm.

“What are you thinking?” he asked without meaning to.

“About the man who just called. That’s his second time tonight.”

“If he didn’t say anything, how can you be sure it was a man, much less the same one?”

While Honor picked at her crab, she thought of ways to sidestep the question. None came to mind. Nor did any explanation that wouldn’t make her sound like a New Age wacko.

“Honor?”

Sighing, she quit fiddling with the crab leg and looked across the table at Jake.

“Are you the macho kind who feels all superior when a woman talks about pretty reliable, really nonlinear ways of getting information?” she asked.

It took Jake a moment to sort out what she was trying to say. Even then he wasn’t sure, until he remembered Kyle’s famous hunches, a kind of gambler’s luck that he laughingly said came to him from the Druid side of the Donovan blanket. His mother’s side.

“Nonlinear information”, Jake said neutrally. “Is that a fancy way of saying your woman’s intuition is at work?”

“I prefer to call it a hunch. Men don’t make sarcastic jokes about hunches.”

“Okay. You have a hunch that the same man has called you twice tonight and had nothing to say. What else?”

“You’re going to think this is weird.”

“So are crabs. Did that stop me?”

She smiled crookedly.

If he hadn’t already known she was Kyle’s sister, Jake would have been certain now. That off-center smile was a big part of the Donovan charm.

“One of the men who answered my ad in the paper made my skin crawl”, Honor admitted.

“Did he touch you?”

Though Jake’s voice hadn’t changed, her breath caught. She sensed that he was angry as certainly as she had sensed the mysterious caller’s malevolence.

“No”, she whispered. “I didn’t even let him in the front
door.”

“Why?”

“His eyes.” A shudder worked through her. “They made
a snake look friendly.”

“Most of them are.”

“You and Faith. She says the only kind of snakes she worries about have two legs.”

“Drink some more wine”, he said, filling her glass. “You look tighter strung than a steel guitar.”

She took a few quick sips, then a healthy swallow. With a whispery sigh she settled into her chair and began looking at the crab with interest again.

“Other than eyes”, Jake said, “was there anything memorable about the guy?”

She hesitated, fork halfway to her mouth, and thought about the short time the man had been at her front door.

“He was Caucasian”, she said, “over thirty, medium height, medium weight, medium brown hair, medium everything except his voice. He had an odd accent.”

“European?”

“Maybe, but it wasn’t French, Italian, or German.”

“Are you sure?”

“Pretty sure. Faith and I have worked with a lot of Europeans in our business.”

“There’s a group of recently arrived Russians in Anacortes”, Jake said slowly. “They’re day workers, mostly. Then there are the Finns and the Croatians, but those families have been here so long that only the grandparents talk with an accent.”

“For someone who lives in Seattle, you sure know a lot about Anacortes.”

“I was raised here.”

“Oh. Is that where you met Captain whatshisname, he of the bright orange Zodiac?”

“Conroy. What kind of clothes was Snake Eyes wearing?”

“Generic stuff. Dark wind shirt and pants, like a warm-up suit. Leather jacket, cheap from the look of it. Some kind of athletic shoes, not new. A baseball cap that looked like it had hitchhiked from hell.”

A picture of a snake-eyed man half a world away flashed through Jake’s mind. Even as he told himself it was extremely unlikely, he couldn’t shake the memory of Dimitri Pavlov’s little black eyes and standard E-Bloc thug couture, the kind of clothes that would be thought fashionable only in a country where Western consumer goods were rare.

The problem with Pavlov as Snake Eyes was simple: no money for a ticket to the United States. Half the time Pavlov couldn’t even afford vodka. On the other hand, rumors that the Amber Room had been found would bring quite a gathering of international carnivores. Compared to the dead czar’s priceless amber art, the cost of a plane ticket was nothing. Some crooked entrepreneur could have financed Pavlov’s travel expenses in the hope of making an astronomical profit when the Amber Room was found.

“Did the man have all his fingers and thumbs?” Jake
asked.

Honor grimaced, remembering the cops’ questions about
the dead man who had washed up on a rocky island beach.

“I didn’t count”, she said slowly, “but I didn’t notice anything missing.”

“When was the first time you saw him?”

“About four days ago.”

“When was the last?”

“Ten seconds after the first time. I told him the job had been filled and closed the door in his face.”

“Was he angry about it?”

“I didn’t ask. He didn’t say anything or make rude
gestures.”

“And you didn’t see him after that?” Jake asked.

“No, thank God.”

He frowned. “Not much to go on, but I’ll ask around the
rougher bars.”

“You don’t have to do that”, she said quickly.

“Afraid I’ll stub my toe on a bar stool?”

Honor laughed despite her tension. “I don’t like to think of anyone getting into trouble because of me, that’s all.”

“I’ll be okay.”

“Does that mean you’re at home in tough bars?” she asked, curious about Jake. He rarely answered questions about himself, but that didn’t keep her from trying.

“I stopped going to tough bars a long time ago”, he said. “But it’s like riding a bike – you don’t forget which moves work and which ones will leave you flat on your butt wondering
what hit you.”

“I didn’t know that being a fishing guide was such rough
work.”

“It isn’t. Growing up is, at least in downhill sliding towns
like this one.”

Honor looked up from her crab, which she was eating
again
with pleasure. “What did your father do?”

“A bit of everything.” Jake picked up his wineglass and took a drink. “Is that a sketch pad I saw next to the Chapman’s?”

She sighed. The subject of Jake Mallory was closed. But when it came to a non sequitur, she could give as good as she got.

“I can only take so much talk of vectors and angles of intersection before I overload”, she said.

He followed her train of thought without dropping a beat. “Then you start drawing?”

“It’s part of my work. I design things using semiprecious stones.”

“Jewelry?”

“Jewelry, decorative art, things to please the eye and touch and spirit. Or ‘gemmy little knickknacks’, as my patronizing brothers would say.”

Jake smiled faintly. “Could you draw a sketch of Snake Eyes?”

“Sure.”

She leaned back in her chair and snagged the sketch pad off the counter. The pencil was a longer stretch. She pushed back on the chair, balancing it on two legs. It rocked, seemed to steady, then teetered on the edge of falling over.

With startling speed Jake shot to his feet, righted her chair, and handed her the pencil.

“Didn’t your mother ever tell you not to tip back on your chair legs?” he asked.

“Regularly.”

“Did you ever listen?”