Deadly Intentions (3 page)

“So, what’s up for today?” She bit into her poppy seed bagel.

“I was hoping you could follow Gail Flint this morning.”

Jolene’s brows shot up. “Steve Flint’s wife?”

Jake nodded while he spread cream cheese on his bagel.
 

“Why?” Jolene felt her heart tug. Steve Flint had grown up in Noquitt and had been a close friend of her sister, Celeste. He’d been over to the house many times and Jolene knew him well. He was a good guy. Jolene remembered when he and Gail had met—the two of them had been head over heels for each other and gotten married within six months. Surely, they weren’t having trouble already? Steve had been so in love with her it was almost sickening.

“He thinks she has something going with a professor at the junior college and she meets him around ten. I guess he doesn’t have classes then.” Jake gestured to the top of her desk. “I put some pictures of her in that folder for you.”

“Okay,” Jolene glanced at the clock. Plenty of time to get to the college by ten. She flipped open the folder. Inside were a few shots of the beautiful blonde. “I already know what she looks like. Steve is a friend of the family.”

“Oh? I hope she won’t recognize you tailing her.”

Jolene shrugged. “We don’t know each other that well, but if she spots me I’ll just pretend we’ve run into each other by coincidence. It’s understandable in a small town like this.”

“We also need to figure out how to get evidence for the Powers case.”

“Oh, right,” Jolene licked some cream cheese off the side of her bagel. “The feud.”

Jake laughed. “I know it seems silly, but Jeb was pretty mad about those lobster pots. It’s his livelihood.”

“Oh, I know. You never screw with a lobsterman’s traps.” Jolene scrunched up the empty bagel bag and tossed it into the trash barrel beside her desk. “But do you really think Gordy did something to them? I mean, I know they’ve had that feud going on for a while, but messing with someone’s traps is hitting below the belt.”

Jake pursed his lips together. “I thought that, too, but Jeb is pretty sure
something
happened, so I guess we’d better dig into it.”

“Okay, I’ll check out the satellite pictures later on. Maybe one of them caught someone messing around with the lobster traps.”

“Maybe you can go down to the cove and check out the boats to see if you can see anything. I doubt Gordy will let you on his, but you can see a lot from the dock.” Jake glanced out the window at the ocean. “In the meantime, I’ll hit the streets and ask around. You know how quickly rumors spread through the fishermen grapevine around here.”

Jolene nodded. The fishermen were worse than the blue-haired old ladies under the hair-dryers down at Mavis’
Cut-N-Curl
when it came to gossip.

“Oh, and Luke called,” Jake continued, “sounded like he might have something for us, too.”

Jolene cocked an eyebrow at Jake. “Oh? Another mysterious assignment?”
 

Luke Hunter was Morgan’s high school sweetheart who had left her to join the military, then suddenly appeared in town again two summers ago. He now worked for some secret agency that he refused to give them details about.
 

The odd thing was that the agency seemed to know all about Jolene and her sisters and their special ‘gifts’ and was keen to hire them to help out on cases. They’d already completed one assignment that involved digging up an old treasure out West and it had proven to be interesting work. Jolene still had no idea what this had to do with the government—or even
if
it did—but she wasn’t about to look a gift horse in the mouth.

Jake shrugged. “He didn’t say exactly, just that he’d heard rumblings about something being up.”

“Well, I can’t wait to see what that’s all about.” Jolene slid out from behind the desk and made her way to the door, stopping with her hand on the knob. “Are you gonna be over for supper tonight? My long lost aunt is coming to visit.”

 
Jake looked up from his laptop screen, his lips cocked in a crooked smile. “I heard. Wouldn’t miss meeting another Blackmoore woman for anything. The rest of you have all been so fascinating.”

Jolene pulled the door open, shoved her oversized sunglasses on her face and looked back at Jake over the top of them.

 
“You can say that again,” she said, then disappeared out into the hall.

Chapter Three

“Do you remember much about Aunt Eliza?” Morgan looked across the cottage at Fiona who was bent over a gold and amethyst necklace laid out on her worktable.

Fiona glanced up, her ice-blue eyes narrowing slightly. “Gosh, we were just kids when she went away. I don’t remember much about her.”

Morgan pressed her lips together. She didn’t remember much about Eliza either—she’d been too preoccupied with teenage things to pay much attention to an adult aunt, even if Eliza was only ten years older than she was.

She turned toward the tall, rustic shelf that housed her selection of dried herbs in old-fashioned glass apothecary jars. She loved the look of the jars, which she’d acquired at yard sales and auctions, all lined up on the wooden shelves that were accented with layers of chipped paint.

The cottage that housed
Sticks and Stones
had been in the family for generations and sat on a large parcel of land about two miles from their home. Their ancestor, Isaiah Blackmoore, a sailing merchant, had settled the town. Rumor had it that he originally owned all the land from their house on the point to the cottage, but most of it had been sold off over the generations.
 

For some reason, the family had always kept this cottage and Morgan was glad. The one story cottage was small, but she loved it here.
 

They hadn’t done much to it in order to convert it into a store. It was already one big room. They split the main room with Morgan and her herbs on the left and Fiona and her crystals on the right. Behind the main room were a small bedroom and a bathroom. What had once been the kitchen area was on Morgan’s side and she’d removed cabinets and appliances, then rearranged it a bit to fit in her herb displays. The sink came in handy for making her remedies, which, she realized, she should be doing now.
 

She glanced out the window over the sink. The rose bushes that matched the ones growing along the front porch were starting to bloom. Birds chirped and twittered as they flitted between the branches of the trees in the woods behind the cottage. If she squinted and looked directly to the back of the woods, she could make out a faint line of sparkling blue ocean a half-mile away.

She turned her attention back to the shelves, the old pine floorboards sighing as she reached up to pull down the jars of lemon verbena and oregano. Laying out some mesh tea bags, she took a pinch out of each jar and placed them in the middle of the bags, touching the herbs gently with her fingertips so as to infuse them with as much healing energy as possible.
 

“Do you think Eliza has any unusual, umm … gifts … you know, like us?” Morgan asked.

Fiona squinted down at the necklace. The amethyst stone glowed slightly when her fingers brushed against it. She answered without looking up. “I hadn’t thought about it. You’d think we would have heard if she did. I never heard of anyone else in the family having them.”

“Me either, but just because we haven’t heard about it doesn’t mean no one else has them.”

“Still, I don’t think we should let on that
we
do. I mean, we all agreed the less people that know the better.”

“Yep, that’s true.” The girls had discovered early on that it wasn’t a good idea to let too many people know about their paranormal powers. People tended to react strangely and it was better to keep that kind of thing to themselves.

“I wonder if she’ll want to poke around in the attic,” Fiona said.

Morgan began the process of folding the mesh tea bags over the herbs to secure them. “That’s a good question. That stuff is hers as much as it is ours. Some of it may even have more sentimental value for her, especially if she remembers it from her childhood.”

Fiona glanced up. “We haven’t even seen everything up there ourselves.”

“I know. There might be other important historical items like that journal,” Morgan said, referring to an old book they’d discovered in the attic. The book had been written three hundred years earlier by Isaiah Blackmoore and contained coded clues about a mysterious family legacy. The girls had discovered the meaning of the journal along with an attic full of treasure already, but the attic was so large they hadn’t explored the whole thing. Morgan had a gut feeling there could be more family mysteries up in the attic, and her gut feelings were usually right.

“… and the crystals,” Fiona added, referring to a mysterious burlap sack they’d found with crystals inside like the ones Fiona used in her healing jewelry. Apparently, a long-ago ancestor had the same affinity for stones. But had they also possessed Fiona’s healing powers?

“Well, if she needs money, we have plenty now. We should be sharing it with her anyway, since it came from her ancestors, too. Just because Dad inherited the house doesn’t mean he should have everything in it, too.”

“I agree.” Fiona said. “They probably didn’t even realize anything of value was up in the attic. Everyone thought it was just cast-offs and junk. It’s an awkward subject, though. It’s not like we can just come out and ask her if she needs money.”

“Right. I guess we’ll just play it by ear.”

The girls were interrupted by the cheerful tinkle of the bells on front door. That sound always made Morgan feel happy—it signaled the arrival of a paying customer.
 

Two little old ladies came through the door, their heavy orthopedic shoes clomping on the wooden flooring.
 

“Morning Beatrice.” Morgan nodded at the woman on the left, then nodded to the one on the right. “Harriet.”

“Morning girls,” the two women chorused.

“I’ve come for my herbal teas.” Beatrice marched over to the counter that separated Morgan’s half of the shop from the main area.
 

“I’m just finishing them up now,” Morgan said as she tied the last teabag and then placed all the tea bags into a white paper shopping bag that sat on the counter.

Harriet eyed the two apothecary jars.
 

“Lemon Verbena and Oregano.” She pursed her wrinkly lips and looked at Beatrice. “Now why would you need a tea made from those herbs?”

“Never you mind,” Beatrice shot back.

Morgan rang up the sale, ignoring the two women’s banter. She wasn’t about to betray a customer’s confidence and tell Harriet that the remedy was for flatulence.

“We heard your Aunt Eliza is coming back to town,” Beatrice said as she fished in her large handbag for her wallet.

Morgan raised a brow at Fiona. News sure did travel fast in this town. “Yep, we’re excited to see her. None of us remember much about her.”

“Your grandma was right put out when Eliza up and left like that,” Harriet said while they all watched Beatrice take her time counting out the exact change.

“Just why
did
she leave?” Morgan frowned at Harriet.

Harriet and Beatrice glanced sideways at each other. “Oh, we really couldn’t say…”
 

“Surely it can’t be a secret after all this time?” Morgan prompted.

Beatrice pushed the pile of change and bills toward Morgan. “No, we really couldn’t say because we don’t know why.”

“We always figured she just didn’t want to be tied down in a small town,” Harried added.

“I guess that makes sense.” Morgan rang up the change.
 

“Well, we must be going.” Beatrice grabbed her bag and turned toward the door.

“Ta-ta,” Harried said, following Beatrice.

As the two women exited the shop, Morgan mulled over what they had said about Eliza leaving town. It made sense that Eliza left because she had dreams that couldn’t be satisfied in a small town. What didn’t make sense was that she left and never talked to anyone in the family ever again—until now.

Chapter Four

Jolene slouched down in the seat of her car and stared at the concrete exterior of the junior college. The picture of Gail Flint sat beside her on the passenger seat. She didn’t really need the picture, though. She knew Gail personally and besides, every detail of the woman was imprinted in her photographic memory.

At nine-fifty-five, a green Subaru pulled up. Jolene watched Gail Flint get out and walk into the building.
 

That’s strange
, she thought. Normally, cheating spouses had clandestine evening rendezvous at some out of the way place to conduct their affair, but here was Gail trotting right into the school in broad daylight.
 

Jolene chewed on her bottom lip, deciding whether to follow her or wait out here. As she stared at the building, trying to make up her mind, she felt the hairs on the back of her neck prickle … as if someone was watching her.

Her back stiffened, but she kept her head facing forward as she glanced up at the rear-view mirror, then slid her eyes to the side mirrors. She didn’t see anyone there. Slowly she reached up to the rear-view mirror, angling it to see more of the parking lot behind her.

A spark of sunlight glinted off something at the very back of the lot near the woods. Jolene spun around in her seat.
 

Was someone back there with binoculars or a camera?

Why would someone be watching her? Before she could even think of the answer, she found herself ripping the door open and bolting out of the car.
 

She sprinted toward the woods. The glint disappeared. The bushes rustled where she thought she’d seen someone, then they fell back in place. When she got to the spot, no one was there.

“Damn it!”
 

She stared into the woods, but the only thing that moved was a squirrel scurrying down the trunk of an old oak tree. She turned her attention to the area where she thought she’d seen someone. The brush was trampled, branches broken.