Temptation Bay (A Windfall Island Novel) (13 page)

“Talk,” she said, all ice, “or we can go inside and talk there.”

“I need your word that you’ll keep what I’m about to tell you a secret. Even from Jessi.”

“And if I don’t agree, you won’t talk.” Maggie hissed out a breath. “Fine.”

“You know I came here for a case,” Dex began.

“As a lawyer or a private eye?”

Dex smiled grimly. He should have known she’d figure that out. And he had to give her the truth. A lie would only work against him at this point—and he found he didn’t want to lie to her anymore. “Private investigator. Small-time stuff, mostly.”

She crossed her arms, her mood lightening perceptibly. “Taking pictures of cheating spouses?”

“I’ve handled some insurance cases, too. But, yeah, mostly it was divorce work.” Which it galled him to admit,
almost as much as the next confession. “If not for this case I’d have to seriously think about a career change.”

“I’m sorry, Dex.”

His gaze shot to hers, and even in the dim light he could see she meant it. Her sympathy surprised him, but not half as much as the relief he felt. He wanted Maggie’s good will, sure, but this relief felt more personal, and nothing about this case was supposed to be personal. Hell of a time, he thought, for Maggie to show her sensitive side.

“If you wanted to be a PI even half as bad as I wanted the sky, I can only imagine how terrible you must feel at the idea of giving it up.”

And she’d surprised him again, or maybe this time he’d surprised himself. Somewhere in the years of chasing liars and cheats he’d forgotten how much he wanted to help people—until this case, and even then he’d been more focused on the goal and the salvation, the vindication it might bring him, than how amazing it felt to be doing what he loved.

“A couple of weeks ago,” he continued, feeling like a light had been turned on inside him, “a friend in Boston gave me a call. Alec is a lawyer—a real, high-profile lawyer—and he’s the only person who knows why I got into this business in the first place.”

“You don’t have to tell me, Dex. It’s none of my business.”

“It’s the same reason I became a cop… and the same reason I stopped being a cop. Police departments all over the country are down-sizing, so the chance I’d get to be a detective…” He broke off, shook his head at his own foolishness. Maggie Solomon showed one iota of interest, of sympathy, and here he was baring his soul. “Long story short, I became a private investigator because I want to find
people, those who’ve been taken against their will, those who’ve become lost through no fault of their own, those who don’t want to be found.”

“What kind are you looking for here?”

“The kind who doesn’t know they’re lost.”

Maggie scrubbed her hands through her short hair, pacing away a few steps only to whirl back, her breath steaming on the frigid air. “Stop talking in riddles and just tell me what’s going on.”

“I was hired to find any possible descendants of a baby who went missing from her nursery in 1931. She was ten months old.”

“Eugenia Stanhope,” Maggie said. It wasn’t a question.

“I should have known you’d make the connection.”

“I shouldn’t have had to guess,” she fired back.

Dex rubbed the back of his neck, knowing it was best to let her work through her anger at her own pace.

“The
Perdition
exploded and sank right out there with Eugenia on board.” Maggie pointed to the dark expanse of ocean shining in the sliver of moon beyond the pale lights of the village. “It’s still the biggest thing to happen around here in a hundred years—that and Prohibition. And the two go hand in hand, since the ship was docked out there to offload illegal liquor.”

“I doubt you’d find many in this country who didn’t break that particular law.”

Maggie wrapped her arms around herself, but not, Dex thought, to keep warm. “Running booze is worlds apart from kidnapping babies. I don’t believe any Windfaller would be involved, even back then when bootlegging meant the difference between life and death to the people here.”

“I didn’t come to Windfall Island to point fingers. I just want to find the truth,” Dex said, exhausted suddenly, tired
of his contention with Maggie, tired of fighting his attraction to her, weary of pitting his will against an entire population of the most stubborn people he’d ever met.

“If your aim is to find the missing,” Maggie said into the heavy silence, “you picked a doozy of a first case.”

He looked over, surprised that he saw in her eyes what he’d heard in her voice. “Sympathy?”

“Understanding,” she corrected, her voice warmer now. “I live here, remember?”

“Who could forget?”

“Sympathy?” she threw back at him.

“Pity,” he said with a smile. “Do you know the rest of Eugenia’s story?”

“I know she was kidnapped by a nursemaid.”

“Some say she was kidnapped, others say that the maid only wanted to have a little fun, and when she wasn’t allowed to have the night off, she took the baby with her on board the
Perdition
, not intending any harm. It’s widely believed they both died when the ship exploded that night.”

Maggie digested that for a second. “Whoever hired you believes Eugenia may have survived. Even if you accept that as fact, what makes you believe there’s any connection to Windfall Island?”

And there, Dex thought, was the question he’d been expecting. The answer, he knew, would make or break his case. “There were sightings of the maid. Credible sightings.” And he could see Maggie wasn’t convinced. “A woman recently died in Boston. Her name isn’t important, but before she died she told her son that Sonja Hanson, the maid, was his great grandmother. And she gave him a box of documents, letters, birth certificates, press clippings.”

“Let me guess, something in that box linked Sonja with Windfall. Why didn’t he go to the press?”

“Money. He didn’t want to expose his family to the tabloids and credible news agencies don’t pay for stories, so he went to the Stanhopes directly. They paid him for the records and his silence, paid him very well, I’d imagine.”

“And now they’re paying you very well.”

Dex drew in a breath, let it out slowly, ignoring the sting in her words. She didn’t think much of him at the moment. He understood why. “The Stanhopes are American royalty. The luck belongs to whoever is descended from them.”

“There’s an inheritance, I take it.”

“Eugenia was never declared dead—at first because her mother wouldn’t allow it. In the years since her death, it was just never dealt with. Now, well, they want to be sure someone won’t show up to make claims against the family.

“But you already knew this was about money.”

“I figured there was something of value, and that you wanted to keep it a secret so there wouldn’t be a free-for-all. Now that I know it’s a fortune, I can understand the secrecy.” She pinned him with a look. “Understand, not forgive.”

“Maggie—”

“Jessi and Benji, they could be descendants.”

“That’s why you can’t tell her.”

Her stare turned to incredulity, with an edge of insult. “Do you think she’d falsify records?”

In for a penny…

But Maggie’s quick mind had already jumped to the suspicion he would have voiced. Her brilliant blue eyes hardened, shining eerily in the faint light. “She could use the money, right?”

“I don’t—” He stopped, took a moment to remind himself of his responsibilities. “I like Jessi, but I have to be objective. If word gets out, it will be almost impossible for me to do my job. Especially if word gets off the island.”

She stared at him for another second, then whirled away to pace.

He could feel the fury pumping off her, so much she should have been steaming in the chilly night air.

“If you tell Jessi why I’m here, you’ll only be putting her in an awkward position.”

“Like me, you mean? The awkward position I’m in now, knowing you’re here to turn the life of someone on this island upside down, someone I love—or at least tolerate. And I can’t say a word or all hell breaks loose.”

Dex shoved a hand back through his hair. He wished she’d slugged him instead. A fist to the face wouldn’t have left him feeling so slimy. He couldn’t even defend himself; from the minute he’d met Maggie Solomon, he’d known her personality and her history made her the only person he’d be able to… enlist.

“What, not going to apologize?”

No, because he’d do it again to solve this case. “I wouldn’t mean it, and you wouldn’t accept it.”

“Finally, the truth.”

“I’m capable, when it suits me,” Dex said, and let her think the worst. They were going to have to work together, probably closely. Better for them both that she hang on to any resentment that helped her keep him at arm’s length.

“It better suit you from now on, Ace, or I will out you,” she said from a safe distance, physically and emotionally. “And you can take that to the bank, along with the fat fee you’ve left me no choice but to help you earn.”

T
he airport on Temptation Bay—
her
airport, Maggie thought as she walked from the hangar to the office—never failed to leave her awestruck. It wasn’t just about ownership, it was about pride, the kind an architect felt in looking at a high-rise come to life from a humble drawing, or a baker felt in putting the finishing touches on a wedding cake that would not only taste like heaven, but be the crowning touch on some lucky bride’s perfect day.

The runways were just concrete, the buildings just aluminum, brick, wood and glass, and there were weeds to be trimmed; she’d need to get Mort on that, she told herself, and made a mental note. The place could use some paint to brighten it up—she added another mental note—to not only give her passengers great service but provide surroundings that were nice to look at. To keep the wolves from her door.

It wasn’t all about paying the bills, though there’d been plenty of months she’d wondered if she’d sail over that hurdle or catch a toe and fall into a hole she’d never be able to climb out of. But even those memories made something swell inside her chest. It was like flying, flying at the best
of times, when the ground dropped away, when there was no safety net but her skill with the controls, her way with engines, the sheer willpower and refusal to fail that had burned in her gut since the day she’d realized her father saw her as a failure. The day she’d decided she’d rather die than prove him right.

And sure, from the outside it might seem that part of her success could be laid at his feet, if only because his lack of faith had put that fire in her. But she chose to believe she’d have accomplished her dreams just the same; hell, even better, if he’d been a different kind of father. The kind, for instance, who’d held her up while she learned to swim, rather than throwing her into deep water and watching her head bob under the surface before panic and instinct put her into a wobbly, frantic doggie paddle. And even then, she recalled, she’d paddled away from him, though the distance to shore had been longer. She’d refused to take the easy route; it was one of the few times she’d earned his approval.

Maggie had never forgotten it.

And although she told herself she’d grown beyond needing his approval, she couldn’t lie to herself and claim she didn’t want it, sad as that was. Sadder still that she knew she’d never get it, not without a price tag.

She stepped inside and crossed the lobby, then made her way back to her tiny office behind the bigger open space, where the real running of Solomon Charters took place. Jessi was taking care of business in the village for the morning, leaving her to man the phones. It had been a quiet morning; under other circumstances she’d have been ecstatic, as the business side of her pet baby always left her feeling slightly queasy.

Just now she could have used a distraction or two.

With Dex Keegan around, she wasn’t likely to get one. If
he wasn’t tweaking her nerve endings, he was pushing her buttons. One moment she wanted him nearby, wanted the thrill of the challenge he presented, both physical and mental. The next moment she wanted him gone, off her island, taking his case of the century with him so she never had to look at her friends and neighbors again and wonder.

She couldn’t have both. So she’d decided, during a long sleepless night, that matching wits and libidos with Dex Keegan wasn’t an option.

That left Eugenia Stanhope. Maggie sat back in her office chair and stared at the story of Eugenia’s kidnapping on her computer screen. She’d read every word a dozen times already, compared the written account with what Dex had told her, looking for clues to Windfall’s involvement. As if all the years and the hundreds of minds more suited than hers to solving mysteries hadn’t already proven the search futile.

The island was never mentioned, not in any of the articles or histories she’d found. Every source, almost without exception, concluded that Eugenia had perished in the explosion that had sent the
Perdition
to the bottom of the Atlantic. The kidnapping had been big news; if Eugenia had lived there was little possibility whoever had her would be ignorant as to her identity. Yet no request for ransom had been made, no one had come forward to claim the huge reward that had been offered.

There were emotions stronger than greed, though: fear, for starters, the kind of fear that would be felt by an insular, territorial, somewhat paranoid population, a population that routinely broke the laws of the time. That fear didn’t come without just cause, Maggie allowed.

If Eugenia Stanhope had been found on Windfall Island, Windfallers would have been arrested. No doubt about
that. There’d been little in the way of individual protections before Miranda rights were established—she’d looked it up—and the FBI at the time had been given wide powers to deal with Prohibition violations. Add in the tremendous pressure to bring in Eugenia Stanhope’s abductors, and you created steamrollers. Guilt or innocence wouldn’t have mattered. The Feds would have simply flattened whoever they arrested in order to get confessions.

But did she have a right to decide for the whole island now? If Eugenia’s fate was linked to Windfall Island, there’d be a rise in tourism, no doubt about it. Others would see that as a good thing, and even if there was no statute of limitations on murder, who remained alive to be punished? And the inheritance? Who was she to measure the price of it—and there would be a price; that kind of money changed people, and not always for the better.

What she did know was that just the possibility of it would rip the community apart, and while she didn’t have the right to deny anyone their own history, she could at least try to contain the damage—especially if that damage might be to someone she loved like a sister.

Maggie had to admit she wasn’t only worried about Jessi and Benji, though. Her life was on the line, too, not in a six-foot-under way, but everything she’d built, everything she’d made herself could be taken from her. Because, while she hadn’t been born on Windfall, her mother had.

And sure, she hadn’t told Dex that. Life with Daddy had made her cautious with her personal business, especially with strangers, and Dex’s secrecy hadn’t exactly inspired her trust. Worse yet, he’d been manipulating her—still was. It made her vision go red at the edges—because of her own history, she allowed, but it didn’t make the feelings any less valid. Even if she had no right to feel… anything.

And there, she admitted, was the thing that had forced her to walk away from Jessi’s house without revealing a word of her conversation with Dex. It was the burn that had kept her up all night and prevented her from concentrating on the mile-long list of chores that always needed doing at the airport.

Betrayal.

Dex Keegan was nothing to her. She didn’t trust him; hell, she didn’t even like him. Problem was, she shouldn’t be feeling so raw and hurt that he hadn’t confided in her sooner. Especially since she’d already examined the case from every angle and been forced to admire his approach. That made her magnanimous, even if she had to say so herself. Being an emotional mess over Dex Keegan made her a fool.

Still, she couldn’t deny that he stirred her up on every level—physical, mental, and yeah, he pissed her off. He was glib, overconfident and confusing, but that grin of his was so damn appealing she found herself smiling over it. And just to make it impossible to forget him, he had a sharp mind and a hell of a body. Total package. If only he didn’t feel a need to keep secrets and tell lies.

The phone rang and, still stewing, she picked it up without checking caller ID. And that, she decided when she heard the voice that greeted her, was another transgression she could lay at Dex’s feet.

“Margaret.” It was her father.

She hung up. The phone rang again and she ignored it. For a half hour. She had to give the man credit for being persistent.

Jessi rushed in and grabbed the receiver off her ancient desk phone. “Solomon Charters,” she said, then promptly hung up.

She dropped her purse in her bottom desk drawer, plopped her ass in her chair, and pulled over a stack of
paperwork. She didn’t say hello, she didn’t look in Maggie’s directions, and she was slapping the papers, just hard enough as she sorted them into piles, to get her attitude across loud and clear. Hurt feelings with a side of sulkiness.

Maggie knew all about it. The difference being, after a decade of history, Jessi was entitled to be upset.

But after a decade of history, Maggie knew how to get around her. She strolled out and perched on the edge of Jessi’s desk.

Jessi stared pointedly at her butt until Maggie lifted her cheek, pulled the papers out from under it, and handed them over. Jessi took them with two fingers and continued her sorting.

Maggie managed not to smile. “Not talking to me yet?”

“Don’t you have that backward?”

“Still don’t trust me?”

Jessi huffed out a breath. “We went over this last night.
You
don’t trust
me
.”

“You’re my family, Jess; do you think I’d keep something from you if I didn’t think it was the right thing to do?”

Jessi shot to her feet, her pixie face like a thundercloud. “It’s not your decision to make, Maggie.”

“You’re right about that. It’s Dex’s, and I gave him my word.”

“To hell with your word.”

“Without it, we’d all be in the dark.”

Jessi crossed her arms, but her expression toned down from outrage to sullen. “I hate it when you force me to be logical.”

“I promise I’ll tell you what I can when I can, Jess. But just now, you have to trust me to do what’s best for us. And for Windfall.”

“I don’t have much choice, do I?” Jessi sighed, sinking
back down onto her chair. “All I can do is sit back and let you handle it. I hate being helpless.”

“There is one thing you can do. Forgive me?”

“Oh, Maggie.”

“Anyone gets a whiff you and I disagree on something, they’ll know it’s big.”

“Well, we wouldn’t argue about something stupid.”

“Exactly. People will be on you like foam on the ocean trying to find out what’s going on. And you know somebody will find a way to get around you.”

“Now who’s lacking in faith?”

“It has nothing to do with faith. It’s your soft heart that worries me.”

“How about Mort?”

“Mort?”

“It’s pretty obvious Dex has taken an interest in you, and I’m not the only one who might have witnessed that conversation you had on the tarmac. Mort was here, too, remember?”

Remember? She could still feel Dex behind her, that big, solid body warm against her back, his breath—

“Mags?”

She took a deep breath, then another, biting the inside of her lip so she could concentrate on the pain instead of the need fluttering low in her belly. “Mort barely talks to you and me, Jess.”

“True. And if he does happen to mention it, no one will think it was more than Dex trying to get in your pants. What? It’s not like he hasn’t tried before, in plain view of half the island.” Jessi put a hand on her knee, looked up at her. “Maybe you should let him.”

Maybe you should mind your own business
. Though the words flew to her lips, Maggie bit them back. She might have said them any other time, in jest or otherwise, without
Jessi taking the least offense. Just now, though, she and Jessi were searching for calm waters again; she didn’t want to shove them back onto the rocks. “We’re talking about you, Jess. At some point, you’re going to have to lie. Look a friend straight in the eyes and lie.”

“Maggie—” she held up a hand. “I know, close my eyes and think of England.”

This time Maggie did smile. “Well, that’s not the island I had in mind, but you’ve got the right idea.”

“And what are you going to be doing while I’m practicing how to mislead my friends and neighbors?”

Something even worse
, Maggie thought, losing every shred of good humor. “Errands.”

Okay, it was a cop out, going to Ma Appelman’s before she faced off with Meeker. Still, nobody had to know about it but her, Maggie figured. She always felt better after she’d spent time with Ma. She always felt stronger. Ma wouldn’t accept anything less.

She pulled up in front of the saltbox Ma called home, a three-story, white clapboard rectangle situated at the extreme landward point of the island. The widow’s walk circling its roof had not been employed to watch for sailors and their ships making safely into port, but to keep an eye out for anyone arriving from the mainland unannounced. Unannounced went hand in hand with untrustworthy, and untrustworthy meant enemy.

The days when that widow’s walk had been routinely manned were over, but the mind-set lived on.

Ma opened the door at Maggie’s knock, to all appearances a frail, white-haired old woman with nothing more pressing on her mind than greeting a friend, considering the wide smile that lit her seamed face and brightened her
blackbird eyes. Behind those eyes, Maggie knew, was a mind as keen as a blade, and behind her smile a tongue sharp enough to leave wounds.

For Maggie, she reined it in. Somewhat. “About damn time you showed up,” she snapped, stepping back enough for Maggie to slip by her.

“I didn’t know I was late.”