Page 12 of Light of Day (Sea Smoke Island #1)

Outside, the fog had thinned and brightened as the sun worked on burning it off. Heather cooled off from her spat with Amy Lou by stomping around the flagpole a few times.

“This is why I hate coming back here,” Heather told Luke once she’d gotten a grip on her temper. “It’s always like this. People see me a certain way, and I get triggered and open my big mouth and confirm everything they think about me.”

“Everyone around here has Amy Lou’s number. I wouldn’t worry what she thinks.”

“Oh believe me, I haven’t worried about her since I was ten and she made me spell ‘incandescence’ three times in the spelling bee because she couldn’t believe I got it right. I’m mad at myself for reacting, not her.”

“Incandescently mad?”

“Ha ha.” But his little joke did the trick; she felt her frustration ease.

She rolled her shoulders and inhaled deep, then released a slow breath.

The cool mist on her cheeks helped too. “This is how you know I’m really worried about Gabby.

No one else could get me to come out here and regress like this. What now, Constable?”

He was watching her carefully, and for the first time, she really looked back at him—taking the time to observe the thoughtfulness behind his steady gaze and the firm set of his jaw. He definitely didn’t fit her image of a Carmichael. Maybe she shouldn’t prematurely judge him either.

“Why’d you take the button back from her?” he asked abruptly.

She lifted her chin. “Because I don’t trust her. I don’t think she’s telling the whole story. She’s leaving something out, and if we leave that button with her, we might never see it again.”

After a short pause, he nodded. “Agreed.”

“Agreed? Really?”

“Yeah. She’s not the only historical expert around. Hell, we can probably look it up on Google image search. Come on.” He jerked his head toward his truck.

“Where are we going?”

“If you were Gabby and you got stonewalled by Amy Lou, what would your next step be?”

“After pushing her off the dock?”

Luke chuckled, but waited for her real answer.

Heather thought it over. Gabby clearly had been onto something, and if her goal was to unearth some kind of “dirty rotten bastard” story for the podcast, there was absolutely no way she’d let someone like Amy Lou get in her way.

If anything, her dismissive attitude would have been fuel for Gabby’s fire.

She would have a called her a “Karen” and maybe quoted a Beyoncé song. These mother-fuckers ain’t stopping me.

“I might…well, Amy Lou mentioned that her predecessor started the project. I suppose I might try that person next.”

Luke shot her an approving smile. “Bingo. Hop in.”

“Who’s her predecessor, do you know?”

“As a matter of fact, I do. It was Jimmy Simms, Denton’s brother. Somehow that doesn’t feel like a coincidence. Amy Lou ousted him from the director position about two years ago. I heard she staged a full-on coup with the support of some donors.”

“Poor Jimmy. He’s a nice man.”

Heather’s impression of Jimmy Simms was that he was a shy man who’d never married and who played the organ at the Episcopal Church every Sunday. He’d apparently been running the historical society for years, probably quietly, as he did everything else.

Jimmy lived not far from Denton, in a small yellow-sided cottage with a brick chimney.

He had to be nearly eighty, with the bent posture of most men who’d spent decades pulling waterlogged lobster traps from the ocean floor.

His cottage had the familiar island smell of salt air and musty fabric.

Piles of crossword puzzle books filled every spare surface.

He offered them tea, which neither one wanted, but accepted for the sake of politeness. Heather moved aside the Lipton tea bag to add sugar from a china dish shaped like a milkmaid’s pail. The tea was still too hot to drink, so she blew gently on it and watched the steam swirl into the stale air.

“Sure, I remember her,” Jimmy said after looking at Gabby’s photo. “She wanted to know about some of the research I did back when I was interested in local lore.”

“You aren’t anymore?”

“Oh no. I learned my lesson. Some things are best left at the bottom of the sea.”

Heather exchanged a glance with Luke. What lesson? Had Gabby learned that same lesson? “Can you be more specific?” she asked cautiously. “What things are you referring to?”

“Didn’t I just say it’s best not to stir things up? I told your friend that same thing. Even more ’cause she’s not from here.”

“What about Denton?” Luke asked.

“What about him?” Jimmy took a sip of his tea, which was just as scalding hot as Heather’s, but didn’t seem to bother him. Maybe all those years of drinking hot coffee from a thermos on a lobster boat had turned his lips to scar tissue.

“Apparently he sent Gabby something. Whatever it was, it might have inspired her to come out to Sea Smoke. Do you have any idea what it might be?”

Jimmy’s mouth slowly twisted to one side. Alarm spread across his face. He held up a finger, then rose to his feet. “Stay here.”

They watched as he limped out of the living room and climbed upstairs, using a handrail made of rope to assist him. When he came back down, empty-handed, his expression was dark.

“He might have sent her my tapes. Looks like he never brought them back.”

“What tapes?”

“From when I went up to Pinewood. Some folks there I wanted to talk to before they died. Mind you, this was over thirty years ago now. The technology wasn’t what it is now.

Those tapes are wicked scratchy now, hard to understand.

You could listen to them and hear different things depending on the day.

More or less worthless from a historical point of view, but I held on to them anyway. ”

Luke shot a glance at Heather, but she was just as mystified as he was. “What’s in Pinewood? Where is that?”

“It’s in Pownal, down east. The Pinewood Center. They changed the name in the seventies, but it used to be called the Maine School for the Feeble-Minded.”

“The huh- what ?” Heather felt her mouth gaping open. “I can see why they changed the name. But what kind of place was it?”

“It was for retarded people, disabled, whatever you want to call it. They called it a school, but it was just a place to hide people away who didn’t fit the mold.

I’ll tell you…” He hesitated, then seemed to force himself to continue.

“My mother used to threaten me with it, because I was kind of slow to learn. I’m dyslexic, but they didn’t have a word for it when I was little.

I had to study extra, and if I didn’t want to, my mother would talk about the School for the Feeble-Minded. ”

“That’s terrible.” Heather wanted to put her hand on the elderly man’s gnarled one, but she doubted he would welcome that.

He shot her a sad smile. “Different times. I was too sensitive. She tried to harden me up.”

“Why did you go there later on, with your tape recorder?” Luke asked.

Good question. Heather had been so caught up in his story that she’d forgotten why they were asking.

“Well, my mother eventually let slip that she had an uncle at that place. That’s why she knew about it.

Not a lot of people do. I’d just started with these oral histories, and I thought I might as well begin with my own family.

But it was a pointless trip. All he did was ramble.

He made no sense. He wanted to show me the cemetery.

Wanted to talk about floating houses. I guess that’s what feeble-minded means.

The tape wasn’t good either, so between those two things, it was a waste of time. ”

Heather’s heart stopped, then started to race. Floating houses? It sounded like something right out of her dream. “Wait. What floating houses?”

“It means nothing. He wasn’t all there.” Jimmy tapped the side of his head. “He had bats in the belfry, as they say.”

Heather didn’t think people said that anymore, but she got the gist. “I wish I could listen to those tapes.”

“You ain’t the only one, so it seems. Denton listened to them thirty years ago, but couldn’t make sense out of them either.

Few weeks ago, he asked to borrow them again.

He said he’d bring them back, but I guess he hasn’t yet.

I told him he oughta leave it alone.” He gazed out the window at the slice of ocean visible through the trees. “You tried him already, yeah?”

“He wasn’t home.”

“He wasn’t? Well, try again, you’ll find him.” His head swiveled back toward them. “You know, I might know why he gave them to your friend. She had a fancy laptop and recording gear. He probably wanted to see if she could do something with the sound on those tapes.”

“Did she interview you?” Luke asked.

“That she did. Like I said, she wanted to know more about the School for the Feeble-Minded. I told her some history is too sad, best to let it be.”

To Heather, that seemed like an odd approach for the former head of a historical society. Wasn’t all history important, happy or sad?

“Do you have any idea where Gabby might be now?” Heather asked.

All this was interesting enough, but it didn’t seem to be getting them anywhere.

So Gabby had found a story and started digging, done some interviews, gotten some tapes, was maybe even putting together some episodes for the podcast already.

But none of that answered the question of where she’d disappeared to.

“I think she said she was staying at the big hotel. Did you look there?”

Heather could have screamed from frustration.

Luke shot her a look that she could read perfectly well. Go easy on the old man. He doesn’t know what he doesn’t know.

“Yes.” She forced a smile. “We looked there.”

“How’s that father of yours?” he asked suddenly. “Haven’t seen him in a while.”

The change in subject disoriented her. “I…uh…I haven’t either. I’m the wrong person to ask.”

“That man was something else,” Jimmy mused. “He had the best heart out of anyone I’ve ever known.”

“He did?” Heather wondered if they were talking about the same man. She had few memories of her father, most of them involving fights with her mother.

“Oh yes. That’s why he never owned his own boat. He kept giving away everything he earned. It was a funny thing, like he felt too guilty to hang on to anything good. I suppose that included his own family.”

Suddenly, Heather wanted out of that cramped little living room so badly she could hardly stand it. If only she could wave a magic wand and be back in her own apartment in Boston, eating a pint of peanut butter chocolate chip ice cream and cruising Netflix.

Luke’s phone buzzed. “I have to answer this,” he said as he got to his feet. Heather jumped at the chance to leave along with him. She offered to help Jimmy clean up the tea things, but he waved her off.

“What else do I got to do all day, besides wash a dish here and there? When I see Denton I’ll tell him you were looking for him.”

“And Gabby. If you see Gabby again, please tell her to call me.”

Outside, she took a moment to fill her lungs with the fresh salt air coming off the ocean.

The wind that had swept away the fog was now stirring the ocean’s surface into cheerful whitecaps.

A few sailboats were out, one with a colorful spinnaker making a brilliant splash of orange against the slate blue of the water.

Luke was standing a few yards away, kicking absently at a ledge of granite rising above the grass. His shoulders hunched against the wind, which ruffled the dark hair curling at the back of his neck.

Attractive guy, she thought absently. She could see why Carrie Prevost had fallen for him. The surprise was that he’d married her, and then stuck around after they’d split up.

Then he turned, and the grim look on his face made every other thought flee from her brain. “What?” She could barely mouth the word.

“A guest at the hotel found a body washed up in Seaweed Cove.”