Page 6

Chapter 6

Jo

It’s going to be a wicked busy summer, thought acting police chief Jo Thibodeau as she drove her patrol car down Purity’s Main Street. The Marigold Café had been packed with customers all evening, and through the window, Jo saw two exhausted waitresses cleaning up for the night. Two doors down, even at 9:15 p.m., a line of people still trailed out the doors of the Sugar Cone, patiently waiting for ice cream. Cash registers had been ringing all around town, a merry sound to the ears of locals who counted on these summer visitors to keep their businesses alive through the lean and lonely months of winter. And this was still only June; come August, the streets would be packed shoulder to shoulder with tourists, and while Jo didn’t look forward to dealing with the inevitable traffic jams and petty thefts and the occasional fistfight that these visitors brought to town, that was the price of living in a village whose lifeblood was tourism. Without it, Purity would be like too many struggling towns in Maine, with empty storefronts and crumbling sidewalks. Summer people brought money. They also brought trouble, which was why Jo would never be out of a job.

She slowed down as she approached the Whale Spout pub and eyed the parking lot. If there was going to be any disturbance tonight, here’s where it would most likely start, fueled by too much alcohol and testosterone. Loitering among the parked cars was a pair of young ladies, their voices shrill with laughter, passing a cigarette back and forth. Jo knew them well. Local girls, both of them sporting hiked-up skirts and spindly high heels tonight. These girls were old enough to know better but young enough to get into trouble, and you couldn’t run from trouble in shoes like that. As Jo’s patrol car slowly cruised by, the girls stared back defiantly, then tottered off into the pub.

Yes, I’m keeping an eye on you. Somebody has to.

She cruised past the boatyard and down to the town landing, where half a dozen lobster boats were tied up at the docks. No trouble brewing down here, just a few tourists, bundled up in sweaters, taking a late-night stroll along the water. This might be the first week of summer, but the wind from the harbor still had a chill to it, and the ocean itself was so cold it could shock a swimmer’s heart to a standstill. Last autumn, they’d hauled a man’s body out of the bay, a forty-year-old who’d fallen overboard just a few dozen yards offshore. He’d been a decent swimmer, but even a fit young man was no match for the frigid bay. Jo scanned the docks for anyone with an unsteady gait, anyone who might stumble into the water in an alcoholic daze, but she saw no one who needed rescuing. Not yet.

She proceeded on her evening patrol route, driving through the center of Purity village with its neatly kept Victorian and Cape and colonial-style houses, then continued past the feedstore and the gas station and headed west, away from the coast. Two miles inland, she reached the next likely trouble spot on her beat: Maiden Pond, where some of the seasonal cottages had recently been broken into. The items stolen had not been significant—a camera, assorted jewelry, a few hundred dollars in cash—but even minor crime was unnerving in a town where most people, including her own father, never bothered to lock their doors. Since the death last year of the previous police chief, Jo had served as acting chief of police—at least until the town’s select board got around to making her role official—so she felt the weight of the community’s safety resting entirely on her shoulders. Purity might sound like a town where you could let your kids ride their bikes unsupervised, where you could sleep at night with your windows unlatched, but in truth, this had never been as innocent a place as people wanted to believe. No town was. As a cop, she’d glimpsed the ugly things that went on inside some of the quaint houses, things that had always been going on, even if the outside world was blind to them.

Jo always locked her doors.

She drove down to the Maiden Pond boat ramp, turned off her engine, and sat for a few moments, enjoying the silence as she scanned the lights along the shore. The break-ins had been on the western side of Maiden Pond, where the seasonal homes stood. They belonged to people from away, people with bank accounts fat enough to afford second homes that stood empty for eight months of the year. On the opposite shore, where the pond turned to muddy shallows thick with cattails, were the far more modest cottages owned by local families, some for generations. Jo knew one of those cottages very well, because on its back deck, she had had her very first kiss. She and Robbie Gordon were both fourteen that year, enjoying a midsummer party with two dozen schoolmates, all of them packed into that cramped little house. Somehow, she and Robbie managed to find a tiny pocket of privacy in the shadows to lock lips. The kiss was sweet but hardly earth shattering, memorable only because it was her first. They’d laughed in embarrassment, had known that it would be their one and only kiss together, and that was fine with both of them. They were far more comfortable just being friends, and that’s what they’d remained over the years.

Robbie was a married electrician now, and prosperous, like most tradesmen in high demand. Whenever she spotted his work van around town, she wondered if he still remembered that night on the back porch, the pond agleam in the moonlight, the sounds of music and laughter drifting from the party. She wondered if he sometimes thought about what might have been, had they chosen to be more than friends. Not that she regretted the choices she’d made, even though they had led to her sitting alone tonight in her patrol car. Even though it meant that tonight she would go home to find only her dog waiting for her.

A pair of headlights flickered in her rearview mirror. She watched as the vehicle approached, moving slowly as if searching for a place to pull over. Of course it didn’t stop; even law-abiding citizens were spooked by the sight of a police cruiser. The vehicle turned around and drove back up Shoreline Road, staying scrupulously under the speed limit. Male at the wheel, female beside him, maybe in search of a private place to canoodle.

This would not be that place.

She jotted down the vehicle’s plate number, along with the time, because you never knew when a detail might become relevant. She started the engine. Two hours left until the end of her shift. That gave her enough time to cruise again past Purity’s usual trouble spots, back to Main Street and down to the wharf in search of mischief in the making. For the moment, though, all was peaceful.

Then her phone rang.