Heroes Are My Weakness

  She tried to rock her way free and was no more successful this time than she’d been the last time. She got out to look. She wasn’t dug in as deeply as before, but she was deep enough that she needed help. And did she have a way of getting help? Did she have an emergency kit packed away or a couple of bags of sand stashed in the trunk like any sensible islander? Not her. She was completely ill-equipped to live in a place that depended on self-sufficiency.

  Loser, Leo whispered.

  Peter, her hero, stayed silent.

  She gazed down the road. The wind that never seemed to stop blowing lashed her. “I hate this place!” she yelled, which only made her cough.

  She started to walk. The day was overcast as usual. Did the sun ever shine on this godforsaken island? She shoved her gloved hands in her pockets and hunched her shoulders, trying not to think about her warm, red knit cap lying on her bed at the cottage. Theo was probably staring at it right now through his telescope.

  Her head shot up as she heard branches snap followed by the pounding that could only come from the hooves of a very large animal. It was a sound that didn’t belong on an island with nothing larger than a cat or dog. And a midnight-black horse.

  Chapter Six

  HORSE AND RIDER EMERGED FROM a patch of old-growth spruce. Theo reined in as he saw her. She tasted cold metal in the back of her throat. She was alone on a lawless island at the end of a deserted road with a man who had once tried to kill her.

  And just might have it on his mind again.

  Eeek! Eeek! Crumpet’s silent shrieks matched the rhythm of Annie’s heartbeat.

  Don’t you dare wimp out, Scamp ordered as Theo came toward her.

  Annie wasn’t generally afraid of horses, but this one was huge, and she thought she detected a crazy look in his eyes. She felt as if she were revisiting an old nightmare, and despite Scamp’s orders, she took a few steps back.

  Wimp, Scamp taunted.

  “Going someplace special?” He wasn’t dressed as he should be for such cold weather. Only a black suede jacket and gloves. No hat. No warm muffler wrapped around his neck. But at least everything was comfortably twenty-first century. She still didn’t understand what she’d seen that first night.

  Marie’s words at the Bunco game came back. “All I’m saying is that Regan Harp was as good a sailor as her brother. And I’m not the only one who thinks it’s strange that she took that boat out with a squall blowing in.”

  She beat back her trepidation by channeling her favorite puppet. “I’m heading for a soiree with my many island friends. And if I don’t show up, they’ll come looking for me.”

  He cocked his head.

  She hurried on. “Unfortunately, my car’s in a ditch, and I could use some help getting it out.” Being forced to ask him for help was worse than her worst coughing fit, and she couldn’t leave it like that. “Or maybe I need to find someone with a little more muscle?”

  He had more than enough muscle, and it was foolish of her to goad him.

  He gazed along the road toward her car, then peered down at her. “I don’t think I like your attitude.”

  “You’re not the first.”

  His eyelids flickered in one of those facial tics she imagined psychopaths developed over time. “You have a strange way of asking for help.”

  “We all have our quirks. How about a push?” Turning her back on him gave her the willies, but she did it anyway.

  Dancer’s hooves struck the gravel as Theo trotted alongside her toward the car. She wondered if he’d started to believe Harp House was haunted. She hoped so. Ticktock goes the clock.

  “Let’s put it this way,” he said. “I’ll help you if you help me.”

  “I’d be glad to, except I have trouble cutting up dead bodies. All that bone.” Damn it! This was what happened when she spent too much time alone with her puppets. Their personalities took over.

  Our personalities come from you, Dilly pointed out.

  Theo pretended to look mystified. “What are you talking about?”

  She backtracked. “What kind of help do you need?” Other than psychiatric?

  “I want to rent the cottage from you.”

  She came to a dead stop. She didn’t know what she’d expected, but it wasn’t this. “And where am I supposed to stay?”

  “Go back to New York. You don’t belong here. I’ll make it worth your while.”

  Did he really think she was that stupid? She shoved her hands in her jacket pockets. “Do you really think I’m that stupid?”

  “I’ve never thought you were stupid.”

  She picked up her steps, but kept her distance. “Why would I leave before my sixty days are over?”

  He looked down at her, at first pretending to be puzzled and then acting upset, as though he’d finally remembered. “I forgot about that.”

  “Sure you did.” She stopped walking. “Why do you want to rent the cottage? You already have more rooms than you know what to do with.”

  He sneered just like Leo. “To get away from it all.”

  I’d punch him for you, Peter said uneasily. But he’s awfully big.

  He studied her Kia, then dismounted and tied Dancer to a branch on the other side of the road. “A car like this is useless around here. You should know that.”

  “I’ll buy another one right away.”

  He gave her a long look, then opened the car door and slid in. “Give it a push.”

  “Me?”

  “It’s your car.”

  Jerkoff. She wasn’t strong enough to do the job, as he very well knew, but he kept her shoving away at the rear end as he called out orders. Only when she began to cough did he relinquish his spot behind the wheel and push her car out on his first try.

  Her clothes were a mess, her face smudged, but he’d barely gotten his hands dirty. On the bright side, he hadn’t dragged her into the trees and slit her throat, so she had no reason to complain.

  SHE WAS STILL THINKING ABOUT her encounter with Theo the next day as she hung her coat and backpack on the hooks by the back door of Harp House and exchanged her boots for sneakers. Just because he hadn’t tried to harm her physically didn’t mean he wouldn’t do it. For all she knew, he’d left her unharmed only because he didn’t want the inconvenience of a potential police visit caused by a dead female body washing up on the beach.

  Just like Regan . . . She shoved the thought aside. Regan was the only person Theo had ever cared about.

  She rounded the corner into the kitchen and saw Jaycie sitting motionless at the table. She wore her customary jeans and sweatshirt—all Annie had seen her in—but those casual clothes never looked quite right on her. Jaycie should be wearing flirty summer dresses and big sunglasses as she drove a red convertible down an Alabama road.

  Annie set her laptop on the kitchen table. Jaycie didn’t look at her but said wearily, “It’s over.” She rested her elbows on the table and rubbed her temples. “He sent me a text this morning after he got back from his ride. He said he had to drive into town, and when he got back, we needed to talk about making another arrangement.”

  Annie suppressed the urge to launch into a diatribe. “That doesn’t necessarily mean he’s going to fire you.” That was exactly what it meant.

  Jaycie finally looked at her, a long piece of blond hair falling over her pale cheek. “We both know he’s going to. I can stay with Lisa for a couple of days, but what do I do after that? My baby . . .” Her face crumpled. “Livia’s already been through so much.”

  “I’ll talk to him.” It was the last thing Annie wanted to do, but she couldn’t think of any other way to offer Jaycie comfort. “He’s . . . still in town?”

  Jaycie nodded. “He took the recycling in because I couldn’t do it. I can’t blame him for wanting to get rid of me. It’s impossible for me to do what I was hired to do.”

  Annie could blame him, and she didn’t like the wistful softening in Jaycie’s eyes. Was being attracted to cruel men her pattern?

&nb
sp; Jaycie pushed herself up from the table and reached for her crutches. “I need to check on Livia.”

  Annie wanted to hurt him. Now, while he was away from the house. Send him back to the mainland. She grabbed a bottle from the refrigerator and went upstairs, entering the turret through the door at the end of the hallway. She made her way to the turret’s only bathroom, where a damp towel hung next to the shower stall.

  The sink looked as though it had been wiped clean since his morning shave. She turned the ketchup bottle she’d brought with her upside down and squirted a few drips in her hand. Not a lot. Only a trace. Spreading her fingers, she ran them down the bottom left corner of the mirror leaving the faintest red smudge behind. Nothing too obvious. Something that might or might not look like a bloody handprint. Something so faint he’d have to wonder if he’d overlooked it that morning or, if he hadn’t, what had happened since then to put it there.

  It would be so much more satisfying to leave a knife plunged into his bed pillow, but if she went too far, he’d stop suspecting ghosts and start suspecting her. She wanted to make him question his sanity, not look for a perpetrator, exactly what she hoped she’d accomplished when she’d sabotaged his grandmother’s clock last week.

  She’d made the trek back to Harp House in the dead of night, a treacherous trip she’d had to talk herself into. But her trepidation had been more than worth it. Earlier that day she’d checked the hinges on the turret’s outside door to make sure they wouldn’t squeak. They hadn’t, and nothing had given her away when she’d let herself in shortly before two in the morning. It had been a simple task to creep into the living room while Theo slept upstairs. She’d pulled the clock just far enough away from the wall to slip in the fresh battery she’d brought to replace the dead one she’d removed earlier. Once that was done, she reset the time so the clock would chime midnight, but only after she was safely back at the cottage. Pure genius.

  But the memory didn’t cheer her. After everything he’d done, these pranks felt more juvenile than menacing. She needed to up her game, but she couldn’t figure out how to do that without getting caught.

  She heard a noise from behind. Sucking in her breath, she spun around.

  It was the black cat.

  “Oh, my god . . .” She fell to her knees. The cat stared at her out of golden eyes. “How did you get in here? Did he lure you in? You have to stay away from him. You can’t come in here.”

  The cat turned its head and flounced off into Theo’s bedroom. She went after him, but he’d gone under the bed. She got down on her stomach and tried to convince him to come out. “Come here, kitty. Here, kitty.”

  The cat wouldn’t budge.

  “He’s feeding you, isn’t he?” she said. “Don’t let him feed you. You have no idea what he’s putting in your Fancy Feast.”

  As the cat continued to elude her efforts, she grew increasingly frustrated. “You stupid cat! I’m trying to help you.”

  The cat dug its claws into the rug, stretched, and yawned in her face.

  She reached under the bed, extending her arm. The cat lifted his head, and then, miraculously, started to crawl toward her. She held her breath. The cat approached her hand, sniffed, and began licking her fingers.

  A ketchup-loving cat.

  As long as she kept a little ketchup on her fingers, the cat was content to let her pick him up, carry him back into the main house and down to the kitchen. Jaycie was still with Livia, so there were no witnesses to Annie’s struggle getting an extremely pissed-off animal into the lidded picnic basket she found in the pantry. The cat howled like a car siren all the way down to the cottage.

  By the time she got him inside, her nerves were scraped as raw as the scratches on her arms. “Believe me, I don’t like this any better than you do.” She flipped open the lid. The cat jumped out, arched his back, and hissed at her.

  She filled a bowl with water. A pile of newspapers on the floor was the best she could do for a litter box. This evening, she’d feed him her last can of tuna, the one she’d intended for her own dinner.

  She wanted to go to bed, but she’d stupidly promised Jaycie she’d talk to Theo. As she trudged back up to the top of the cliff, a scarf wrapped over her nose and mouth, she wondered how much longer she’d have to keep doing this before she paid off her debt to Jaycie.

  Who was she kidding? She’d barely started.

  She smelled the fire even before she saw the smoke rising from the trash drums behind the garage. Jaycie couldn’t have managed that icy path, so Theo was back from town and satisfying his unhealthy fascination with fire.

  When they were kids, he’d kept a supply of driftwood above the tide line so they could build beach fires whenever they wanted. “If you look into the flames,” he’d say, “you can see the future.” But one day Annie had spied him alone on the beach tossing what she thought was a piece of driftwood on the fire he’d built until she’d caught a flash of purple and realized he’d thrown Regan’s precious purple poetry notebook into the flames.

  That night she’d heard them fighting in Theo’s room. “You did it!” Regan had cried. “I know you did it. Why are you so mean?”

  Whatever response Theo had made was lost in the sound of the argument Elliott and Mariah were having at the bottom of the stairs.

  A few weeks later, Regan’s beloved oboe went missing. Eventually a visiting houseguest spotted the charred remains in one of the trash drums. Was it so impossible to believe that he’d played a part in Regan’s death?

  Annie wanted to snatch back the promise she’d made to Jaycie that she’d talk to him. Instead she steeled herself and rounded the garage. His jacket lay across a tree stump, and he wore only jeans and a long-sleeved gray T-shirt. As she moved closer, she realized that confronting him right now, when she’d just come up from the cottage, worked to her favor. He didn’t know this was her second trip, so he’d have no reason to connect her with the handprint on his mirror. Jaycie couldn’t maneuver the steps, and Livia was too small to have reached the mirror. That left only a not-so-friendly creature from the other world.

  A shower of sparks erupted from the drum. Seeing him through those glowing red embers—that dramatic dark hair, those feral blue eyes and saber-sharp features—was like catching a glimpse of the devil’s lieutenant out for a winter romp.

  She curled her hands in her coat pockets and stepped inside the burning circle. “Jaycie says you’re going to fire her.”

  “Does she?” He picked up a chicken carcass that had fallen on the ground.

  “I told you last week that I’d help her, and I have. The house is decent, and you’re getting your meals.”

  “If you can call what the two of you send up ‘meals.’ ” He tossed the carcass into the fire. “The world’s a tough place for a bleeding heart like you.”

  “Better a bleeding heart than no heart at all. Even if you gave her a big severance check, how long would it last? It’s not like there are other jobs waiting for her. And she’s one of your oldest friends.”

  “This morning, I was the one who had to drive the recycling into town.” He gathered up a handful of withered orange peels.

  “I would have taken it in.”

  “Right.” He threw in the orange peels. “We saw how well yesterday’s trip worked out for you.”

  “An aberration.” She said the words with a straight face and some serious attitude.

  He gazed at her, taking in her undoubtedly flushed cheeks and the tangled mayhem poking out from beneath her red knit hat. She didn’t like the way he was looking at her. Not threatening, but more as if he were really seeing her. All of her. Bumps and bruises. Scars. Even—She tried to shake off the impression. Even . . . a few holy spots.

  Instead of the fear and disgust his scrutiny should have elicited, she had a disturbing desire to sit down on one of the tree stumps and tell him her troubles, as if she were fifteen all over again. Exactly how he’d roped her in the first time. Her hatred spewed over. “Why did you bu
rn Regan’s poetry notebook?”

  The fire flared. “I don’t remember.”

  “She was always trying to protect you. No matter what horrible thing you did, she’d defend you.”

  “Twins are weird.” He almost sneered, reminding her so much of Leo that she shivered. “Tell you what,” he said. “Maybe we can work something out.”

  The calculation in his eyes made her suspect he’d set another one of his traps. “No way.”

  He shrugged. “All right.” He pitched a full trash bag into the fire. “I’ll go talk to Jaycie.”

  The trap snapped shut. “You haven’t changed a bit! What do you want?”

  He turned his devil’s eyes on her. “I want to use the cottage.”

  “I’m not leaving the island,” she said as the acrid smell of burning plastic filled the clearing.

  “Not a problem. I only need it during the day.” The waves of heat rising from the fire between them distorted his features. “You stay at Harp House in the daytime. Use the WiFi. Do whatever you want. When evening comes, we trade places.”

  He’d set a trap, and the jaws had snapped. Had he ever said that he was going to fire Jaycie, or had she and Jaycie merely assumed that was the case? As she considered the likelihood that this was a ploy designed to manipulate her into doing his bidding, she was struck by something else. “You’re the one who was using the cottage before I got here. That coffee I found belonged to you. And the newspaper.”

  He threw the last of the trash into the fiery drum. “So what? Your mother never minded lending out the cottage.”

  “My mother’s gone,” Annie countered. She remembered the newspaper she’d found that had been dated a few days before her arrival. “You must have known when I was arriving—everybody on this island seemed to know. But when I got here, there was no water, no heat. That was deliberate.”

  “I didn’t want you to stay.”

  He exhibited not even a trace of shame, but under the circumstances, she wasn’t handing him a gold star for honesty. “What’s so special about the cottage?”