“Here you are.” The waitress set a cup down in front of him. “The thing with Dr. Sam is, you never know from one minute to the next what he’s going to do.” She chuckled. “Just part of the guy’s charm, I guess.”
By nine-fifteen, the doctor still hadn’t arrived, and Scott walked back to the Argonaut and began writing a piece about an upcoming fishing tournament. He’d just finished it when his phone rang.
“You can run but you can’t hide,” Mark, his former colleague from the Times said. “Listen, Carolyn and I had a big bust-up—”
“Jeez, let me alert the national media.” Scott’s younger sister, Carolyn had been dating Mark for a year, most of it marked by big bust-ups. The surprise was that they’d even gotten together in the first place. Carolyn, whose favorite color was black, was deep into the club scene. Mark, when he wasn’t chasing a story or reading a book, was writing a police-procedural novel, which he hoped to sell for enough money to allow him to leave the Times. He was an introvert; Carolyn craved excitement. They fought about everything. “So what was it this time? She got a tattoo you didn’t like?”
“Close. She’s dyed her hair orange. God, I tell you. I thought burgundy was bad. Listen, I could use a change of scenery. Feel like having a house guest for a day or so?”
MARK CAUGHT THE ten-fifteen Catalina Express from Long Beach, and Scott met him at the pier; by noon, they were eating fried fish and chips at a white plastic table on the patio of the Casino Dock Café, looking out at a scene that Ava might have painted. To their left the terra-cotta roof of the Casino; below them Avalon’s version of a traffic jam—kayaks, dinghies and fishing boats, leaving, arriving, or just tooling around.
“Well, sure, I’d rather be stuck in traffic on the Golden State Freeway, stressed out because I was late for the mayor’s press briefing.” Scott emptied the rest of a pitcher of beer into their glasses. “I mean, this is pretty damn hard to take.”
It was all impossibly picturesque. The wheeling gulls, the sparkling blue ocean and, just for a touch of color, a chugging red Harbor Patrol boat. So beautiful that, although he couldn’t drop the note of mockery when he spoke to Mark about his new life, he suspected deep down that he’d already succumbed to the island’s legendary spell. Now if he could just work things out with Ellie.
“So has your brain turned to mush yet?” Mark asked. “I mean, this is idyllic and all that, but…where’s the grit?”
“It’s everywhere,” Scott said. “Garden club chicanery. A tourist in a gorilla suit terrorizing women on the pier. Graffiti-covered golf carts outside Von’s. Lobster poaching. I tell you, I can’t keep up with it.”
“Seriously.”
Scott drank some beer, pushed his chair back from the table and thought about Sam Lynsky’s proposal. Any number of reasons could have prevented the doctor from keeping their appointment, but he was beginning to wonder if Lynsky might just have been spewing a bunch of hot air. He frowned down at the food on his plate and decided to run the whole thing past Mark.
“A few months before I came here, a woman drowned, or at least it looked like a drowning, out on the bay,” he said. “Her husband’s family is old and well connected—at one time they practically owned Catalina. The husband is a pediatrician to just about every kid on the island. Eccentric, but the town practically worships him. I’ve never heard a critical word.”
Mark grinned. “And God knows, you’ve tried to find one.”
“That’s the old me,” he said. “The new me yearns for truth, justice, beauty and goodness. Not necessarily in that order.” A joke, so he’d seem less serious about it than he really was. It came easy, the role of cynical observer. “Anyway, this is apparently a golden family. Beautiful daughters—twins. One’s a local artist. The other one manages a riding stable on the other side of the island.”
Mark’s grin broadened. “Available?”
Scott looked at him. “The artist’s engaged. I don’t know about the other one. The artist’s—” he hesitated “—a princess. High-strung, high-maintenance. Some poor guy’s locked himself into a lifetime of trouble. Kind of like Laura, only with money.”
“I take it you’ve met her.”
“Yep. And immediately got off on the wrong foot.” He shook his head, remembering. “Anyway, moving on, Lynsky and his wife had gone for a sail around the island. While Lynsky was taking a nap belowdecks, his wife apparently fell overboard.”
“And the husband didn’t hear anything?”
“He says he woke up and found her gone. There was a massive search, but the body hasn’t been found. All the usual angles were checked out. No recent insurance policies, no domestic disharmony. Nothing to suggest it was anything but an accident.”
Mark drank some beer. “And?”
“I don’t know. There’s something about Lynsky. A little too jocular when he talks about his wife, maybe. Which wouldn’t matter, except he’s asked me to write his family history.” A waitress in red shorts dropped a check on the table, smiled and sashayed off. Scott watched until she’d disappeared into the restaurant. “He’s offered me access to his wife’s papers. Diaries, letters, that sort of thing. Offered me more to write it than I made in a year at the Times, and frankly, I could use the money.”
“So…what? You’re conflicted?”
“Kind of. Maybe it’s all this.” He nodded out at the sparkling bay. “Okay, maybe I’m just perverse. Maybe there’s something about perfection I can’t deal with, but I just have this gut feeling that there’s something…ugly beneath the surface.”
His expression skeptical, Mark grabbed the check from under Scott’s credit card. “Too much time on your hands, pal. It doesn’t sound like anything to me. If no-one else sees anything suspicious about it, I wouldn’t go around turning over rocks. Take the money and do the damn book. You’re over here in paradise. Don’t screw with it.”
“DAD’S JUST DOING his power trip,” Ingrid said after she’d called Ava to find out what was happening with the cottage and learned that Sam still hadn’t decided about selling it. “What you need to do is pretend you don’t want it, then he’ll lose interest because he doesn’t have anything to hold over you.”
“I know.” Ava was sitting at the worktable in her studio, doing what she’d done every day for the past two months—putting in time without actually producing anything. Hours passed spent in blank staring. And then at night, the dreams. “I just hate playing his damn game. Why is it so hard for him to understand that the cottage might help me get myself together?”
“He understands okay. That’s the whole point. But what you need is less important to him than his power trip.”
Ava wiped her forehead with the back of her hand. It disturbed her that Ingrid could make their father sound so Machiavellian. To anyone but Ingrid she’d vigorously defend him and, even to Ingrid, her first inclination was always to rush to his defense, but Ingrid’s words were like moths nibbling away at the fabric of what she believed her life to be. Holes kept appearing. She’d patch them with denial, weave the cloth together with words and smiles until no one else could see the holes, but she knew they were there. I’m not happy, Ava. I haven’t been for some time.
“Maybe I’ll just tell him I’ve found something else.” She leafed through a book of sketches, searching for inspiration. When she looked up, Scott Campbell was standing in the doorway. “I’ve got to go,” she told Ingrid. “I’ll call you later.”
“Hi.” Scott hadn’t moved from the doorway. “I didn’t realize this