"Then running a marina is what you want to do?"
He thought a moment. "Yes, I guess it is. Yuma and I work well together. He handles most of the people end of the business. I prefer working in the boatyard. It's the kind of work I did to put myself through school. I liked it then, and I like it now."
"Do you miss the financial district?"
"No. I enjoyed that life at the time, and it's allowed me to live as I do now. I've no regrets." He looked at Annie. "But I'm not the same man I was. I've changed."
She nodded and said quietly, "I understand."
In that moment, Garvin thought she did, and he didn't feel as cold.
After dinner there was no question, no discussion, about what came next. They went into his bedroom together, and they made love through the night, with the lights out and the curtains drawn, creating their own, impenetrable world, apart from the past, oblivious to the future. As he felt her, tasted her, loved her, Garvin could sense her urgency, her demand—her need not just for physical pleasure, although that was there, but for him. All of him. Nothing held back. In the way she loved him, stroked him, responded to his caresses, he could feel her searching for a way to connect with him beyond the physical. As they came together, as she moaned with passion, he knew he wanted to give that part of him she was looking for, if only he knew what it was.
Toward dawn she came to him. She eased on top of him, slid herself onto him, so that he grew hard inside of her. She rose up, and he caught her breasts in his palms, stared up at her in the silvery light, her hair hanging down, her eyes lost in the shadows.
She smiled and moved her hips, making it impossible for him to think about anything but now, that moment, and her.
Michael Yuma took one look at Garvin and said, "Uh-oh."
Garvin winced. "Sorry. I don't mean to take my mood out on you. Look, you deserve a day off. Go on home."
Yuma grinned. "Think I'm going to let you run this place in the mood you're in? Man, one look at you, people'll duck for cover. You're bad for business, my friend."
Garvin started down the dock. It was a bright, clear, gorgeous Sunday morning, but his night with Annie Payne and the morning paper, with Sarah Linwood plastered on the front page of the city section in all her eccentricity, had taken their toll. His world was damned near spinning out of control. It was something he'd promised himself would never happen again.
Yuma clapped one hand on his shoulder, his dark eyes unusually serious. "Go on, Garvin. Go do what you have to do. I don't have anything pressing at home. I can hang in here another day."
"Look, Michael—"
"I'm keeping up with the talk, and I read the morning paper. You've got a lot on your mind. Now go on. Get out of here."
Garvin hesitated, but he knew Yuma was right. Trying to hold up his end, as preoccupied as he was, wouldn't help anyone. He gave his friend a curt nod. "Thanks, Yuma."
He shrugged off Garvin's gratitude. "Everyone else around here'll be thanking me, too."
As Garvin headed back up to his house, he found himself thinking about being out on the water with Annie Payne. She was the child of Maine seamen, the former director of a New England maritime museum. She would know the water. One day, he thought, then gritted his teeth. It was the first time he'd really considered the future in a long time. Maybe it was a positive sign, maybe it wasn't. But it was there, the thought of sailing with Annie Payne.
She and Otto had taken off in her rusting station wagon. As he picked up Otto's discarded two-by-four from the middle of his living room floor, Garvin understood that come what may between him and Annie Payne, his life up on his hillside had changed forever. The cease-fire he'd had with himself and his past —and his future—was over. He would never feel isolated or removed up here again, or even, he thought, at peace.
On his way out, Vic Denardo emerged from the shadows of a larch and sauntered out to the walkway. Garvin went still, taking in the man who for the past five years he'd believed had killed his wife and her grandfather. He looked remarkably unchanged, a few more lines at the corners of his eyes, an added crease in his forehead, but the lively dark eyes, the irreverent curve of his mouth, were the same. His amiability wasn't feigned. It was natural, even if he had committed premeditated murder.
"I didn't kill anyone," he said, coming toward Garvin.
He could feel the tension in his spine, could feel his hands curling into tight fists. Yet he remembered, too, in spite of everything, that he'd once considered Vic Denardo a friend, a man he could trust in the most elemental and basic of ways. He owed it to Haley, and maybe to himself, to think before he acted, to reserve judgment until all the facts were in. "If you didn't kill Thomas and Haley, Vic, who did?"
Denardo didn't answer.