“Listen up, Linc. I’m giving you this one chance. That’s it.”
Linc Cooper looked through the tall spruces at the Atlantic Ocean below him, the sun chasing away the last of the fog on the bright, cool morning. He was on a vertical zigzag of stone steps that Edgar Garrison had carved into the granite hillside behind his summer house almost a hundred years ago. They used to lead to an old-fashioned teahouse. Now the steps led to the house the Garrisons had built after fire had destroyed their original “cottage” down on the waterfront.
The new house, with its blue-gray clapboards and black shutters, was supposedly smaller and more restrained, but Linc, who’d never even seen pictures of the Garrison’s original Maine home, had never liked it.
He had always loved playing on the steps as a little kid, if only because no one noticed him out there. His uncle Ellis considered the house his own, but, in reality, the deed belonged to Linc’s father, Jason Cooper.
Everything, Linc thought, was in his father’s name. His father was clever, responsible and ruthless. His younger half brother, Ellis, was passive by nature and gentle in temperament, not unambitious but more measured in his wants and needs.
“I don’t give second chances. Don’t make the mistake of thinking I do.”
Chris’s voice. When he had jumped out of the dark and clamped a hand on Linc’s shoulder, Linc had wet his pants. Chris hadn’t relented.
Thirteen years old, and Linc had never felt such shame as when he looked into his idol’s eyes and saw that he knew everything.
“You have nothing to prove to anyone, Linc. Not to me. Not to your father or to your sister.”
He’d wanted to be like Chris Browning. It didn’t matter that Chris was so much older. Linc wanted to be self-reliant, capable. Chris had no family money to fall back on. His parents had died when he was a baby. He’d made his own way in the world.
“What kind of man do you want to be?”
Linc sat on a stone bench on a narrow landing on the steep steps. How many times had he thought about finding Abigail Browning and telling her everything he knew about the night before she was attacked, before her husband was killed?
Telling her what he’d done seven years ago as a stupid kid.
He heard footsteps above him on the steps and looked up just as Mattie Young came into view. Chris’s friend, the Coopers’ yardman, the local drunk. A creep.
Mattie jumped the last two steps onto the landing. “Hey, Linc, my boy.” He grinned, smug, sarcastic. “Fancy meeting you here.”
There wasn’t any “fancy” to it, and Mattie knew it—he’d provided the when, where, the why. And the consequences of not showing up.
Deliberately, just to rub Mattie’s nose in the disparities between them, Linc had put on an expensive sweater and khakis for their little meeting, and he’d shaved. Mattie had come down the steps from working in Ellis’s gardens, but he would have been a mess, regardless. He’d tied his stringy, greasy hair into a ponytail and wore a stained T-shirt and torn, frayed jeans that sagged on his scrawny frame.
He pulled a pack of cigarettes from his back pocket and tapped one out. “Your crazy uncle has me moving a rhododendron. He doesn’t think it’s thriving where it is. It looks fine to me.” He stuck the cigarette between his lips. “What the hell about me? I’d like to thrive.”
“Then stop smoking. That’d help.”
“Sarcastic little shit, aren’t you, considering the spot you’re in?”
Linc felt his jaw set hard. “I hate your guts.”
Mattie laughed. “Feeling’s mutual, kid. You got my best friend killed—”
“Your best friend? You didn’t even go to his wedding. You were in a ditch somewhere sleeping off a couple bottles of cheap booze.”
“So I was.” Using a small disposable lighter, Mattie lit his cigarette, inhaling deeply before returning lighter and pack to his pocket. “Do you have my money?”
“A thousand. I can’t get my hands on ten grand at once without drawing attention to myself. I told you—”
“Show me the thousand.”
Linc reached into his day pack, dropped at his feet, and withdrew a sealed envelope. His stomach rolled over. Sweat erupted on his back. He couldn’t believe what he was doing, but what choice did he have? Especially now, with his sister Grace’s State Department appointment in the works.
He handed the envelope to Mattie. “Go ahead and count it if you want. It’s all there.”
“I don’t need to count it. If you’re lying, I know where you live, don’t I?”