Doyle scoffed. “You’re not up here to paint.”
“Well, no. Finding out who interrupted my wedding anniversary dinner the other night would be more important than painting. I assume Lou told you about the call.”
“We’re looking into it,” Doyle said. “If we learn anything, we’ll let you know in due course.”
Abigail bit into her shrimp roll, just to keep herself from throwing a few piping hot native Maine shrimp at Alden. She wouldn’t be getting any green light from him to poke around his town.
Lou tackled a big piece of fried haddock. “You two. Come on. We’re all on the same page here.”
Doyle kept his gaze pinned on Abigail, who was seated across from him. “I don’t know about that, Lou. You and I know the call’s most likely bullshit. Abigail does, too, but she doesn’t care—she’ll use it to stir people up. Doesn’t matter who gets caught in the crossfire. Chris’s killer could be long gone and maybe hasn’t stepped foot in Maine in seven years, but she can’t deal with that. She wants it to be one of us.”
“There are too many secrets among your husband’s friends and neighbors.”
Chris hadn’t had a better friend than Doyle Alden, and yet, Abigail thought, she’d gotten on Doyle’s nerves right from the start—because marrying her meant Chris was never coming back to Mt. Desert to live.
Lou started to speak, his anger and shock at Doyle’s bluntness obvious, but Abigail reached across the table and touched her fellow detective’s hand. “It’s okay. Doyle has a point. I haven’t given anyone here a moment’s rest since Chris died. To say I want Chris’s killer to be someone from the area isn’t fair. I don’t.”
“But you believe it is,” Doyle said.
“I’m keeping an open mind. So should you.”
Before Doyle could launch himself across the table and go for her throat, Lou dipped a fry into his little tub of ketchup and handed it over to him. “Eat up, Doyle. If one fry gives you heartburn, see a doctor. If I get heartburn from listening to you two, I’m going to knock both your heads together before I go for the Rolaids. Got it?”
Abigail didn’t doubt that Lou Beeler could, and would, do exactly what he promised. “I understand your wife’s in England, Chief,” she said. “My caller said things were happening up here—”
“Leave my wife out of your guessing.”
“It’s not a guess. It’s a fact that she’s not here.”
“It’s also a fact that a lobsterman up on Beals Island caught a blue lobster last week.”
“No kidding? What did he do with it?”
Lou picked up his coffee mug. “I should have ordered a beer when I had the chance. He donated the lobster to the Mt. Desert Harbor Oceanarium. I read about it in the paper. Abigail, we’re on your side—all of us. Doyle, me, the entire Maine State Police. We all want to solve your husband’s murder as much now as we did the day it happened. We’ll pursue any and all leads with vigor.”
Abigail tried to put herself in Lou’s shoes as the lead investigator on a seven-year-old case, but she couldn’t. She’d only been a detective two years. The cold cases in the BPD’s files weren’t ones she’d worked on. The family members weren’t people she’d come to know from year after year of them pushing, prodding, demanding answers—pleading for resolution. From wanting to give them those answers.
“I know you will,” she said curtly. “But neither of you believes the call will amount to anything.”
“It’s the fifty-seventh phone tip we’ve received over the years.”
“The first in two years,” Abigail said. “The first I’ve received in Boston, at dinner, on my wedding anniversary.”
Doyle, sneaking a fried scallop from Lou’s plate, seemed calmer, less antagonistic. “You’re high profile. John March’s daughter, a Boston homicide detective. I don’t need to tell you that complicates matters, makes it harder to separate bullshit from something real.”
She pushed aside her plate, no longer hungry. “The call may be bullshit, but it was real.”
“Yeah.” Doyle got heavily to his feet. “You’ve got the station number and my home phone and pager numbers. Feel free to call anytime.”
“I will. Thanks.”
He left, the door banging shut behind him, and Lou scowled across the table at her. “You had to goad him?”
“Me? What’d I do?” But she sighed, shaking her head. “He’s never liked me.”
“That’s a two-way street, sister.”
“It’s not—”
“He knew Chris for a lot longer than you did. Do you think you might be just a little bit jealous of Chief Alden?”
Abigail sat back against the scarred wood of the booth and studied the man across the table from her. “You know how to play hardball, don’t you, Lou?”
“It doesn’t come naturally, if that’s any consolation.”
“Not much. What’re you going to do when you retire?”