“We’ll want to talk to you about your relationship with Grace Cooper at some point,” Capozza said.
And Chris’s relationship with her, no doubt. He and Grace had known each other most of their lives. If he’d died of natural causes seven years ago, he’d be a footnote, if that, in the two FBI agents’ investigation. Now, they’d be prepared for anything—they’d hope, if not expect, to run across some new, telling tidbit. Abigail could see it in Capozza’s and Steele’s faces. They would love to stumble on the one missed fact that would solve the cold case of Chris’s murder and turn their routine background investigation into something more.
“Anytime,” she said. “I’ll be here for the rest of the week and through the weekend, at least.”
Special Agent Steele opened up the driver’s door of their car and glanced back at Abigail. “Why are you up here this week? Vacation?”
Capozza toed a loose rock in the driveway. “Funny coincidence, isn’t it?”
“You’ve talked to Lieutenant Beeler and Chief Alden,” Abigail said.
They nodded. Leaning against the open car door, Steele said, “We know about the call.”
“You want me to take you through it?”
“You don’t mind?”
“Not at all.” Abigail smiled, watching her fellow law enforcement officers slap at mosquitoes at almost the exact same moment. “Now would you care to come inside?”
Abigail sank into the old leather chair in her catch-all back room and felt the cold air off the water blow in through the open door. The wind had picked up with the incoming tide. She liked the sound of it, the taste of the ocean on it, but she’d have to get up and close the door eventually. The temperature was supposed to drop down into the forties overnight.
Would Mattie sneak into the old foundation tonight for a secret party?
The FBI agents had listened carefully to her story about the call. They’d asked the same follow-up questions that Lucas, Bob, Scoop and Lou had also asked—that she’d asked herself. She’d half hoped answering them again would bring new insight, but it hadn’t.
After Capozza and Steele left, Abigail had gone into the musty cellar and dragged tools up to the back room and laid them out on the floor. A set of screwdrivers and a set of wrenches, two different kinds of hammers, chisels, scrapers, level, a crowbar, a utility knife, a drywall saw, a sledgehammer.
The Browning men had taken good care of their tools. She’d left the electric drill and saw in the cellar, and other tools that were either unfamiliar to her or looked dubious. Chris and his grandfather weren’t big on throwing things away. They’d recycle broken bits of one thing and use them to fix something else.
The back room needed more than a fresh coat of paint. It needed gutting. New wallboard, new wiring, new flooring. Abigail had collected do-it-yourself books over the years. Surely there was a chapter on gutting a room. How hard could it be? She just had to be careful not to drop anything on her head or electrocute herself.
The wind picked up, gusting through the open door. A light plastic chair scraped across the porch floor and fell over backward, landing with a bang that, although she’d seen it coming, startled her.
She shot out of her chair and grabbed the sledgehammer, lifting it with both hands, remembering Chris grinning at her as he’d held it himself so long ago. What had he been doing? She couldn’t even remember.
She saw the section of wall where they’d fixed the leak on their last morning together. The job had never been finished properly. She could see the edges of tape and dried spackling, and the paint over the repair work didn’t match the white of the rest of the wall.
Abigail could do the work herself, or ask friends, or hire it out, but she simply hadn’t gotten around to it.
“Oh, Chris.”
Her voice caught on the wind and seemed to echo out on the darkening rocks.
She drew the sledgehammer back and, on an exhale, smashed it not into the haphazardly repaired wall, but the narrower wall next to the porch door.
The plaster cracked. White dust puffed out from where the sledgehammer had struck.
She smashed the wall again. This time, the head of the massive hammer broke through the plaster.
Tears mixed with plaster dust in her eyes.
“I owe you, my friend.”
Seven years…
“I owe you all I am.”
CHAPTER 11
The acidic smells of evergreen and peat mixed with the smells of low tide, filling the cool night air. Owen stood out on his deck, listening as he angled his flashlight beam up onto the rocks. He’d been drawn outside by voices, a sharp exchange near the old foundation.
Mattie Young stepped out of the shadows and crooked an arm in front of his face. “You’re blinding me.”
“What’re you doing out here, Mattie?”
“Running from Abigail. She’s armed—I thought she was going to kill me.”