He climbed up, sat beside Simone.
“Hell of a view,” he said.
“A favorite.”
“Yeah, mine, too.”
She’d wound a scarf with a half dozen bold colors around her neck, pulled a cap of bright blue over her hair.
She looked vivid, Reed thought, and just downright amazing.
“CiCi’s not here,” she told him. “She’s taking a couple days at a spa with a friend. Spur of the moment.”
“I wondered when she didn’t answer. Her car’s out front. Yours, too.”
“I drove her to the ferry this morning. He picked her up on the other end.”
“‘He,’ huh?” Reed slapped his chest. “Heartbreak.”
“They’ve been friends for decades. And he’s gay.”
“And hope springs yet again.” He waited a beat, enjoyed her smile. “Am I in the way here?”
“No. I heard about the meeting the other night. Apparently you handled yourself well.”
“People need time to get used to me, judge whether I suck at the job or not.”
“I don’t think you’ll suck.”
“I won’t, but they need a chance to decide.”
“Most islanders like you. I hear.”
“I’m a likeable guy.” He shot her a smile to prove it. “I can even slide into affable. How about you?”
She looked back out, over the water. “I don’t think I do affable very well.”
“No, me. Let’s talk about me. Am I likeable?”
She turned her head again, gave him a long look with those tiger eyes. “Probably. I don’t really know you.”
“I could take you to dinner. It’s meatloaf night at the Sunrise, or there’s Mama’s Pizza.”
She shook her head. “I’m taking a break, but I plan to work tonight.” She took a deep breath of that slapping wind. “The cold’s getting through.”
When she shifted, he climbed down, offered her a hand.
“It’s the meatloaf, right?” he said, making her laugh.
“It factors, but I really do intend to work. I needed some air first. Some … mind airing.”
“As long as it’s not me asking you out that’s the problem.”
She tipped her head this time, sort of slid her gaze up. “I don’t know if it is or not, because I don’t really know you. And because I’ve opted not to go out with your gender the last few months.”
“Hey, me, too—with yours. I bet we’re due.”
“Why?”
“Because,” he said as they walked through the lumpy path in the snow they’d both formed in the drifts, “you’ve got to break the fast sometime.”
“No, why are you on a fast?”
“Oh.” He concluded a woman wasn’t brushing a guy off—altogether—if she kept talking to him. “Well, got shot, had to brood and bitch over that awhile, came here, met the breathtaking CiCi, changed my life. Not a lot of time for meatloaf with a woman in there. You?”
“I’m not really sure. Lack of interest. There may have been some SBZ in there.”
“SBZ?”
“Simone Brood Zone. I sometimes reside there. But primarily, I’d say a lack of interest.”
“I can be interesting as well as affable.” He started up the beach steps with her. “I could clear these off for you.”
“That’s the affability. It’s appreciated, but we’re getting another few inches tonight anyway.”
“Have you got everything you need in case there’s more? Food, drink—Sorry,” he said when his phone signaled. “I need to go by the…” He trailed off, studied the text. “Ah, I need to go by the market anyway, so—”
“What is it? I know faces,” she said as they reached the patio. “You’ve got a good poker face, or maybe that’s cop face, but it slipped for a second. Is your family all right?”
“Yeah. It’s nothing like that.”
“I know faces,” she repeated. “You should come in, have coffee.”
She crossed the patio, opened the door. “CiCi would insist, and would be disappointed in me if I didn’t.”
“Coffee’s good.” He stomped off his boots, stepped into the house, the warmth.
She turned on the fire first, then stripping off the coat, hat, scarves, gloves, walked to the coffee machine. “Straight or fancy?”
“Just black.”
“Manly man.” She kept her voice light. “I usually go for lattes myself. I worked in this crappy coffee shop when I first got to New York. But we made excellent lattes.”
“I upset you the night of the party. Your friend said I didn’t, but—”
“Mi’s right, as usual. You didn’t. I was thinking about something, and you made me think harder. I was abrupt, but that’s because I was inside my own head.”
“The SBZ?”
Her lips curved as she shrugged. “Maybe just inside the border.”
As she frothed milk for her latte, she glanced over her shoulder. He hadn’t taken off his coat. “The phone. It has something to do with that. With the DownEast?”
“Are you a little bit psychic like CiCi?”
“No. It’s a logical assumption. You should tell me.” She turned back to finish the coffees. “Not all that long ago I’d have made sure you didn’t. You couldn’t. Now I’d like you to tell me.”
He took off his coat, but didn’t say anything when she brought him the coffee.
“Let’s sit down.” She gestured toward the sofa facing the fire. “You’re the first person I’ve asked into the house, and made coffee for in … I can’t think if ever. I wonder why that is. I don’t think it’s your famous affability.”
“I don’t want it to be because of shared trauma.”
“But part of it has to be, doesn’t it? Nobody who hasn’t experienced what we did can ever really know. For years, I shut it out. You can’t see if you don’t look, can’t hear if you don’t listen. Do you want to know why I started looking and listening again?”
“Yeah, I do.”
Simone shifted to sit cross-legged on the sofa. “I ran into my archenemy from high school. She was golden and beautiful and had breasts. I was brown and gawky and ordinary.”
“You were never ordinary.”
“That’s what I saw in the mirror that night in the bathroom. I thought, Why can’t I be beautiful like Tiffany? She’d come into the theater with the boy who’d just dumped me for her because I wasn’t ready to put out. Heartbreak, humiliation, with the intensity you can only feel at that age. World over.
“Then it happened. The boy who’d dumped me was dead. Tiffany was shot in that young, beautiful face. Now, years later, she confronts me—another bathroom, in the universe of irony. She said ugly things, and for whatever reason that few minutes of ugliness made me start looking and listening. Not for her. For me.”
“I couldn’t stop looking and listening,” Reed told her. “I don’t think it’s an obsession, but I’ll cop to mission. I followed every story, put together files. It never seemed right, or complete. They barely had a brain among them, and the only one with a brain? Why didn’t he go after the girl he blamed for ruining his life? There had to be more, and I wanted to know what it was.”
“And you were right,” Simone added. “The ‘more’ turned out to be Patricia Hobart.”
“Yeah. That made sense, in a sick, twisted way, once we—they,” he corrected, “went through the things she had to leave behind in her rush to rabbit. She was, like, fifteen at the time of the DownEast. Already a psychopath, and a smart one,” he added. “Really smart even at fifteen. Smart enough to hide her nature. But before she shot me, before it made that sick, twisted sense, I followed everything. Essie did, too. One of the ways she did—and I did? We get alerts whenever anyone who was there that night dies. Any reason.”
So she understood the look on his face, just for that second. “Who died?”
“He was mall security. Took a couple of bullets that night. Went back to work when he recovered. A seriously good guy.”
“Did … Did she kill him?”
“I’m going to say yes. No proof, not yet. And she’s good,” he added as he pushed up to pace. “She’s damn good. She’s been in the wind since she shot me. Not a damn trace. Now Robert Kofax is dead because she laced his drink on a beach in Bermuda.”
“Bermuda?”
“I don’t know why he was there—I’ll find out. I just got the alert: his name, COD. Cause of death,” he explained.
“She found a way,” he continued, “because that’s her mission.”