her dark green Toyota and drive out of the parking lot.
He went back to his second-floor corner room at Errol Flynn’s
Hammock, booted up his laptop, and wrote a quick email:
I met her over a broken jar of peanut butter in Food Fort. She’s fine,
but nervous as hell. Understandable. You won’t believe this, but now
she’s embroiled in a mess here in Riptide. A skeleton fell out of her
basement wall. Everyone in town believes it’s a neighbor’s wife who
disappeared over a year ago. Who the hell knows? Will keep you informed.
Adam
He sat back in his chair and smelled the coffee perking in the
Mr. Coffee machine he’d bought at Goose’s Hard-ware when he’d
gotten into town.
She was wary of him, maybe even afraid. Well, he couldn’t blame
her, a big guy trying to pick her up in Food Fort after she’d
found a skeleton in her basement, while already on the run from
the FBI, the NYPD, and a murderous madman. He didn’t think
she’d been amused by his peanut butter wit, which meant she
wasn’t a dolt.
He poured a cup of coffee, sipped it, and sighed with bone-deep
satisfaction. He leaned back in the dark-brown nubby chair, which
was surprisingly comfortable. The TV played quietly on its stand
against a far wall, providing background noise. He closed his eyes,
seeing Becca Matlock again.
No, now she was Becca Powell. Under that name she’d quickly
rented the Jacob Marley place and promptly had a skeleton fall out
of her basement wall after that incredible storm that had battered
the Maine coast.
The woman had pretty sucky luck.
Now all he had to do was make her come to trust him.
Then, just maybe, he would have a very big surprise for her.
But first he had some reconnaissance to do. It never paid to rush
into things.
So Adam kept his distance the next day, watched her house during
the morning and saw Tyler McBride and his little boy, Sam, pay
her a visit around eleven o’clock. The kid -was really cute, but he
didn’t yell and jump around like other kids his age. Was everyone
right? Had the son witnessed McBride killing his mother, or was it
just talk?
Adam wondered what was going on between Tyler McBride
and Becca Matlock Powell. He watched Sheriff Gaffney pay her a
visit, even overheard the sheriff speaking to her outside the front
door, on the big wraparound porch. He heard them clearly.
“Nothing yet from the medical examiner’s office, Sheriff?”
“They say hopefully tomorrow. I just wanted to go over the
basement again, see what I could sniff out. My boys didn’t find any
fingerprints, but just maybe there’s something there that we all
missed. Oh, and another thing, Rachel Ryan asked me to tell you
that some boys would be arriving to remove the tree and fix the
window for you.”
The sheriff left after an hour, a chocolate chip cookie in his
hand. Adam knew it was chocolate chip. He could smell the
chocolate from twenty yards and was salivating.
He sent an e-mail after lunch and within an hour knew all about
how Becca Matlock had met Tyler McBride at Dartmouth College.
Had the two of them been college sweethearts? Lovers? Perhaps.
It was interesting. And now everyone believed the skeleton
was Tyler McBride’s missing wife, Ann. He’d find out everything
he could about Tyler McBride. He supposed there was a certain
possible irony at play here. What if she’d managed to get away from
one stalker only to stumble upon a man who’d done away with his
wife?
Yep, her luck sucked, big-time.
He still wasn’t ready to approach her, she was too spooked. So
he kept an eye on her that evening as well. She didn’t leave the
house. Since it stayed light so late in Maine during the summer
months, five guys, all armed with chain saws, came to take care of
the old fallen hemlock that lay along the west side of the house.
They pulled the limb out of the upstairs window and sawed it up.
They cut off and sawed up the branches from the tree, then