Sutherland Island years ago—the nature preserve wanted to add it to its onshore acreage.
Zoe stared at the short stretch of beach, not breathing, seeing herself a year ago when she realized there was no hope, her father was dead. She hadn’t known if the shooter was still nearby, if she was in danger, but she hadn’t been able to make herself respond like a law enforcement officer—it was her father dead before her.
She could still feel the water seeping into her running shoes as she ran out into the cove, screaming at a lobster boat down toward Sutherland Island. It turned out to be Bruce Young’s.
It occurred to her then and had stuck with her for the past year that her father’s murder had something to do with her. Was she supposed to find his body? It was no secret she ran in the preserve. Had she told him something in the weeks before that ultimately got him killed? Had a case she worked on when she was with the state police come back to haunt not her, but her father?
In the first weeks of the investigation, the state detectives had looked into all those possibilities. But there was nothing—no lead, no potential lead—that connected back to her.
So, what about Teddy Shelton?
She doubted it took much to pop up on McGrath’s radar screen, but still.
She leaped suddenly up off the boulder, as if she’d been bitten by a spider, but it was just nervous energy, restlessness. She’d spent the last two months milking goats and knitting. Why hadn’t she come back here sooner? She was convinced now, just as she was a year ago, that the answers to her father’s murder didn’t lie outside of Goose Harbor. They were here, in her hometown.
I know who did it....
Then again, maybe she was letting herself be misled by a dying old woman’s ramblings.
“Damn.”
She took a breath and walked back up to the trail. The three-hundred-acre preserve was her aunt’s legacy, as much as her Jen Periwinkle novels were. Olivia had had a long, good life. It was some consolation. Her father’s was cut short, in midlife. He hadn’t even had a chance to fight back. For him, Zoe’s only consolation was that he hadn’t suffered—the coroner said he’d most likely died almost instantly.
The first murder in Goose Harbor in thirty years.
She glanced back at the cove, the afternoon light waning as the tide washed over the sand and rock. There were worse places to die.
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