Suspicion

“So has your brain turned to mush yet?” Mark asked. “I mean, this is idyllic and all that, but…where’s the grit?”

“It’s everywhere,” Scott said. “Garden club chicanery. A tourist in a gorilla suit terrorizing women on the pier. Graffiti-covered golf carts outside Von’s. Lobster poaching. I tell you, I can’t keep up with it.”

“Seriously.”

Scott drank some beer, pushed his chair back from the table and thought about Sam Lynsky’s proposal. Any number of reasons could have prevented the doctor from keeping their appointment, but he was beginning to wonder if Lynsky might just have been spewing a bunch of hot air. He frowned down at the food on his plate and decided to run the whole thing past Mark.

“A few months before I came here, a woman drowned, or at least it looked like a drowning, out on the bay,” he said. “Her husband’s family is old and well connected—at one time they practically owned Catalina. The husband is a pediatrician to just about every kid on the island. Eccentric, but the town practically worships him. I’ve never heard a critical word.”

Mark grinned. “And God knows, you’ve tried to find one.”

“That’s the old me,” he said. “The new me yearns for truth, justice, beauty and goodness. Not necessarily in that order.” A joke, so he’d seem less serious about it than he really was. It came easy, the role of cynical observer. “Anyway, this is apparently a golden family. Beautiful daughters—twins. One’s a local artist. The other one manages a riding stable on the other side of the island.”

Mark’s grin broadened. “Available?”

Scott looked at him. “The artist’s engaged. I don’t know about the other one. The artist’s—” he hesitated “—a princess. High-strung, high-maintenance. Some poor guy’s locked himself into a lifetime of trouble. Kind of like Laura, only with money.”

“I take it you’ve met her.”

“Yep. And immediately got off on the wrong foot.” He shook his head, remembering. “Anyway, moving on, Lynsky and his wife had gone for a sail around the island. While Lynsky was taking a nap belowdecks, his wife apparently fell overboard.”

“And the husband didn’t hear anything?”

“He says he woke up and found her gone. There was a massive search, but the body hasn’t been found. All the usual angles were checked out. No recent insurance policies, no domestic disharmony. Nothing to suggest it was anything but an accident.”

Mark drank some beer. “And?”

“I don’t know. There’s something about Lynsky. A little too jocular when he talks about his wife, maybe. Which wouldn’t matter, except he’s asked me to write his family history.” A waitress in red shorts dropped a check on the table, smiled and sashayed off. Scott watched until she’d disappeared into the restaurant. “He’s offered me access to his wife’s papers. Diaries, letters, that sort of thing. Offered me more to write it than I made in a year at the Times, and frankly, I could use the money.”

“So…what? You’re conflicted?”

“Kind of. Maybe it’s all this.” He nodded out at the sparkling bay. “Okay, maybe I’m just perverse. Maybe there’s something about perfection I can’t deal with, but I just have this gut feeling that there’s something…ugly beneath the surface.”

His expression skeptical, Mark grabbed the check from under Scott’s credit card. “Too much time on your hands, pal. It doesn’t sound like anything to me. If no-one else sees anything suspicious about it, I wouldn’t go around turning over rocks. Take the money and do the damn book. You’re over here in paradise. Don’t screw with it.”

“DAD’S JUST DOING his power trip,” Ingrid said after she’d called Ava to find out what was happening with the cottage and learned that Sam still hadn’t decided about selling it. “What you need to do is pretend you don’t want it, then he’ll lose interest because he doesn’t have anything to hold over you.”

“I know.” Ava was sitting at the worktable in her studio, doing what she’d done every day for the past two months—putting in time without actually producing anything. Hours passed spent in blank staring. And then at night, the dreams. “I just hate playing his damn game. Why is it so hard for him to understand that the cottage might help me get myself together?”

“He understands okay. That’s the whole point. But what you need is less important to him than his power trip.”

Ava wiped her forehead with the back of her hand. It disturbed her that Ingrid could make their father sound so Machiavellian. To anyone but Ingrid she’d vigorously defend him and, even to Ingrid, her first inclination was always to rush to his defense, but Ingrid’s words were like moths nibbling away at the fabric of what she believed her life to be. Holes kept appearing. She’d patch them with denial, weave the cloth together with words and smiles until no one else could see the holes, but she knew they were there. I’m not happy, Ava. I haven’t been for some time.

“Maybe I’ll just tell him I’ve found something else.” She leafed through a book of sketches, searching for inspiration. When she looked up, Scott Campbell was standing in the doorway. “I’ve got to go,” she told Ingrid. “I’ll call you later.”

“Hi.” Scott hadn’t moved from the doorway. “I didn’t realize this was your studio. I was just walking by and I saw you working.”

“Trying to work.”

“Am I interrupting?”

“Not really.” She got up from the stool and then couldn’t think of what to do, so she sat back down again. Something about him made her feel awkward. Mostly, she suspected, because she’d always been drawn to the type. Average height and weight, a touch on the scrawny side, perhaps. Slightly bookish with his round rimless glasses and blue chambray shirt. Fine, even features. Curly dark hair. Quizzical, sardonic, probably given to brooding silences. Probably subscribed to the New York Times—delivery cost more in California, but the book supplement was worth it—preferred merlot to chardonnay, listened to NPR and thought American Beauty was a brilliant film. He really did look like Rob.

“Is it distracting working here?” he asked. “Being visible from the street?”

“I can usually block out distractions.” She glanced around the storefront studio she’d worked in for the past year. “When people see me working, they don’t just drop in.”

“I can leave.”

“I didn’t mean you.”

“Well, I know how it is to be interrupted in the middle of a thought.”

“I haven’t had a whole lot of thoughts lately.” Her face went warm. Why the hell had she said that? “About work, I mean. I’m…I’ve had other things on my mind. Actually, I’ll be moving soon. I’m buying my grandmother’s cottage and there’s a porch in the back that will make a perfect studio. I can just stumble out of bed and start working.”

“Pretty convenient,” he said.

He looked genuinely interested, as though she’d actually said something, not babbled like an idiot. She folded her arms, unfolded them. Stuck an elbow on the worktable, propped her head in her hand and tried to look bored. Better than looking flustered and awkward. Coffee. Did she have any? No. He had an athlete’s body. Not an ounce of fat. Unlike her own fleshy roll constricted now by the waistband of her jeans. Her hand was going numb.

“Anyway,” he said, “you asked yesterday if I had any questions and now I realize I do.”

“Questions?”

“About the tile-making process.” He took a notebook from his pocket, flipped the through the pages. “How do you actually make tiles?”

She glanced at him briefly, long enough to tell her that he wasn’t really here to talk about tiles. Fine, if he wasn’t going to come clean, she’d make him pay the price. “The short answer is, you mix the clay, roll it out, mold it, fire it in one of those kilns over there, dry it for a few days, then glaze it several times and fire it again,” she said. “Painting them is another process.”

“So—”

“Exactly.” She launched into a detailed explanation of paint pigments, moved on to glazes and firing techniques and anything else she could think of to throw into the monologue. When she saw his eyes begin to glass over, she began a dissertation on paint pigments. “That’s a very short and simplistic answer,” she said some twenty minutes later, “and I’m sure you must have dozens of questions.”

“What I—”

“Did I mention that the tiles are mixed with two different kinds of clay?”

“Twice.”

Only a touch embarrassed, she plowed on, anyway. “But I probably didn’t explain that it’s the glazing that gives them the really brilliant colors. Glazing and firing and more glazing and the heat’s turned up and they develop this hard brilliance.”

“My daughter would find this interesting,” he said.

“Unlike her father?”

“On the contrary.” He had his back to the shop window, a hand casually resting on the edge of her worktable. “I’ve been following your advice and checking out the installations around town. Right outside my office, there’s a tiled mural of a girl riding a whale.”

“Designed after a 1950s-era postcard made to advertise the big tuna that used to be caught in Catalina,” Ava said in the tour-guide voice she used during the weekly art walks she conducted. “Three children commissioned it to celebrate the anniversary of their mother’s birth.”

“Interesting,” he said.