Riptide

“No, I just got here yesterday. The first thing I heard about was your finding that skeleton. The second thing I heard was it was the missing wife of your neighbor, Tyler McBride, and that you were seeing him and now wasn’t that interesting?”

A reporter, she thought. Oh God, maybe he was a reporter or a paparazzo, and they’d found her. Her brave new world in the boondocks was going to be over just as it was beginning. It wasn’t fair. She began backing away from him.

“Are you all right?”

“Yes, of course. I’m very busy. It was a pleasure to meet you. Goodbye.” And she was nearly running down the aisle lined with different kinds of breads, hamburger buns, and English muffins.

He stared after her. She was taller than he’d expected, and too thin. Well, he’d be skinny, too, if he’d been under as much pressure as she was. What mattered was that he had found her. Amateurs, he thought, even very smart ones, couldn’t easily disappear. He thought about how he had managed to misdirect the FBI, and grinned at the jars of low-fat jams and jellies. They had more procedures, more requirements, more delays built into the system, a system that could have been designed by a criminal to give himself the best shot at escaping. Another thing they didn’t have was his contacts. He was whistling when he carried his can of French roast drip coffee to the checkout counter. He watched her climb into 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 e-mail:

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 Hardware 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?