Luke swallowed, looking vulnerable, ashen. "After Patrick's death last year, I discovered the missing gun. It's a Colt Python.357 revolver. It's a fine weapon."

"How long after Chief West was killed?"

"The next day. After I heard Olivia had died. I don't even remember why I checked."

"Did you report it?"

He shook his head. "No."

Betsy was silent. Her stomach ached.

"Now it's too late," he said.

She nodded. "I-I understand."

"No, you don't. You think I'm covering up for my son. I'm not. Betsy, I don't believe Kyle killed Patrick West. I never believed it."

"But you were worried the police would."

"I was worried Zoe would find out and kill him."

"Luke!"

He closed up the cabinet and locked it. "She wouldn't have. I see that now, but at the time, I was as caught up in the drama as everyone else."

She thought of the payments to Stick Monroe. "What about Stick?"

"He knows about the stolen gun. He knows I didn't report the theft to police. I should have, especially when I knew it could have been the weapon used in Patrick's murder. I paid Stick for his silence. Cash. He wouldn't take it-he says he's retired and has no intention of ratting out a friend. But I insisted. I don't know what he does with it. Tosses it in the ocean for all I know."

"He's not-you don't consider that blackmail, do you?"

Luke shook his head sadly, his disappointment palpable, as if he'd hoped she'd have figured it out by now, understood him after all. "No, Betsy. I consider it an act of friendship."

To pay a man for his silence? Betsy didn't get that. But she supposed that was Luke's whole point. That she didn't get it, didn't get him.

"Once I realized the Python was gone," Luke went on, "I couldn't sleep, I couldn't eat. I was terrified that a gun I owned, legally, for the most innocuous of reasons, would end up being the murder weapon, not only in Patrick's death-"

"But someone else's," Betsy said. "You hired Teddy because you were afraid the murderer was getting ready to strike again."

Luke shut the gun cabinet and reset the alarm. "I still am."

Twenty-Seven

Zoe slipped up to the attic and sat on her thick chenille rug among her pillows and scribblings. She picked up one of her yellow pads and sighed at how awful her writing was. She didn't have Olivia's zest for adventure, her accessible style, her insight into Jen Periwinkle.

At least it didn't seem so at that moment.

Last year, sitting up here with her feet propped up on pillows and the window cracked so that she could feel the breeze and smell the ocean, she'd thought she was brilliant. The words flowed, the scenes developed one after another in her head, and she couldn't stop writing.

She hadn't written a word since she'd left Goose Harbor, not even after she was fired and living with Charlie and Bea Jericho, canning vegetables and milking goats and learning to knit. She'd meant to pretend that she'd never written at all.

Probably still a good idea. She could burn this mess and go find a job.

"Zoe?"

It was J.B. She'd left him in the kitchen to scrounge up dinner now that their evening on the Castellane yacht was off. She figured he'd drag her to Perry's for fried shrimp, beer and a game of darts.

"I'm here," she said. "Come on up. You've read this garbage, so it's not like it's a secret."

He seemed even taller as he made his way toward her under the slanted ceilings. "I told you-"

"Yeah, right, you can't read my handwriting. I don't need to polygraph you on that one-I know it's not true."

He smiled. "I take it I'm not disturbing you?"

She shook her head. "No, it's not like I'm writing." She sighed at a curling yellow page. She'd thought about writing with a fountain pen, the way her aunt had started in her early twenties, but decided on pencil. "This was just a catharsis or something."

J.B. stepped over her discarded drapery rod from what seemed like a thousand years ago. "Do you believe Kyle's story that he didn't get all the way up here?"

"That part. He wouldn't have been able to resist if he knew I'd played around with Jen Periwinkle. It seems like an invasion into Aunt Olivia's imagination, don't you think? Jen and Mr. Lester McGrath were her creations, not mine."

"Then make them yours. She left you the rights to her Periwinkle novels for a reason. Maybe that was it. So they could live through you-"

"Trust me, I was a better cop than I ever will be a writer."

He stood in front of the bureau at her feet. "Except for that little incident with the gun and the Texas Ranger."

"Did the governor's murder get solved or did it not? And without too much damage to the good guys." She leaned back against a fat pillow, eyeing him. "You'd have fired me, too, wouldn't you?"

"I'd have fired you the first time I caught you without a weapon while you were on duty." His presence made her writing space seem even smaller, more intimate. "You disengaged from the work, didn't you?"

"Over time. It didn't happen all at once."

He sat on the chenille rug and stretched his legs out straight, crossing his ankles an inch from her hip. "I can understand how Stick Monroe and Luke Castellane could see themselves as your protector-Luke because of his loyalty to Olivia, Stick because of his loyalty to you."

"Luke's protecting himself. Anyway, I can take care of myself."

"That's not the question. It's not about you. It's about them and their relationship to you, to your father, to your aunt. It's a tough position to be in. For all of you." He watched her a moment, then the corners of his mouth quirked. "Especially for them. You're noncompliant."

"Not me." She smiled. "I'm good at taking orders."

But he'd gone serious on her. "You're more out of control than I am."

Her throat caught at the quiet truth of his words, and she looked away, staring out at the harbor. It was dusk, the water still, glasslike, reflecting the moored boats and the bright leaves of trees on the shoreline.

"If Teddy Shelton knows anything about who killed my father, why-"

"Let the state and local police figure it out. If they choose to, they can bring in the bureau. Zoe, you have to stand down. You have to let people do their jobs, let them help you. You ran last year because you knew you couldn't keep it up, you had to back off."

She shook her head. "I ran because I knew the answers to my father's murder are here in town, not outside. That's what people want to believe. That's why they're all so nervous around me." She shut her eyes and inhaled, then exhaled slowly. "I just want to know why he was killed, J.B. Who did it."

"I know."

"And then I want a normal life." She tried to concentrate on her breathing and not to relive the image of Kyle Castellane flying toward her, Teddy Shelton shooting at her. She'd had no idea he was armed, hadn't even considered it. Law Enforcement 101. "All this past year I told myself coming home was a normal thing to do and nothing would happen. I could make my peace with Dad's death and figure out what comes next in my life. I could live here. I could eat blueberry pancakes every morning."

"Everything you've just said makes sense."

She managed a halfhearted smile. "Not the blueberry pancakes."

"Zoe-"

"I knew it wasn't true. I knew I couldn't just come back here and it'd all be normal again."

She looked down at her bandaged wrist. He'd helped her put on a fresh bandage, but since she wasn't hurting as much when he did it, she'd responded to even his slightest touch. Another reason she'd bolted up to the attic. That was what it was, she thought. A place to hide. Her writing, too, was a place to hide.

"Well," she said, "I guess I anticipated dodging bullets and having my car stolen, but I sure as hell never expected to go kayaking with an undercover FBI agent."