On the Edge by Carla Neggers

Author:Carla Neggers [Neggers, Carla]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Harlequin
Published: 2003-11-14T07:00:00+00:00

6

He and Carine were right, Hank thought. Something was up with Antonia. And whatever it was, it wasn’t good. He checked out her cottage, similar to countless old-fashioned cottages he’d been in since he was a kid. It was tiny, cozy, with inexpensive furnishings that were functional and at least as old as he was. A lumpy old couch. A heap of musty-smelling quilts, mismatched chairs and dishes, mason jars filled with matchbooks, tacks and rubber bands, soggy decks of cards and the ubiquitous Scrabble game. The bathroom was prosaic, to say the least. He noticed the stack of threadbare towels.

The bed was behind a curtain, the sheets clean and white.

Hank didn’t let himself linger gazing at the damn bed.

Antonia said that Babs Winslow was ninety-seven, and when she was gone, this place would be, too. That was the deal. She had a life-lease on the cottage, but the land under it was a National Wildlife Refuge. As, they all believed, it should be. Shelter Island and nearby Monomoy Island were uniquely located as stopovers for migrating birds, their spits of sand at the elbow of Cape Cod well-suited as home to dozens of species of rare and endangered birds. And time and time again, storms had rearranged what passed for land along this exposed stretch of the Cape—they would again. It wasn’t the best spot for the trophy houses that surely would have doomed Babs Winslow’s cottage long before now. Development pressures, the skyrocketing prices of beachfront land, were tough to resist.

But he could see why Antonia liked to come here to think, relax. It was about the perfect escape from a busy urban emergency room, not that getting away from work, hiding out to write this journal article she was supposedly writing, explained why she was here now. They certainly didn’t explain her mood. She was a dedicated physician and hadn’t taken a break in months, but she’d been on the island for several days—why still the drawn look? Why still the edginess that he’d noticed at dinner in Boston?

He motioned to the laptop computer on the rickety table. “How’s the article coming?”

“What?”

She seemed to focus on him, then went pale and suddenly swooped in front of him and hit the power button, not bothering to shut the computer down properly. But this way, Hank thought, he couldn’t see what was on the screen. Which made him wonder what was on the screen. He doubted she’d have jumped like that if it’d been medical jibberish about some aspect of trauma medicine.

“The article’s coming along, but it’s slow work.” She snatched up a spiral notebook, closing it before Hank could read her scribblings there, too. She shoved it into a backpack on the floor and smiled unconvincingly at him. “I think I brought my laptop more so I could play FreeCell than anything else. Nights here can be pretty lonely.”

“Tonight won’t be.”

Her cheeks turned a healthier pink, but even that didn’t last as she grabbed the laptop and it followed the notebook into her backpack.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.