Phantom Cove: A Port Stirling Mystery by Kay Jennings

Author:Kay Jennings [Jennings, Kay]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Paris Communications
Published: 2022-11-16T16:00:00+00:00

TWENTY

Fern left her car in a small beach overlook parking lot about five miles south of Port Stirling and made her way down the sandy wood steps to the wide beach. The morning was raw, and the wind was picking up. She zipped up her black parka, and pulled her black hat on, shoving her ponytail up into it so none of her red hair was showing.

Armed with high-powered binoculars and a couple of other tools that the best minds in the spy business had picked out for her before she left Club Fed in Georgia, she took off striding south down the beach. She set her pedometer at zero because she wanted to know when she’d walked 1.2 miles on the long-deserted beach. That mileage would put her right at the northern edge of Zhang Chen’s property where the little river came in.

The closer she got, the jumpier she became. It’s OK to be a little nervous. This place was terrifying to you last year. But you survived that, and it’s a new year, she reassured herself. She hadn’t been back on this beach since the tsunami, and she wasn’t sure if the terrain would be as she remembered or not. As she approached where she thought the river started, she could see that it was now a little wider than before. But it didn’t look any deeper; if anything, it was shallower than the night of the raid. She would still get plenty wet fording it to get closer to Chen’s barn and the house, but she was relieved that the water would only be about knee-deep compared to its previous hip-high level.

She stopped and crouched behind a huge tree stump moored in the wet sand. She noticed her favorite green anemones circling the shallow waters around the stump. So pretty. Taking out the binocs, she pointed them at Chen’s barn, the top half of which was easily visible from her location. She remembered her pink tee-shirt, tattered and filthy, flying from the top of it, and shivered remembering how close she’d come to dying that perilous night. Again, new day, new situation. Move on.

The barn appeared to have a recently restored roof, which jived with the renovation report she’d heard. Maybe Zhang Chen is innocent. Just an investor who fell in love with the Oregon coast. Maybe they all had it wrong. Since Fern was relatively new to the crime world, she knew she didn’t have all the answers, but when seasoned vets like her boss Joe Phelps, the sheriff, Patty, and, especially, her husband all believed that Chen had to have been involved with the operation being conducted on his property, she fell in with them.

But now, in her new job, she had to think for herself. What if he wasn’t really the head honcho on the Anselmo operation? Where did that leave them now with this ghost guns deal, and the attempt on Matt’s life?

The big sliding door facing her was partially open, which likely meant that someone was home.

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