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hallucinating!” Ava argued, then heard a quiet cough and saw Austin Dern standing near the window, ostensibly looking out at the dark night. He caught her gaze in the watery glass for just an instant and gave an almost imperceptible shake of his head.
    â€œI mean . . . Oh, I don’t know what I mean.” She hated this. She was lying, but Dern’s subtle warning had penetrated her anger.
    â€œYou know Noah’s been gone for nearly two years,” Evelyn McPherson said kindly, and tears threatened behind Ava’s eyes. “He would be almost four now. He would look much different than when you last saw him.”
    Ava swallowed hard and nodded.
    To the sheriff, the doctor said, “Obviously this isn’t a good time.”
    â€œIs there ever one?” Ava asked. “A good time?”
    â€œThere are better times.” McPherson straightened and Joe Biggs took his cue.
    â€œGlad this is all straightened out,” the sheriff said.
    Really? Ava stared at Biggs as if he’d gone mad, but if he saw the doubt in her eyes, he ignored it. Squaring his hat on his head, he started out of the room.
    â€œThank you, Joe,” Wyatt said, and the big man stopped. “I know it’s an inconvenience.”
    â€œAll in a day’s work.” Biggs shook Wyatt’s hand before walking through the kitchen, his heavy footsteps fading as the back door creaked open.
    In her pocket, Ava’s fingers curled over the unknown key in a death grip. She didn’t know why it felt important. She didn’t know who had left it for her, but she didn’t think it was some random mistake. The key was significant to something.
    If she could only figure out what.
    Â 
    What the hell had he gotten himself into? Dern wondered as he strode down the broken stone path to the stable where the small herd of horses that were now in his care was locked for the night.
    The whole island was something out of a Hitchcock movie and a bad one at that, the kind his mother had watched far into the nights to accompany her and her ever-present insomnia.
    He glanced back over his shoulder at the house, a huge, rambling beast of a building that rose into the night, its single turret appearing like the long tooth of a monster’s lower jaw, piercing the low layer of clouds huddling over the island. Neptune’s Gate . . . Whose idea was it to name it that? He supposed the building had been dubbed long ago, maybe by the original owner, a sea captain who had settled here and taken up sawmilling back when the virgin forests stretched over the states of Washington and Oregon for thousands of square miles.
    Well, old Stephen Monroe Church begat himself a loony of a great-great-granddaughter in Ava Church Garrison. Beautiful, almost hauntingly so if you believed in those things. Dern didn’t. With her big eyes, as gray as the waters of the Pacific in winter; high cheekbones; and pointed chin, she had the markings of a real beauty, but she was just too damned thin for his taste. Waifishly so. Though it hadn’t always been. He knew.
    He checked on the horses and felt a little calmer as the smell of dry hay, dust, and oiled leather was layered over the more astringent smells of urine and the earthy scent of manure. The horses rustling in the straw, occasionally nickering, was also comforting. Then again, he’d always felt more at home with animals than he had with people, and today the reasons for his feelings had become clearer than ever when he’d met more of the people housed in Neptune’s Gate, a nest of vipers if there ever was one.
    Locking the door behind him, he headed up the exterior stairs to the apartment that was now, at least for a short while, his home. Inside was a studio, smaller by half than the library in which he’d witnessed the interaction of the Church family members, the staff of Neptune’s Gate, and the sheriff. That’s where the lines blurred a bit. Some of the