Breakwater by Carla Neggers Read Free Book Online Page B

refrigerator.
    Quinn had walked next door to the only other cottage on the quiet, dead-end road, but the Scanlons, the couple who’d retired to Yorkville just before Quinn bought her place, were still not home.
    A wasted trip, she thought, watching an osprey-a female-swoop up from the marsh into the clear sky above the bay. In spite of her concern for Alicia, Quinn felt some of her tension ease at the familiar sight of the huge bird. Once facing extinction, ospreys had become opportunistic in choosing their nesting sites, using channel markers, buoys, old dock posts and even the occasional bench on a quiet private dock. The nests could only be removed with a permit.
    The two young ospreys that had constructed the oversize mess of a nest on a marker at the mouth of Quinn’s cove had returned. The nest had survived several fierce winter storms. With luck, the ospreys, mates for life, would have baby ospreys in a matter of weeks.
    But they were raptors-birds of prey. Although they dined primarily on fish, if Alicia had indeed walked out to the water early one morning and saw an osprey scoop up an unsuspecting duckling in front of her, she would have been horrified. Stressed out as she was from the pressures of her job, perhaps on the verge of a breakdown, she could have latched onto such a gruesome sight as she’d melted down, twisting it into a metaphor for all her fears and troubles.
    Speculation, Quinn thought, turning away from the water.
    Built in the 1940s, her cottage occupied a half-acre lot with lilacs and azaleas, not yet in bloom, and a vegetable garden out back that she meant to revive. Right now, it was mostly weeds. Alicia had promised to rent a tiller and dig up the garden, but Quinn had known it was just well-meaning talk. She loved Yorkville for its simplicity. A picnic, kayaking, walking on the beach, prowling mom-and-pop shops for books and antiques, sitting on her porch and reading. What Quinn enjoyed most about Yorkville, Alicia found lacking. Quinn grew up in the Washington suburbs, but Virginia ’s Northern Neck, with its wide, shallow rivers, its marshes and inlets, its beaches and rich history, spoke to her soul.
    She walked across the road and up the stone walk to her cottage, the grass, which needed mowing, wet from the pounding rain. She stepped onto her porch, no railing to impede the view of the water from her wicker chairs. On one of her weekends on the bay, Alicia had put out a blue ceramic pot of yellow pansies as a gift for use of the cottage.
    Quinn tucked her hands up into the sleeves of her sweater. Dusk was easing into night, the wind quieting, the air cold and fresh. Shivering, she went inside, her small living room dark enough now that she needed to switch on a lamp.
    When she’d bought the cottage, it was a wreck. For two years, she’d poured herself, and coaxed various friends, into fixing it up. The scrubbing and painting and foraging for deals served as a welcome contrast to her days spent researching and analyzing criminal networks with tentacles that knew no borders, no boundaries, no ethics or morals but the lust for power, money and violence. She painted the simple wood floors and replaced the wainscoting, splurged on tile for the bathroom that she had put in herself.
    Quinn remembered a sun-filled weekend in Yorkville, shortly after Alicia had moved to Washington. They’d gone on long walks together and had crab cakes at the marina restaurant, then drank wine and talked until midnight on the front porch, rekindling a friendship strained by busy lives and different interests and goals.
    It was just before Alicia had introduced Quinn to Brian Castleton, the Washington, D.C., reporter for a Chicago newspaper, and they’d begun an on-again, off-again six months together that now, in retrospect, seemed doomed from the start. Brian found Yorkville too small, too boring, too unsophisticated, too, as he liked to say, 1947. He’d drag himself along with Quinn as she scavenged flea