Night's Landing by Carla Neggers Read Free Book Online Page A

suffered in his left upper abdomen. Explained how he could live without a spleen. About the risks of blood loss, the strain it put on the kidneys. Luckily, he’d gotten medical attention within the “golden hour.”
    Char hadn’t.
    Because Ethan hadn’t been there.
    He hadn’t been there a lot during their two-year marriage.
    He jumped to his feet and tore open the small refrigerator, grabbed a glass container of leftover barbecue and popped it into the microwave. It was an ancient microwave. It must have been one of the first ones off the assembly line. The Dunnemores weren’t into gadgets.
    He got out dill pickle slices and found a dried-up sesame-seed bun in the bread box. He softened it up in the microwave and put the whole mess together and ate it leaning against the sink, wondering what in hell he thought he was doing. Night’s Landing. The Dunnemores. President Poe’s boyhood home just up river. Ethan knew better than to turn into some kind of nut-ball loose cannon, but here he was.
    He’d read Sarah Dunnemore’s dissertation on the Poe house and how the Poe family fit into the post-Civil War South. Thought he’d go blind. She’d just finished producing and directing a documentary. There was talk of her becoming the director of the Poe House and working to open it to the public as an historic site. Now that he’d met her, Ethan couldn’t see Sarah Dunnemore spending her time figuring out where the visitors’ center should go, doing fund-raising, training docents—she needed a new project.
    Ethan had taken his own private, illicit, midnight tour of the Poe house downriver from the Dunnemores. It hadn’t produced a single thing except a spider bite on his ankle. His search of the Dunnemore house hadn’t produced much more. He’d gone through file cabinets, photo albums, old yearbooks. The father had written plenty of boring papers of his own. The mother was into art.
    He’d found Sarah’s locked diary from when she was fifteen but decided he wasn’t low enough to break into it and read it.
    But he might yet. He was
that
goddamn frustrated.
    He wasn’t sure what he expected to find in Tennessee. A connection, a hint, a link. Something that explained Charlene’s interest in the Dunnemores. Why she’d contacted Betsy Dunnemore in Amsterdam two days before she was killed. What it had to do with her death.
    She’d gone to Amsterdam on her own. On holiday, she’d told her friends and superiors, Euro-style. Ethan had shown up at her base in Germany without notice, found her gone, figured out where she was and headed to Amsterdam to join her. He could track down anyone, so he’d tracked down his ambitious, incredible wife.
    He hadn’t considered the importance of her trip until she’d turned up dead. Then he wanted to know everything. Why Amsterdam? What had Char been up to?
    Weeks of probing, spying and prowling in Europe had landed him on the Cumberland River in middle Tennessee, playing gardener.
    Waiting like a damn fool for answers to fall into his lap.
    Ten days ago, he’d bought a ticket back to Amsterdam.
    But he hadn’t yet used it. Because Sarah Dunnemore had returned from Scotland. And now her brother had been shot in Central Park.
    Suddenly Ethan realized the crickets had stopped chirping.
    He set his plate in the sink and went still, listening, aware of the .38 semiautomatic strapped to his ankle under his overalls.
    “Mr. Brooker? It’s me, Conroy Fontaine.” The accent was distinctly Southern, the voice amiable, familiar. “Would you mind if I had a word with you?”
    Ethan stifled a groan. Just what he needed, a bottom-feeding reporter who liked to pass himself off as a legitimate journalist-historian. Before he could respond, Fontaine was at the door. He was working on an unauthorized, tabloid-style biography of the president. He’d set up shop a couple weeks ago at a cabin he’d rented at a fishing camp farther up river from the Poe house. He was worming his way into