Waterford Point Read online

  Chapter Two

  People were often surprised when they found out what Rachel did for a living. There were dozens of successful crime writers in the world, but, with a few notable exceptions, most of them were men.

  Rachel was one of those exceptions.

  She had begun her career fresh out of college, after realizing that she was no longer interested in following in her father’s footsteps. Despite all the courses she’d taken in criminology and forensics, working for the LAPD didn’t really appeal to her.

  Her passion lay in writing about crime. She was fascinated by the motives that lay behind the violence, the emotional histories, the family stories, the sometimes petty insecurities that led people to strike out against their fellow human beings.

  All of these things factored into any good homicide investigation, but in the end, the work her father did came down to a simple who-did-what-to-whom, and Rachel knew that filing a few police reports would not lead her to a fulfilling life. Neither would walking a beat for several years just to get her detective’s shield.

  So, much to her father’s disappointment, she worked as a crime reporter for a small daily newspaper in the Valley. Thanks to her college coursework and her father’s willingness to teach her the ins and outs of homicide investigation, she had adapted to the job quickly, soon moving on to the Los Angeles Tribune, then to the world of true crime books.

  Her stories of murder and mayhem and family connections gone wrong now lined the shelves of libraries and bookstores around the world.

  The only drawback was immersing herself in the darkest side of human nature. She heard stories told by cold, heartless men and women that would send chills up the spines of most people, and had been forced to find a way to distance herself from the horror. In the process she’d become desensitized to the violence. She was sure that this had contributed to her failures with Dan.

  How could it not?

  But Rachel hadn’t come to Waterford Point in search of a story. In fact, it was just the opposite; she had too many things weighing on her brain right now to be concerned with a couple of small-town murders.

  After Chavaree left, she stewed for a moment, thinking she’d like to chase after him and give him a piece of her mind for being so rudely presumptuous. But when she thought about it, she really couldn’t blame him. She probably wouldn’t have believed her, either.

  Instead, she spent the next several minutes trying to convince Maddie to give her a room.

  “I paid a deposit,” she said. “I made a reservation. In my world that’s a contract.”

  Maddie took the book from the countertop and looked it over. “In your world, huh? Out there in Hollywood?”

  “And right here in Waterford Point, too. Murders or no murders.”

  Maddie squinted at her. “Were you telling Nick the truth? Are you really here for a vacation or are you trying to pull a sly one on him, get close to his investigation?”

  “I couldn’t care less about his investigation. I have my own problems to work out.” She gestured toward the stairs. “I’ve had a long trip and I’m tired. Are you going to give me a room or not?”

  Maddie studied her a moment. “You’re a stubborn one, I’ll give you that. You sure you aren’t worried about the ghost?”

  This threw Rachel for a loop. “Ghost?”

  Her utter perplexity must have shown, because Maddie softened and said, “Child, you really don’t know anything, do you?”

  “Haven’t I been saying that all along?”

  RACHEL WASN’T SURE when exactly she’d made the breakthrough, but Maddie started searching again and brought out a key.

  Relieved, Rachel reached for her suitcase, but the woman quickly came around the counter and grabbed it.

  “Someone in your condition shouldn’t be lifting,” she said.

  Rachel was only four months pregnant and while she’d certainly grown thicker around the middle, she had no idea she was showing. “Is it that obvious?”

  “To the trained eye, it is. I used to work for an obstetrician over in Rockland. Only came back here to Waterford after my folks passed away.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that. Did they own this place?”

  “They did, indeed. In fact, the room you’ll be sleeping in used to be theirs.”

  They climbed the stairs. Maddie struggled slightly with the suitcase, and Rachel felt a twinge of guilt. She was perfectly capable of carrying the thing herself, but she knew Maddie was not the kind of woman to be trifled with, and let her have her way.

  “Breakfast every morning at 8:00 a.m.,” Maddie said. “No stragglers. Nothing I hate worse than serving cold eggs.”

  “Okay. No straggling.”

  “Nick’s the only other guest we have right now, and you’ll have to share a bathroom with him. He’s a man, and men are messy, but he does his best and I do what I can to clean up after him.”

  Rachel’s own bathroom back home had clothes piled on the floor and a counter that looked like a beauty salon after a hurricane. Messy wasn’t something she was particularly concerned with.

  When they reached the top of the stairs, Maddie turned to her.

  “You sure you want go through with this? What with the murders and all, Waterford Point isn’t exactly the world’s number one vacation spot. You might be better off in Rockland or Searsport.”

  “I’ll be fine,” Rachel told her.

  Maddie shrugged. “Suit yourself. Just be thankful I’m not putting you up down the hall.” She pointed toward a closed door some distance from the stairs.

  “Why?”

  “Because that was Caroline’s room.”

  “Caroline?”

  Maddie nodded. “Came here from out of town, just like you. Little less than a month ago. Wasn’t here two days when it happened.”

  “When what happened?”

  “They found her in the woods out back,” Maddie said. “She was Weeping Willow’s first victim.”

  This was the second reference Maddie had made to Weeping Willow and Rachel once again stifled the urge to ask for details. She could see that Maddie was deeply affected by this death, her eyes filled with the kind of fear usually reserved for very late, very dark nights.

  This woman Caroline’s murder had obviously been the start of something horrible here in Waterford Point and the fact that the victim had been staying in this very house—had been found in the woods nearby—was a surprising coincidence.

  It would also explain Sheriff Chavaree’s sensitivity.

  Had he been living here when Caroline was killed?

  That would certainly raise some concerns—un-fairly or not—about his ability to do his job, and she didn’t doubt he had been struggling with those questions ever since.

  But Rachel resisted the urge to dig deeper. Had to keep reminding herself that she was not here for a story.

  Throw in Maddie’s mention of a ghost, however, and she had to admit she saw a compelling mystery developing.

  “I’ll tell you,” Maddie said. “I haven’t been able to bring myself to go into that room. Haven’t even made the bed. So consider yourself lucky, dear. Although, I suppose it’s bad enough you’ll even be this close. Thank goodness I’m staying downstairs.”

  Unlike Maddie, Rachel wasn’t bothered that she’d be sleeping down the hall from the victim’s room. She’d gone face-to-face with serial killers and socio-paths, so sharing the house with the specter of a dead girl didn’t really concern her.

  She could plainly see that Maddie was dying to keep talking about this, so she remained silent, doing her best not to prompt the woman.

  This wasn’t her affair.

  Maddie seemed to get the message and five minutes later, Rachel was in her room with the door locked, her suitcase unpacked and a king-size bed waiting for her to crawl into it. Her flight and the trip across the bay had taken their toll, and all she wanted to do right now was nap.

  Barring those last few minutes on the ferry, her bouts with morning sickness had passed, but she found herself tiring more easily these days.

  There was a time she wouldn’t have dreamed of napping.

  But things change, don’t they?

  Things always change.

  RACHEL WAS ABOUT TO PUT her head on the pillow when her cell phone rang.

  She sighed. What now?

  Scooping the phone off the nightstand, she checked the screen but didn’t recognize the number. She clicked it on and put it to her ear. “This had better be good.”

  “Rachel?” It was Janet Matlin, an assistant D.A. out of Los Angeles.

  “Sorry, Janet, I’m a little out of sorts right now.”

  “Who wouldn’t be, considering what you’ve been through. I just wanted to give you the heads-up.”

  “About what?”

  “Lattimore made bail.”

  Rachel’s chest tightened.

  Emit Lattimore was a stone-cold, unrepentant sociopath, and the subject of Rachel’s book in progress, Ladykiller—the book she had put on hold after Lattimore tried to strangle her during a contentious interview.

  Lattimore’s third wife went missing over six months ago, a disappearance that became a media sensation. The more the police looked into the disappearance, the more convinced they were that he was the likely perpetrator, especially since his two previous wives had died under suspicious circumstances.

  One had taken a fall down some stairs, and the other had been shot by an intruder while Lattimore was reportedly away on a hunting trip. Lattimore had been a suspect in both deaths, but there had never been enough evidence for an arrest, let alone a trial and conviction.

  And it didn’t help that he was a former L.A. County medical examiner. Even Rachel’s father had worked with him once or twice.

&n
bsp; But Rachel was convinced his luck was running out and had begun writing the book in anticipation of that inevitability. She had pressed him hard during the interview, pushing a lot of buttons, but he’d been arrogant enough to think he could outmaneuver her. She caught him in a glaring contradiction and apparently his oversize ego couldn’t take it. He suddenly snapped, leaping across the table, his face full of fury.

  The memory was fresh in her mind, and she’d never forget those black, malevolent eyes boring into her, or those rough, oversize hands going for her throat. And knowing that he was out on bail after only a week behind bars didn’t give her any comfort. Even if he was three thousand miles away.

  “You still there, Rachel?”

  She shook off the memory. “Can’t you get a judge to consider revoking bail?”

  “We’re working on it but there aren’t any guarantees. In the meantime, you might want to think about getting out of town for a bit.”

  “Already done,” she said.

  “Oh? Where are you?”

  Rachel was about to respond, when Janet cut her off. “Wait, never mind. I don’t want to know. Just stay there for a while.”

  That was certainly the plan.

  The irony was that Rachel had booked this trip before Lattimore had become a threat. She had intended to use the time to finish writing Ladykiller, but that idea went out the window the moment he tried to wrap his hands around her throat. She couldn’t be objective about him anymore, and objectivity was her stock in trade.

  Rachel may have been tough-skinned, but she was also human. And Lattimore scared the heck out of her.

  “You think he’d actually try to come after me?”

  “He’s a misogynist of the worst kind, Rachel, and you wounded his ego. But if he doesn’t know where you are…”

  “Small comfort, believe me.”

  “Don’t worry, we’re doing our best to keep an eye on him and I’ll be pushing to revoke. Even if we never find his wife, we at least have enough with the attempted assault to put him away for quite a while.”

  “Promises, promises,” Rachel said quietly.

  And promises were too often broken.

  Chapter Three

  Nick Chavaree couldn’t remember a time he’d been so frustrated.

  He didn’t generally think of himself as an unhappy guy. He was usually pretty genial, as a matter of fact. But this last month in Waterford Point had been something of a nightmare. A nightmare he wouldn’t wish on any cop in the known universe.

  It was bad enough that he had three murder victims in as many weeks, all with their heads bashed in. But the fact that the first one had happened right under his nose, while he was sleeping for godsakes, had him wondering about his ability to serve his community.

  It wasn’t as if Nick was a stranger to violence. He’d spent five years in the Marines, running his own squad in the desert. But hunting down the Taliban in Afghanistan wasn’t quite the same as gathering evidence at a local crime scene, and he wasn’t afraid to admit that he was a little out of his depth here.

  Throw Rachel Hudson into the mix and his bad month was about to get worse. He’d read all of her books—enjoyed them, as a matter of fact—but the thought that he might become the subject of one didn’t sit well. And as beautiful as she might be, he didn’t relish the idea of her sticking her cute little nose into this investigation.

  Such as it was.

  “You gonna eat that chicken or just stare at it all night along?”

  Nick looked up from his plate at Charlie Tevis, who sat across the table from him. Charlie was one of his best deputies and they often had dinner together. They were sitting in a booth near the back of the Bayside Grill, the busiest and best of Waterford’s handful of restaurants.

  Charlie was a big guy with an equally genial attitude that hadn’t been diminished by the recent turn of events.

  “If you don’t want it,” he said, “slide that plate over here.”

  “How do you do it, Charlie?”

  “Eat so much? I guess I was just born hungry.”

  “No,” Nick said. “How do you stay so cheerful in the face of what’s been going on around here?”

  Charlie thought about it a moment, then leaned back. “It’s all about attitude. I learned a long time ago that it’s pointless to take life too seriously.”

  “You don’t think three back-to-back murders in a town this size is serious?”

  “Of course I do. Serious as a heart attack. But I don’t see any point in moping about it. We’ll catch this son of a gun sooner or later.”

  “That’s what I keep telling myself.”

  “Don’t you worry, he’s bound to slip up. Assuming what we’re talking about here is human.”

  Nick stared at him. “Don’t tell me you’re buying into this Weeping Willow nonsense.”

  Charlie shrugged. “If I were, I wouldn’t be the only one. Putting this off on a ghost might explain a whole heckuva lot of—”

  “Shut your trap, Tevis.”

  The voice came from behind Nick, but he didn’t have to turn around to know who it was.

  He braced himself for the assault.

  A moment later, Bill Burgess slid in next to him and stared pointedly at Charlie. “We don’t need that kind of talk coming from our own law enforcement officers.”

  Burgess was a former Rockland County judge and a smarmy, self-important jerk who had managed to get himself elected mayor—another mystery Nick had yet to solve.

  “The day I start listening to you,” Charlie told him, “is the day I turn in my gun and badge.”

  “That can certainly be arranged.”

  Burgess and Charlie had gone to high school together and Nick knew there was no love lost between them. Charlie had once told Nick that when he was thinking about returning to Waterford Point, after living across the country for nearly three decades, he may have reconsidered the move if he’d known that Burgess was the new mayor.

  But Charlie had always had a soft spot for Maine, and Waterford Point in particular, so he figured he’d do his best to turn lemons into lemonade.

  So far it wasn’t working.

  “Your threats don’t scare me, Bill, so don’t even bother.”

  Burgess’s eyes narrowed. “You think I wouldn’t do it?”

  “I think you’re all yap and no follow-through, just like you were in—”

  “Stop,” Nick said. “Both of you. This isn’t getting us anywhere.”

  Burgess’s face was turning red, but he calmed himself.

  “Sorry, Nick, but the last thing we need right now is your men perpetuating ridiculous rumors.” He swept an arm out, gesturing to the room. “Look at this place. Best diner in town and it’s practically empty. You start talking ghosts and that’s what Waterford Point will become. A ghost town. And we can’t afford that right now. We’re already strapped enough as it is.”

  “People are scared, Bill.”

  “Of course they are. That’s my point. You need to catch this guy, Nick. We can’t afford for this to go on much longer.”

  “That’s easier said than done. The crime scenes are always pristine. We’ve got no evidence.”

  “Then find some.”

  “How? I’ve got five deputies, and we’re all stretched thin right now. We spend half our time chasing down false leads, people calling in at every little bump in the night. I’m a small-town sheriff, Bill. I don’t have the manpower or the expertise to handle a case like this.”

  “So what are you suggesting?”

  “I think we should invite the Maine State Police to help us out.”

  Burgess shook his head, his tone adamant. “No, no, no,” he said. “We bring the staties in, we’ll only invite more publicity. We’re trying to contain this thing, not expand it.”

  “I’m not a miracle worker. What do you want me to do?”

  “I don’t know. You’ve got some Native American blood in you. Can’t you do a smoke dance or something? Figure this thing out?”

  Nick just stared at him.

  Had he really just said that?

  Charlie shook his head in disgust. “You are one amazing piece of work, Burgess.”

  Burgess glared at him, then got to his feet, shifting his gaze to Nick. “Look, Nick, I like you. The whole town likes you. But I’m starting to wonder if appointing you sheriff was a bad idea.”

  “You didn’t appoint me,” Nick said.