his knee. “Even if it doesn’t sell at all, who cares? We can afford the year off, and I can’t imagine a better place to spend the time than out here. So even if the book is only an excuse to spend a few months at the beach—which it isn’t, of course—” she added quickly, “it’s still worth it.”
“And what about my patients?”
“What about them?” Elaine said airily. “Their neuroses will keep, with Bill Carpenter looking out for them. He may not be the psychiatrist you are, but he’s not going to kill your patients.”
Brad lapsed into silence. Elaine was right. It was a comfortable silence, the kind of silence that comes only between people who love and understand each other, a silence born, not from lack of anything to say, but rather from a lack of necessity to say anything at all.
They had been combing the peninsula for two weeks, looking for the right town in which to spend the year Brad estimated it would take him to complete his book. But there had been something wrong with every town they had seen—too commercial or too shabby, too self-consciously quaint or too self-satisfied. Today, Brad knew, they would either find the right town or give up the search, for if they continued on, they would be into the unrelieved dullness of Aberdeen and Hoquiam, having made a complete circuit of the peninsula. Maybe Elaine’s right, Brad thought. Maybe Clark’s Harbor is the right place. He rolled the name of the town around in his mind. Clark’s Harbor. Clark’s Harbor. It had a nice lilt to it, like an old New England fishing village.
“It’s right up ahead,” Elaine said softly, breaking the silence.
Brad realized he hadn’t been paying much attention to the road, driving more by habit than by concentration. Now he saw they were in the outskirts of a town.
It didn’t seem to be a large town, which was fine, and it seemed to be well tended, which was even better. The houses were scattered along the road, frame houses, some neatly painted, others weathered to a silver patina by the sea wind. But even the older structures stood firmly upright, solidly built to withstand the elements.
They drove down a slight incline into the heart of Clark’s Harbor. It was little more than a village. There was a side street running perpendicular to the highway, and Brad made a right turn onto it. The incline steepened and they dropped quickly into the center of the village. The street ended at a wharf. Brad brought the car to a stop and he and Elaine looked curiously around.
“It looks like something out of New England,” Elaine said softly, echoing Brad’s thought. “I love it.”
And it did look like a picture-postcard New England town. The buildings that clustered along the waterfront were all of a type: neat clapboards, brightly painted, with manicured gardens flowering gaily in the spring air. Set apart, grandly aloof from the rest, was an old Victorian building, its lawn and garden neatly bounded by a white picket fence. A hand-lettered sign proclaimed it the Harbor Inn.
There were several people on the streets, enough so the town seemed busy but not frantic. One or two glanced at the Randalls’ car, but with no particular interest. No one stopped to stare; no one gestured or commented. Brad frowned slightly, feeling a strange lack of curiosity in the people who had glanced at them so disinterestedly. Always sensitive to her husband, Elaine looked quickly at him, concern clouding her face.
“Is something wrong?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” Brad said. Then he grinned at her. “What do you say we get something to eat?”
Rebecca Palmer had noticed the strange car passing by as she was about to go into Blake’s Dry Goods, but she was preoccupied with other things. Right now she was more concerned with her shopping than with who might have arrived in Clark’s Harbor. The dark green Volvo had seemed somehow familiar, though. Wishful thinking; she pushed it out of her mind.
She pulled a cart from the row that stood waiting just inside the front door and began wheeling it slowly through the aisles, stopping to look at a display of china that struck her as being in particularly bad taste, even for dime-store dinnerware. Shaking her head sadly at the garish pink and blue pansies that paraded helplessly around the perimeter of the plates, she moved on, picking up an item here and there and depositing it in the