quarters, though it was rarely used for anything but transport to and from the island.
“You want me to wait?” Butch asked after she handed him a twenty-dollar bill, which he made a big show of not wanting but pocketed anyway.
“No. I’ll ride with Wyatt.”
“Sure?”
“Absolutely.”
Butch cocked a bushy, doubting eyebrow but nodded. At the top of the graying steps leading into the town, she paused and looked out to sea. Spying the Holy Terror streaking away from the mainland, she held up a hand and waved, then let it fall. Butch didn’t so much as cast a glance over his shoulder.
She checked her watch and saw that it was two-fifteen. The ferry to the island returned at four, so she’d have to be quick if she wanted to finish everything on her agenda.
First stop was to try and catch up with Tanya, a high school friend who had dated Ava’s cousin Trent—who just happened to be Ian’s twin—for a few years. The relationship had fizzled when she’d met and quickly eloped with Russell Denton, a bad-ass cowboy type who couldn’t stay faithful, sober, or away from poker tables.
That marriage had crumbled fairly quickly but not before she’d gotten pregnant. . . twice. Tanya and Russ had been involved in one of those mercurial and toxic relationships that they could never quite end. Eventually, less than a year ago, the divorce papers had been inked. Now a single mother of seven-year-old Brent and his older sister, Bella, Tanya was the owner of Shear Madness, one of the two beauty shops in Anchorville. With her nose for business and ear for town gossip, Tanya was doing all right, or so she’d told Ava. Tanya had left the marriage in possession of the house, an older bungalow built on one of the town’s steep side streets, and this little shop. She was one of the few people Ava felt she could trust entirely.
As clouds gathered overhead, Ava hurried to the beauty shop, some five blocks from the docks and wedged between a deli and the best bakery in the county. Her stomach growled as she passed the bakery’s open door where she caught a whiff of freshly brewed coffee laced with the scent of warm bread and cinnamon.
The door to Tanya’s salon was closed, the lights dimmed, and a sign in the window had been posted with a quickly written note saying that the shop would reopen in the morning.
“Great,” Ava muttered, disappointed. Then again, what had she expected? It wasn’t as if she’d made an appointment. She glanced into the darkened interior where the walls were painted a soft pink and the decor was an homage to the sixties, with framed black-and-white pictures of women icons of the decade. Everyone from Marilyn Monroe, Jackie Kennedy, and Brigitte Bardot to Twiggy and Audrey Hepburn stared down at the four stations, now empty, their black faux-leather chairs unoccupied.
She grabbed a coffee to go at the bakery, resisted the urge to buy the last cinnamon roll in the display case, then tried calling Tanya only to get voice mail, where a lifeless computer’s voice instructed her to leave a message.
She didn’t.
Instead, she sipped her coffee and walked to the corner where she caught a glimpse of the bay and Church Island, still visible despite the fog bank slowly rolling in from the sea. She even made out Neptune’s Gate on one end and, just visible on the southern tip of the island, the dark roof of Sea Cliff. The institution had been closed for six years now, forced to shut its doors permanently when the last of its criminally insane inmates, Lester Reece, had escaped. Reece had been a suspect in several local homicides and had been convicted of murdering his wife and her best friend in one of his many fits of rage. His defense team had insisted that he’d been suffering from paranoid schizophrenia, and in the end, Reece had been sentenced to live out his days at Sea Cliff.
Then he’d somehow duped the guards, slipped through the iron gates, and disappeared into the night.
Ava felt a chill when she thought of Reece and his heinous acts. It seemed impossible now to think of him, and the others who had been equally dangerous, living so close to Neptune’s Gate. Of course, as a child, she’d accepted it as just a part of Church Island’s lore.
“So, who sprung you?” A male voice cut into her reverie, and she nearly jumped out of her skin.
Looking over