Safe Harbor (50 page)

The sad thing was, by the time of Alison's murder, Owen Bennett had had little contact with Alison's father Rupert. Olivia didn't know why the brothers had drifted so far apart, and she'd never dared
to
ask. Olivia's father had bought out her Uncle Rupert's interest in the mill, that much she knew. But she'd always had the feeling that there was more to the split than a difference in business philosophies.

In any case, the attendance of Owen and his family at Alison's funeral did nothing to breech the growing rift between brothers. After the murder, the rift became as wide as a canyon and stayed that way.

Olivia pushed away all of the memories; all of them were bad. No, Quinn was out of the question. He was too bound up with the worst period of her family's life for Olivia ever to be able to take him seriously. True, there was that box of stuff she'd been keeping all these years. But after she returned it to Quinn, that
would be
it. The town could deal with him any way it liked; it had nothing to do with her.

"Are these parquet squares the kind you buy at Home Depot?"

Olivia turned to the young couple who were linked arm in arm and studying the drawing room floor. "No," she said with a gracious smile, "they're
Burma
teak, and their value is priceless."

****

Quinn drove home in a state of near bliss. He'd gone on the Candlelight Tour for no other reason than to keep a high profile, and he'd come away with a date with the Princess.

Socially speaking, of course, he was a frog. He knew it, and it made the promise of taking her out all the more gratifying. Dating Olivia was something he never would have dared try back in high school, which was undoubtedly the reason he had enjoyed trouncing her in the classroom every chance he got. He had enjoyed it even more than trouncing her brother on the field.

But it was all such kid stuff. What a jerk he used to be. He laughed softly to himself as he drove his repaired rental past St. Swithin's Church, past the bank, past Town Hill with its lit-up tree.
Had
he grown up? He hoped so. He hoped that his reason for wanting to be seen in Keepsake with Olivia on his arm was not because she was a royal and he was a commoner, but because she was smart and funny and, okay, knock-down gorgeous.

But he really wasn't sure.

****

At three in the morning, Father Tom was lying in bed with a brutal case of heartburn. He shouldn't have done it; shouldn't have had the blessed beer with his pepperoni pizza. He had yielded to temptation, and now the devil was claiming his due. The priest shifted onto his side, prompting an ineffectual burp.

It tasted like popcorn. Another temptation yielded to, but who could watch a
episode
of
Mystery!
without popcorn? It wouldn't have been right. The priest sighed and sat up, swinging his legs over the side of his bed. The two antacids he'd popped into his mouth before lying down for the night hadn't done a thing; maybe Pepto would help. He reached for his flannel robe and slipped into his sheepskin slippers, then padded sleepily down the hall in search of relief.

I'm getting old. Old and soft and lazy.

What kind of example was he setting for his parish? He, the driving force behind St. Swithin's soup kitchen, now had a pot of his own. He
rubbed
his belly in disgust. Tomorrow he would walk a mile before mass, and no dessert. And it'd be a cold day in hell before he'd order green peppers on a pepperoni pizza again.

By the glow of the acrylic angel night-light—a present from his grandniece—Father Tom took the bottle of pink liquid from the medicine cabinet, then filled the dosing cup. He downed it the way he used to do his bourbon when he was a young man, tossing it to the back of his throat and swallowing hard.

He washed out the plastic cup and inverted it over the bottle, then returned it to its shelf. And then, because he was loath to lie right down again, he stood a moment at the window of his bathroom and stared out at the lighted Christmas tree on Town Hill. It gave him pleasure to see it—one of the perks, he liked to tell everyone, of having his living quarters within spitting distance of the hill. In summer there was the bandstand; in spring, the Easter-egg hunt. Everything nice about Keepsake happened right across the road from where he lived and served God. (The good Lord willing, he would live through this heartburn to serve Him still.)

Father Tom was about to return to his bedroom down the hall when something
... something caught his eye that wasn't quite right. The priest had a keen eye for pattern and symmetry. If the candlesticks on the altar weren't exactly equidistant from one another, he'd rearrange them before he could even think of saying
Mass.
So he knew: something was out of whack.

He stared at the town tree.

Yes, there it was, on the left side. Something long and shadowy and unlike anything else on the beribboned tree. How odd. He'd have to take a closer look in the morning. He began to head back to his bedroom, but then, because he was Father Tom and quietly obsessed with maintaining some sense of order in a disorderly universe, he detoured into the front hall and took out his overcoat from the closet there.

He slipped the coat over his robe, then stepped out of the rectory, catching his breath in the cold night air. His slippers dragged on the rock salt spread over the brick path to his residence; he began to walk on tiptoe, trying to minimize the damage to the deerskin soles. He stepped to the sidewalk
... then to the curb
... then to the middle of the empty road.

Salt-melted slush oozed through the seams of his slippers the minute he paused.

No matter. Father Tom was oblivious to the wet and the cold as he stared in shock at the effigy hanging by its neck on a length of rope tied to the Christmas tree. The effigy was the biggest ornament on it: a life-sized figure roughly shaped from a pair of stuffed pantyhose, a wig of blond hair, and a varsity jacket from the high school. The jacket bulged grotesquely at the stomach. Even Father Tom understood that the effigy was meant to depict a pregnant student at Keepsake High. A hanged, pregnant student at Keepsake High.

With a groan of dismay, the priest resisted an overwhelming impulse to cut down the figure and instead ran back to the rectory, where he had to look up the number of the chief of police before punching it in with a shaking hand.
God in heaven. God in heaven. D
on't let this be so.
It was the most fervent prayer Father Tom had ever sent skyward, and the one most doomed to go unanswered.

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