The Sweetest Summer: A Bayberry Island Novel (11 page)

C
lancy watched as Evie slipped from the motel room, turning her back toward him to double-check the lock. The instant she glanced over her shoulder, there was no longer any doubt in his mind—she knew who Clancy was, and she remembered the week they’d spent together when they were kids, probably in more detail than he did. But, for whatever reason, she’d chosen to avoid him and lie about it, and the time had come to find out why.

Cricket—Evie—faced him but remained at the door. Her hands hung straight at her sides, balled up into fists. Her eyes darted around the motel courtyard, almost as if she expected someone to jump from the bushes.

“Please come sit.” Clancy patted the concrete bench under a loblolly pine, just outside of the range of the security light.

She had changed from the revealing pajama shorts and was now covered head to toe. Despite the humidity, she wore a baggy pair of jeans and a too-big—brand-new—Indiana University hoodie sweatshirt. Clancy didn’t know what the hell she was up to, but he had to give her points for choosing a story and sticking to it.

“How’s your nephew?”

She frowned, pulling her mouth tight. She tried not to
look at him but kept returning her gaze to his, expecting the worst. She was afraid of him, for some reason.

“He’s fine.”

Evelyn glanced down at the ground and Clancy did the same. She’d ditched the sport sandals for a pair of top-of-the-line Asics running shoes, a model he’d seen on many women athletes. It was difficult to be sure in the limited light, but they certainly didn’t appear as new as the sweatshirt.

“I should probably go.”

“Who was harassing you?”

“What?” Her head snapped up.

“At the door. You were about to call the police, remember?”

“Oh!” She brightened up. “You know, uh, it was just the Mormons.”

Clancy couldn’t hold back his laugh. “Yeah, they’re a rough crowd. Our jail is pretty much wall-to-wall Mormons as we speak.”

She burst out laughing, then turned her face away to hide the one honest thing she’d shared with him in the last eighteen years. Score. Clancy made her laugh! And, oh, did he remember that laugh.

She faced him again, embarrassed. She was adorable. How could he have not known her the second she stepped off the ferry? Those eyes—such a pale, ethereal green curtained with dark lashes. As a clueless adolescent, he’d been mesmerized by those eyes. And as a grown-ass cop, he was still mesmerized, still defenseless when it came to her.

As a reflex, he let his eyes travel down to her mouth, pink and full. He wanted to kiss her. Just one more time.

“I need to go.”

He smiled at her. “Do you still wear sundresses?”

Her eyes widened.

“You looked so beautiful in that yellow dress, but those shoes . . . I never liked those plastic shoes.” With
that, Clancy reached into his pocket and pulled out the photograph.

She arched away from him, holding on to the edge of the bench. He could see her chest rise and fall.

“It’s good to see you again, Evie.” He kept his voice gentle, not wanting to cause her to freak out any more than she already was. But why was she? “Please tell me what’s going on, okay? I just want to understand why you took all the trouble to come back to Bayberry Island, and then didn’t want me to know it was you. You are literally hiding from me.”

Her body tightened, but she responded as casually as if he’d just asked her to pass the salt. “Sorry, but I’m not following you.”

Clancy laughed softly at her stubbornness. “Okay. I’ll make it real easy. You were here the summer we were both fourteen. I fell in love with you.”

She blinked. Evie leaned in, took the photograph, and studied it, the faintest tremble visible in her hand. “That’s pretty interesting. I mean, the girl does kind of look like me, doesn’t she? A little bit, anyway. Her eyebrows are completely different, though.”

“You don’t have to . . .”

“And I’ve always had blond hair. Sorry.” She glanced up and smiled casually at him. “Was she important to you, this girl? Are you searching for her for personal reasons, or is it, you know, a police thing?”

Clancy felt one of his eyebrows arch high, not even sure how to respond to that loaded set of absurd questions. First off, it didn’t take a cop to see that she was lying about her hair. She’d recently bleached it, and not all that evenly, either. And she’d managed to ask about his feelings for her while fishing around for whether he suspected her of wrongdoing. This was getting more interesting by the second.

Just then, she slipped the photo into the pouch of her sweatshirt. He pretended not to notice.

“Why didn’t you write me, Evie?”

He watched a dozen different emotions rush across her pretty face. Surprise, anger, frustration, fear . . . she wanted to say something. Her lips parted. It was killing her not to be able to say it. A bead of perspiration appeared on her upper lip.

“I think you’ve mistaken me for someone else.” She wiped her palms on the front of her jeans. “Whoever that girl was, she cared a lot for you—you can see it in the picture. I’m sure she wrote you. I mean, why wouldn’t she?”

With that, she jumped up and returned to the motel, already reaching to put the key in the door.

Clancy would not let it end like this. Evie was going to bolt the first opportunity she got. She felt threatened that he was a cop and terrified because he’d figured out who she was. He saw how she struggled, how she wished she could tell him what was going on . . . if only she trusted him.

He jumped off the bench and in an instant stood behind her. Her back was so close he could feel her heat radiate through the sweatshirt and onto his chest. He lowered his mouth to her ear. “Evie.” He touched her hair. He softly placed his lips on the back of her neck.

She spun around. Evie raised her face and leaned forward tentatively, touching her mouth to his. Almost immediately, she pulled away, her eyes filling with tears. “Good-bye, Clancy. It was nice to see you again—today. Since earlier today. Thank you for saving my nephew.”

The force of his response surprised him. He pulled her against his body and kissed her, hot and slick and over and over again. Instead of pushing him away, she fitted her body against his, threw her arms around his neck, and kissed him back with a desperation he’d never felt from a woman in all his life. Her hands were in his hair; then her fingers dug into his shoulders. She moaned into his mouth. She allowed him to back her against the motel room door.

Clancy was out of his head. He was gone, completely lost inside the kiss, only wanting more of her, anything
and everything she had to give. His hands pushed up inside the sweatshirt and grasped her firm waist, caressed her straight back, pressed against the hot, smooth skin of her belly. Christ, he hadn’t wrestled with this kind of raw need since . . . never. Not like this, ripe and hot and full-to-bursting from the first touch.

It was completely insane how much he wanted her.

She began to push him away, tentatively at first, then with force. He let her go. They stared at each other for several seconds, breathing hard, bewildered, and amazed.

She touched her fingers to her lips, as if she couldn’t believe what she’d just done. “I have to go.”

“I can help you. Whatever it is, you can trust me.”

She opened the door and slipped inside.

And just like that, it was over.

*   *   *

As exhausted as Clancy was, there was no way he could go home. Not like this, with ten thousand questions swirling around his brain. He knew how it worked. If he went home with a head full of loose ends, he would only lie in his bed and stare out the window, unable to sleep. He might as well get to it.

He grabbed a cup of locker-bottom coffee, placed the driver’s license information on his desk, and logged on to the police department’s mainframe. He began a database search for one Cricket Dickinson, twenty-nine, of 3448 Jinni Lynn Court, Bloomington, Indiana. It sure didn’t take long to find her. Everything was right at the top of the search results, like it had been placed there for his convenience. Interesting.

She was an IU graduate, a self-employed vitamin and supplement distributor, a registered voter, YMCA member, good credit, and legal guardian to her nephew Chris Dickinson, a four-year-old enrolled at a Montessori preschool down the street. According to tax records, she owned a three-bedroom bungalow at that address, which she’d purchased two years earlier for two hundred ninety-eight thousand dollars.

Fine. It all looked perfectly fine. And that was what bothered him. Why did a chick with such a tidy little life give herself a quickie dye job and leave town? How did she find herself a thousand miles from home, on Bayberry Island during festival week, hiding from the police chief? What made her so frightened that she couldn’t admit she was his summer love from eighteen years before?

Why was she even here?

At this point, Clancy knew that was the only thing he was sure of—Cricket was Evie, they were one in the same. No doubt in his mind. Her touch, her kiss, her laugh, how she fit in his arms, the way he felt when he was with her . . . those things were real. The rest of it? He shook his head as he scrolled through the database search. The rest of it made no sense.

There were a couple possibilities. She could be an innocent, law-abiding woman hiding from a spouse or boyfriend who had harmed her. The kind of domestic dispute Clancy had responded to just that morning was more commonplace than people wanted to admit, and Evie could simply be another woman who had reached the point of no return, unable to take one more punch or one more degrading comment. It would have taken planning and advanced IT skills, but maybe her new identity had been in the works for a long time.

Or, she may be on the run for reasons far more sinister. Maybe she embezzled from her business, or orchestrated a pyramid scheme out of her home and the SEC caught up with her. Possibilities like that were endless.

Clancy’s mind did a double take. On the run. The way she moved down the ferry gangway. The long, lean, muscular legs. Those shoes.

He opened a new window on his laptop and searched for the make and model of running shoe she’d been wearing. It retailed for one-fifty, and just as he thought, it was the go-to shoe for serious women runners. Clancy smiled. Now this was a subject he knew a little bit about.

He logged on to a members-only Web site that tracked amateur race results from all over the country, members and nonmembers, everything from 5Ks to ultra-marathons. First he checked Indiana races—no finishing times for a Cricket Dickinson were listed. He broadened his search. He saw nothing at first, but kept digging. There she was! San Diego’s Rock ’n’ Roll half marathon, 2009, where she finished twelfth in her category—the seventy and up age group.

Huh?

He tried for another half hour and though he encountered the senior citizen version of Cricket Dickinson a few more times, he didn’t find his Cricket. She simply did not exist in the data-hoarding world of running, which implied that her lies were several layers deep. And that bothered him. A lot.

Clancy was so tired his body hurt. He took the Jeep home, played with the dogs for a few minutes, grabbed a quick shower, then collapsed in bed. His mind wasn’t racing with unanswered questions anymore. It was heavy with dread and regret for what had to be done come morning. When Evie boarded the first ferry—and he was sure she would—Chief Flynn would be waiting for her with a boatload of questions.

She wouldn’t be leaving Bayberry until every one of them had been answered to his satisfaction.

*   *   *

“The FBI just found your car.”

Evelyn let her head drop into the crook of her elbow. “No! Oh, God!”

“They went public with a snippet of video footage. They caught you leaving the parking structure at Logan, and again taking the T. They don’t know for sure, but they’ve told the public that you may have caught a bus to the Cape.”

“No! Hal!” Her body had already started to shake. “I had my hat on! My shades! I changed shirts in the ladies
room before we got on the bus! I changed Chrissy’s clothes twice! How did they . . . ?”

“Manpower. From what I’ve been able to tell, they put hundreds of agents on this, and they scoured thousands of hours of video from hell and back. They used facial recognition and the latest body recognition software. We were out-manned and out-teched.”

“Shit.”

“I’m so sorry, Evie. I know it sucks.”

She groaned.

“There’s a ferry at eight a.m., and you need to be on it. Cover up and wear the baggiest clothes you’ve got and try to remember to skip or swing your arms differently. The software is still rudimentary enough that you’ll get away with it.”

“Okay.”

“Keep Chrissy in your arms whenever possible so they can’t scan for her movement, either. I will contact you once you get back on the mainland, and I’ll have some ideas how we can switch things up.”

Evelyn stared at the bug-encrusted light fixture again. She felt limp. Her brain had glazed over. “What am I going to do?” The pitiful voice she heard was her own. “This is a total disaster.”

“You’re not alone. I am helping you every step of the way. And don’t you dare give up. Stay pissed! Wahlman is a scummy, lying dickhead who rigged the custody decision. Don’t forget that.”

Evelyn broke down. She tried to keep the noise to a minimum by burying her mouth in the crook of her arm, then realized it probably didn’t matter much—Chrissy would soon be hearing a lot of crying.

“Evie. Please.”

“Why are you doing this for me, Hal?” Her sob came out as a hiccup. “You’re putting your own future at risk.”

He laughed. “Honey, first of all, we’ve been over this—no one will ever find me. Remember, this is what I
do. It’s my thing. And second of all . . .” Hal got choked up. It took him a moment to find his voice. “You saved my life, Miss Evelyn ‘Feed The Speed’ McGuinness. I was killing myself. I was thirty-nine and I was fucking killing myself with junk food and sitting on my ass in front of a bank of computers. You took me under your wing and—”