Chapter 16
“Don’t get your hopes up too much,” Tina added quickly. “I’m not sure what it adds up to.”
He reined in his eagerness. Part of him had been hoping Kate Mansfield’s heartbreaking story—though vague on the details—would be the key to finding Jessie. Maybe it still would be.
“So what’s our next move?”
“Food. We can look at the pictures I took.”
“You took pictures behind the counter?”
“Yup. Couldn’t pass up the opportunity. I don’t know what they all show, I was moving too fast.”
Tina was busy tapping on her phone while he drove. “Take a right,” she said, gestured at the intersection, where a classic white-steepled church reigned over a pocket-sized green park. “There’s a burger place with a view of a river.”
“Works for me.”
Even better, the river was swollen from a recent rainfall, and the noisy tumble of water over rocks meant they could talk without fear of being overheard.
They chose a table in the corner of the open deck.
Tina claimed a seat from which she could monitor comings and goings, while he got the view of the river flowing past radiant maples lit by dappled sunshine.
Tina insisted on bringing his shopping bag full of craft supplies with them. It sat on its own chair, its cheerful Bibs and Bobs logo broadcasting their apparent obsession with crafting.
Tina ordered a Portabello mushroom burger with gorgonzola cheese. “I like strong flavors,” she explained, when he raised an eyebrow.
“That tracks.”
He ordered the same. “Open-minded,” he explained. “And cheese-mold-curious.”
After the teenaged waiter had disappeared back into the restaurant, Jack propped his elbows on the table. “Before we get into the photos you took, what did you think of what Kate said? The sister seems important.”
“Agreed. It almost sounds like she’s controlling her brother. But she’s married, so that complicates things. She probably changed her name.”
“It’s a thing in that family. We know Adam/Seth/Lloyd does it too.”
Tina nodded and sipped her water. “When she said ‘my daughter blames me for everything,’ I wondered if she was referring to leaving the island. If the kids were happy there, but were forced to leave, they could blame her.”
He’d been thinking along the same lines. “Did you notice that she never mentioned a partner at all? She used the pronoun ‘we’ once, but never said ‘my ex’ or ‘their father.’”
“Good catch,” she said approvingly, lifting her water glass to clink it against his. “And yes, of course I noticed that.”
“Damn. Just when I thought I had something.”
She chuckled at that. “Listen, the way you handled Kate, that was well done. I went in thinking I was going to chat her up about unsympathetic bosses, but you took the baton and ran with it. All I had to do was keep my mouth shut. Not easy, mind you.”
That sassy smile…so sexy.
“I felt bad for her. It’s hard to see someone suffering so much.”
“Are you…” She tilted her head at him, black hair falling across her cheek.
For her role as his assistant, she’d taken her hair out its usual knot at the back of her neck.
It hung mostly loose to her shoulders, with a clip holding the front section away from her face.
That hair style showed off her round cheeks and made her look much younger, which was no doubt her intent.
“How much of what you said about your mother is true?”
“Are you implying I lied?” He lifted one eyebrow.
“Of course not, but maybe…embellished? Exaggerated?”
“Relax. It was all true, but it was about my aunt, not my mother.”
She glared at him, but her cute temporary hairstyle took the sting out of it. He didn’t feel bad for teasing her. She could take it. It was good to see her let her cop guard down once in a while.
“My aunt’s a handful, and you could say we’re estranged. She was a jerk to Jessie when everything started coming out. But she does love crafting. I figured that I’d have a better chance of making a connection with Kate by talking about my mother.”
“Who doesn’t like crafting.”
“My mom cut herself on a crochet needle once, which really shouldn’t even be possible. She’s no crafter.”
Their burgers arrived on large plates loaded with an insane amount of fries alongside the burgers. He’d forgotten to tell the waiter to skip the fries, but when he saw Tina eyeing them greedily, he was glad for it.
“Help yourself,” he offered. “I don’t eat fried things.”
“Is that a Hollywood thing? Are you on some kind of paleo-keto-raw food diet?”
“No. I’m allergic to the oil most places use in their deep fryers. Got out of the habit.”
She gazed at him with such utter sympathy that he almost laughed. “I would die. I might even mean that literally. French fries have been my favorite food ever since my family’s first drive-through experience. Which I had to beg them to do, by the way. They didn’t approve.”
“Approve of what? Drive-throughs?”
“Too American. My father always wanted to hang on to his Chinese-ness. He believed it was important because too many people in this country would always see us that way anyway.”
“China has fast food drive-throughs, doesn’t it?”
“Yes, but they didn’t when my father lived there. To him, they will always be American.” She dove into her pile of fries with a ferocity that fascinated him. Everything about Tina was fascinating to him. It was something about the intensity and energy she brought to everything, even French fries.
“Have you been to China?”
“Twice, to see family, when I was younger. I don’t have a lot of spare time to travel nowadays. Okay, enough chitchat. We’ve established that you’re allergic to deep fryers and I’m betraying my culture with my fry obsession. Moving on. Let’s check out the shots I got.”
She plucked her phone from the pocket of her hoodie, an item of clothing he’d never seen her wear before her cameo as his assistant.
“I didn’t want to pause and make her suspicious when I invaded her bathroom.
I randomly clicked while I passed a corkboard with photos pinned to it. Let’s see what I got.”
She positioned the phone so they could both look while she flipped through the photos. Only one was clear enough to make anything out—a photo of a cork board. They studied that one, with Tina enlarging it with her fingers so they could look at each item on the board individually.
Kate was big on inspirational quotes, some of which she’d written out herself in flowing cursive script.
Others were printed out from elsewhere, maybe Pinterest or some other Internet source.
Be Kind. You Never Know what Someone Else is Going Through, read one.
Tomorrow is unknown, the past is gone, all we have is the gift of the present.
They took extra time with each photo. Those with Kate in them seemed to be relatively recent, since she looked to be roughly the same age she was now. They showed Kate with various customers, Kate showing off a quilt, shots of a local farmer’s market with a Bibs and Bobs booth.
“Maybe she keeps this corkboard strictly for business,” Tina murmured. “Too bad we can’t sneak into her house.”
“We can’t sneak into her house,” he said sternly. “I have a morals clause in my contract.”
“As do I. We have so much in common,” she said dryly. With her fingers, she zoomed in on a small photo at the very lowest corner of the corkboard. “What’s this now?”
The shot showed two little kids bundled up in winter clothes, being pulled on an orange plastic sled by a large man in a heavy parka.
The camera was focused on the children, who both wore hand-knitted hats, their blond hair peeking from under the ribbing.
The girl sat behind the boy, her arms around him.
The man’s head was lowered, his face impossible to see.
Maybe he didn’t want to be seen; that was Jack’s impression.
Snow covered the ground, and beyond the heads of the children, sea smoke rose from the ocean.
“Is that Sea Smoke Island?” Tina asked.
“I think it is. Look, you can see the Lightkeeper lighthouse way back there. Sea Smoke is the only outer island with such a clear view of it.”
“Well, what do you know. This must be a photo of her kids, and that could be their father.”
“Or their uncle,” he pointed out. “Or a male relative.”
“Yes, that’s true.” She studied the photo. “But look at the kids’ faces. What do you see?”
“The girl looks watchful. She’s holding on tight to her little brother. He looks a lot more happy and excited, with that big grin.”
“Yeah. Also, look at their jackets. Brand-new Bogner ski gear, pricey as hell. No way could single mom Naomi Martin afford those. If she had family members with that kind of money, why would she be scraping by on Sea Smoke? Remember Sally McPhee’s speculation about an abusive ex?
That’s a classic tactic, to show up with expensive gifts to try to win someone back.
My gut says this is their father, and the girl’s expression tells me she doesn’t trust him one bit.
She’s probably seen some shit go down between her parents. ”
Jack tipped his glass to her, impressed by that deductive demonstration.
“So her ex did come to Sea Smoke Island at least once. Was he there long enough to kill the man harassing the mother of his children?”
“Maybe. Let’s find out more about him.” She switched over to Google and did a few minutes of searching. “I don’t see any mention of a Mr. Mansfield in this part of Vermont. There’s a Timothy Mansfield in Montpellier, but he’s only forty.”
“What about the last name Martin?”
After more extensive searching, she shook her head. “There are a fair number of Martins, but none that fit the profile.”
“Too bad we can’t tell anything about him from this photo.”
“No, but the kids are plenty recognizable. This must be Naomi Martin’s children, aka Linette and Lloyd Mansfield, and who knows what else. We also have to consider the possibility that Naomi Martin was also an assumed name.
She centered the faces of the two children.
“The boy does resemble the photos we have,” said Jack. “Can you do an age progression on them? Do you have access to that technology?”
“Of course I can, when I’m at work. But I’m theoretically on vacation.”
“Can’t you call in a favor? That’s what we always do on the show.”
“Yes, I know. Tell your writers it’s a cheap plot trick and they’re overusing it.”
He laughed, since he’d told them the same thing already. “Noted.”
She took a moment to mess with the photo, isolating the face of each child and making a new image of it to send to the Harbortown tech person.
He watched as she tapped away, her fingers flying across the screen, the quirky curves of her lips lifting as her contact responded.
Watching a woman be good at her job had always been a turn-on for Jack, but Chen took it to another level.
Watching her do police work was like admiring a salmon swimming upstream, or a swallow riding a current to its nest on the cliffs.
She made it look easy, and if he knew anything from his time as Detective Denver Black, it was that the job wasn’t easy.
“Okay, done,” she said, as she set aside her phone to dig into her burger. “He’ll get on it as soon as he can, but it probably won’t be today. All I had to do in exchange was promise to have a margarita.”
Jack felt an odd twinge of jealousy. “With him?”
“No, with myself, or whoever’s handy. It’s because I’m supposed to be on vacation and he knows I don’t do vacations very well. I still get shit about the time I spent mandated time off at the FBI Experience in DC.”
“Was it cool?”
“Best vacation ever.” She winked at him. “Although this one is working out pretty well too. Give me a case to sink my teeth into and I’m a happy camper.”
He wondered if there was a reason she was such a workaholic, or if that was simply her nature. Was she avoiding something by throwing herself into work? “What about your personal life?”
“What about it?” She bit into her burger, probably to avoid answering his question.
“Ever been married?”
She shook her head as she chewed.
“Long-term relationship defined as anything longer than six months?”
“Sure.”
“Romantic relationship,” he clarified.
She swallowed a bit of her mushroom burger and half-closed her eyes in bliss. “Mmmm.”
He waited patiently until she could speak again. “Was that a yes?”
She sighed, then launched into her answer. “I wouldn’t call it romantic, but there was lots of sex. Sex is very healthy, an excellent release, and I quite like it. I don’t really get the point of romance. Like, give me my orgasm, then let me get back to work.”
The wave of amusement started somewhere in his belly, then swept upwards through his heart and into the smile that spread across his face. She made him laugh like nobody’s business.
“I get the picture. So are you in one of these relationships now? All sex, no romance?”
“No.” She set down her burger and went for the fries. “I thought things were going well, but he wanted to meet my parents. I told him there was no point in that, but he kept insisting.”
“What happened?”
“It was incredibly awkward. We met them for dinner and he told them he wanted to marry me, and wanted to get their approval before he proposed. I realized he didn’t know me at all, because—”
“That was insulting. You’ll pick your own life mate, should you ever want such a thing.” Even he knew Tina, with her fierce independence, wouldn’t appreciate that move.
“Exactly. He was playing the eligible Chinese husband card, but it didn’t work on my parents either. They know me better than that.”
“What’s the eligible—”
She dragged a French fry through ketchup.
“Many Chinese-American parents would prefer their children marry someone Chinese. My father feels that way, but my mother’s more open.
It’s one reason I sometimes avoid Asian men.
I don’t want my parents to get their hopes up.
The fact is, I don’t know if I’ll ever get married.
I’m lucky that I have two siblings, and they’re much more obliging, so the pressure is less than it could be. How about you?”
“Me? I’m handy,” he offered.
“Excuse me?” She set down her French fry before even taking a bite. “You mean, for orgasms?”
He let out a spurt of laughter. “Not saying ‘no’ to the orgasms, but let’s start with a margarita.”
She stared at him blankly, pink rising in her cheeks.
“You said your police contact made you promise to get a margarita with someone handy.” He spread open his hands like a showman about to break into song. “Here I am, handy Jack Finnegan, at your service.”
They were so focused on each other that they both started at the sound of a woman’s voice nearby.
“I knew it was you! You’re Jack Finnegan from Dark of Night, aren’t you?”