“But that’s probably wishful thinking. I always thought Seth was bad news. He always seemed to be right there, shadowing her. I never could talk to her alone.”
“Some men go over the edge when a woman ends the relationship.”
His gut twisted. Jesus. She was right. What if Jessie had been trying to walk away, but Seth didn’t want to let her go? Wasn’t that the plot line of at least six Dark of Night episodes?
He stared at the scrap of yellow paper, trying to put all the words together into a coherent message.
“Who is this Sally?” he asked. “Or Sandy. Any chance that’s your client?”
“No.” Chen shook her head. “I assume she doesn’t mean ‘sally forth’ or something like that.”
“Doubt it. Too bad she wrote in all caps. Can’t even tell if it’s a name or not.”
“It certainly could be. How’s this?” Tina raised her voice and narrated, “‘Warning, you liar about Sally. Lose my cell number. Don’t touch my paper because you broke my heart. Get out.’” She smiled, rolling her eyes at her goofy interpretation as she looked up from the note. Was that the first time she’d offered him a whole-hearted smile? He liked it.
But she was assuming a lot about that note.
“Or try this one. ‘I’m warning you, liar, about the sandy celery. If you touch it, my paper heart will give out.’”
Tina burst out laughing, and if he’d found her smile attractive, her belly laugh was even more so. “Your guess is as good as mine, I suppose. Come on, then. Sally forth and show me what you’ve got so far.”
5
Tina still found it surreal that she was in the company of one of her favorite TV characters, but she was getting used to it. It helped that Jack didn’t have that scar across his face, and that his eyes weren’t two different colors the way they were on the show. He must wear contact lenses along with the makeup.
Jack also had a completely different personality, much more congenial and charming than the brooding Denver Black, who was, quite frankly, borderline sociopathic.
In his relatively new Dodge Ram, he drove her across the sandbar that connected the two ends of the islands, upscale east and downmarket west. She’d taken several photos of the Post-It, front, back, and every which way, and tucked it into a plastic baggie from the inn’s kitchen. She had no idea if that note would help their search, but?—
What was she thinking. Their search? Since when had she decided she and Jack were working together? He seemed to have decided it all on his own, and so far, she was going along with it.
“My mother’s family is from here,” he was saying, as they cruised down a gravel road lined with birch trees. Their leaves fluttered hypnotically in the golden sun. “Olaf and Enid Sunderland were my grandparents. My mom left after high school and married my father, who’s a Finnegan. He detested the island, so when she brought us back here for summers, he never came along. People just called us the Sunderland kids. I bet no one here even associates the Jack Finnegan from Dark of Night with my family.
“My grandparents died a few years ago, and Mom signed the Sea Smoke house over to me and Jessie. We’ve been renting it to a young family, but they finally bought their own house. They moved out at the start of the summer. Jessie came out here to clean the place up, get it ready to rent again, but once she got here, she decided to stay for a while.”
“So she met Seth Baker here?”
“That’s what she said. Jessie is…” He hesitated, giving Tina the impression he was choosing his words very carefully. “She’s extremely shy. She’s an artist, a really good one, and she spends a lot of time alone.”
“Introvert?”
“Very much so. I honestly don’t know how she met Seth, but it was probably while doing something ordinary like picking up groceries at the dock. Not much else would get her to leave the house. She does love nature, though, so she might have been walking through the woods or something like that.”
He pulled up in front of a tidy house perched on top of a rise. Instead of a driveway, a long wooden boardwalk connected the house to the road, bridging a shallow gully along the road.
“We used to love that bridge when we were kids,” he mused, as he turned off the engine. He left the key in the dashboard nook, which was something she would never get used to, even though many islanders did exactly that. Car theft was nonexistent out here. “We’d run up and down it until Granny lured us inside with molasses cookies.”
“Wholesome.”
He snorted. “Yeah, I guess so. Something wrong with wholesome?”
“Nope.”
Tina thought about the time her mother had made cookies for a school bake sale. She’d begged her to make normal cookies, but Mom hadn’t understood that “normal” didn’t mean dry almond cookies with barely any sugar in them. Tina didn’t have the heart to tell her so, and she’d watched in agony as kids had spit out bits of those cookies into their napkins. Growing up the child of immigrants gave you a set of experiences that someone like Jack would probably not understand.
She followed him down the boardwalk, fighting the urge to run because it honestly was very tempting. The house itself was nothing extravagant, a typical fisherman’s house with small rooms that were easier to heat. Its best feature was the sliding glass doors leading onto a deck that offered a picturesque view of lobster boats bobbing at their moorings, which looked like big neon-pink balloons to her.
“We added the deck after my grandparents died,” Jack said when he saw her looking. “I offered to do it earlier, but they always insisted it was a giant waste of money and told me I should put those funds into savings bonds.”
