Unpacking herself from the bag, she decided she could think more clearly if she were sitting up. Or standing. She reached for her cardigan that was draped across a lone straight-back chair next to her quasi-bed. Pulling it over her cotton pajamas, she raked her hands through her hair in a halfhearted attempt to comb it, then stuck her feet into her Crocs with a single thought: What the heck was his problem?
Then he was back, laptop in hand. “Open it, please. Boot it up. To the internet.”
At least he’d said “please.” So Annie turned it on and waited for the screen to light. She plugged in her password, half-hoping that the fickle Chappy connection would not cooperate. However, that morning it decided to play nice, so she handed the computer back to the man who did not in any way appear to be the kind and loving person she’d agreed to marry.
She wondered if he’d gone bonkers like her brother had.
He futzed with the keyboard for several seconds then handed it back to her. “It’s a Mac, not a PC. I have no idea how it works.”
She wondered if that gave her an edge, though she had no idea why she’d need one.
“John,” she sighed, “will you please tell me what’s going on?”
“Oh, nothing much,” he replied, arms crossed on his chest. At least he wasn’t in uniform. At least he wasn’t wearing his holster and his .38, or whatever caliber the Edgartown police used for guns. “Find VineyardInsiders.”
VineyardInsiders was a private website for islanders, about islanders. It was a place of perpetual information that everyone who lived there should or might want to know. On occasion, it served as a kind of gossip column, publishing things that neither island newspaper regarded as newsworthy. Some anecdotes were funny; some were not.
Though Annie rarely looked at it, she had a sickening suspicion of what she would see.
She typed VineyardInsiders.com and awaited her fate.
The first (or more accurately, the latest) morsel in the newsfeed was about a pig that had been found wandering on the airport runway. “This is the kind of stuff that happened back in the fifties,” an old-timer had commented and added a smiley face.
Annie scrolled to the next story: a photo of a silver pickup, complete with visible license plate; the author proclaimed that the driver had cut her off at the five corners, causing her to slam on her brakes and her shopping bag to propel to the floor, thus shattering nearly all two dozen eggs she’d bought at Ghost Island Farm. A thread of comments offered sympathies and agreed that the truck must belong to a tourist. One writer suggested that the woman “bring the pic to the police station and have them run a make on the vehicle,” as if that wouldn’t waste law enforcement’s time.
And then there it was. A photo of Illumination Night. With the shimmering rainbow of lanterns in the background. And Annie in the foreground. With Simon Anderson leaned in closely, whispering in her ear after he’d clasped the glow necklace at the nape of her neck. From the angle of the shot, it looked as if he’d been brushing his lips on her.
If, in Annie’s previous life, she’d been a longshoreman or perhaps a lumberjack instead of a third grade teacher, she might have spewed a string of expletives that would have embarrassed the most heartless villain in her murder mysteries. In her mind, she hoped Murphy was spewing them for her.
“Did you read it?” John hissed. “Did you read the comments?”
She had not. She did not want to.
“Go to the one that says, ‘Hey, Sgt. Lyons, see what your lady’s been doing while you’re on the night shift.’ That’s one of the good ones. Or, ‘What’s going on at The Vineyard Inn, John?’ And be sure to read, ‘A crack in the wedding bells?’ Yeah. I really love that one.”
Annie couldn’t speak; she could hardly breathe. “No . . .” she moaned, “It isn’t . . . it wasn’t . . .”
“The worst part . . .” John stepped on her words, his tone methodical, as if he was working hard not to sound threatening, “. . . the worst part is that my daughter showed it to me.” His voice cracked when he said, “daughter.” “She greeted me with it when I got home from work.”
His daughter? Of course Abigail would do something like that. It was no secret that she didn’t like having to live on the Vineyard, that moving back had only been what she’d perceived as the lesser of two evils. For all Annie knew, Abigail had taken the picture to humiliate her father. Or her father’s girlfriend. Or both of them. “No . . .” Annie insisted again, then said, “Abigail . . .”
John scowled. “Not Abigail. Lucy. Lucy is upset.”
Annie was stunned. That the image conveyed a romantic encounter was beyond a doubt. Of course Lucy would have been upset. But why hadn’t she texted Annie and asked her about it first? Then Annie knew that as close as they’d become, Lucy would always put her father first. As Annie would have done.
“So what was he really doing?” John continued. “Other than sucking on your neck?” He’d unfolded his arms and hooked his thumbs into belt loops, a stance that Annie recognized as him trying to tamp down anger.
“John . . . please . . . it isn’t like that . . .”
“Okay,” he said. “Then let’s look at it from my viewpoint. Step one: With all the places on the island, why did the illustrious Simon Anderson pick the Inn as the place to bed down?” Then his breaths became choppy and his words stuttered out. “Did he interview you for one of your books? Did he think it would be cool to do an exposé on a celebrity who actually lives on our supposedly cushy little island? Or . . . is he someone else from your . . . checkered past?”
He was clearly referring to an unfortunate incident that had happened in the spring, when an unwanted demon from Annie’s past had showed up at her door. She wondered if John would always be jealous, and, if so, how she should handle it when he seemed convinced that he’d been betrayed. Should she get defensive? Should she cry? Trying to pull her thoughts together, she wanted to say she had no more clues about this photo than he did. Or that she’d only met Simon Anderson two days ago.
But as she started to speak, John huffed. “I’m going to go before you say something I don’t want to hear.” Then he bolted out the door and clomped back down the stairs, one clomp at a time.
Then Annie had another thought: While it was clear to her—and apparently to all of social media—that Simon’s face looked snuggled on her neck, his assistant, Bill, was not in the picture. Nor had she seen him in the brief few seconds that the episode had lasted. Had he been lurking in the crowd with a telephoto lens, waiting for the chance to snap the photo? Had this been a setup? And if so, for God’s sake, why?
* * *
