Her resolve now in place, she stepped onto the porch. The main door was open, but thanks to the light of the lamps, Annie had a clear view through the screen: Simon was on his hands and knees in the bedroom, scrubbing Kevin’s blood up off the floor.
Chapter 29
Annie’s first instinct was to run. Far from the cottage, from Chappy, from Martha’s Vineyard. But she couldn’t very well run with her feet glued to the ground.
She must have cried out. Or gasped. Or shrieked. Whatever the sound she’d made, it alerted Simon. Before she knew it, he was at the screen door, looking at her. Shamefaced. Sheepish.
“How is he?” he asked.
Her heart was beating faster than it should. She took a breath before she spoke. “He came through surgery okay. But they’re not going to wake him up until tomorrow morning.” She was amazed that she sounded so coherent.
He closed his eyes. “I am so sorry, Annie. I thought he was going to shoot me.”
The feeling began to come back into her feet, her legs, the rest of her. “I know, Simon. I know.”
He opened the screen door; she backed up a step but stopped before nearly falling off the porch.
“He’s going to be okay, isn’t he?”
“He’ll only need another surgery if more bone fragments break loose.” Her words were medical, scientific, logical. They did not reveal that, basically, she was still scared to death for her brother.
Simon stepped outside onto the porch. “You want to come in? Have a glass of wine or something?”
She shook her head more insistently than necessary. She gestured back to the Inn. “I’m having dinner with Francine and one of our guests.”
“It’s clean,” he suddenly said. “The floor.”
Annie’s toes and fingers wriggled as if she were trying to stave off a seizure. “We would have called a cleaning service . . .”
“Bill did it. By the time I got back from the police station, he’d . . .” His gaze drifted toward the meadow, toward the Inn, toward the ground. “. . . he’d taken care of... it.” Simon was visibly struggling for words; Annie wondered if his toes and fingers were wriggling, too.
“I saw you on the floor . . . I thought you were scrubbing. . .” They were tough words. For a tough situation.
“I was touching it up. To be sure . . . well, you know.”
She knew, so she nodded. “I need to go now.”
“I’d like to talk with you, Annie. I need to clear a few things up.” He couldn’t seem to look at her; perhaps he was vying for time, attempting to summon his own form of courage. “Maybe tomorrow evening?”
“Here?” she asked.
“How about somewhere neutral? Like a restaurant in town?”
Of course, a restaurant was out of the question. Annie didn’t need for John to see her out with Simon. Or for anyone to see her with him. Especially if “anyone” had a camera with a flash and a zoom lens. Though Annie had no idea where, if anywhere, her relationship with John was or wasn’t going now, she didn’t want to intentionally derail it.
“It’s probably not a great idea to be seen in public together.”
He nodded. “Right. Here, then?”
“Let’s meet on the beach. Around six o’clock?”
“Six is good.”
“As long as Kevin is awake and he’s okay.”
“Fair enough.”
She started off toward the workshop.
