If she went into the kitchen, she wouldn’t bother to ask Claire if she needed help. As always, the woman would have the food prep under control. Every island crisis, especially those on Chappy, relied on a competent person to tend to the needs of the volunteers: Claire had been blessed with that role.
A breeze kicked up, chilling Annie’s cheeks, reminding her she was standing on the beach, wearing only her jeans, a cotton top, and a light wool jacket, hardly smart attire for a cold, wintry night. And she certainly wasn’t doing any good at all by just standing there, a sandcastle of confusion. After all, there was a whole lot to do. And Bella to find.
“Bella,” she whispered into the fog. “Where are you, my sweet girl?”
Ignoring a shiver, Annie turned and headed up the path, her flashlight bobbing back and forth close to the dunes, her determination to be the one to find her growing with each step.
She was beginning to feel confident about the outcome until she reached the lawn that led up to the Inn and saw a tall, bulky figure standing off to one side, silently watching the action at the bottom of the hill. As Annie got closer, the fog thinned a little, enough for her to make out whose figure it was.
Rex.
If he saw Annie, he did not acknowledge her.
Chapter 25
Annie trudged toward the Inn, passing the workshop and her cottage on the way, wondering how soon John could get someone there to cordon off the porch with tape that warned intruders not to cross. Had Tyrannosaurus Rex been there? Was he the one who left the Post-it? But why? It seemed that he was going to get what he’d come to Chappy for—the house. Still, the thought of the big man carrying Bella off somewhere launched somersaults inside her.
There were more people at the Inn than there were a short time ago: men, women, teenagers. In the kitchen, Annie stopped to tell Claire that John would be there soon. Claire acknowledged her but kept a stiff composure and did not pause her rapid pace of layering ham and cheese into sandwiches for searchers to take outside while they worked.
Keeping her anguish likewise buried, Annie moved into the great room, where volunteers were lined up at the urns, waiting to fill thermoses before beginning or returning to comb the grounds. After all her time on the island, Annie was surprised at how many faces she still didn’t recognize.
“Remember when Mason Beachem’s kid went missing?” she heard an older man ask. He was dressed in a well-worn Navy peacoat, his white-bearded face rimmed by a plaid wool scarf; he was addressing a woman of a similar age whose knit cap was pulled down around her ears. She wore a full-length, quilted coat that might have been acquired at the nearby thrift shop. Annie knew that the attire in no way indicated whether either of them was rich or poor, but exemplified Yankee frugality in which many lifelong Vineyarders took pride.
“Found him in the dog pen, didn’t they?” the woman replied.
“Yep. Sound asleep, while Mason’s two beagles were keeping watch.”
A man behind the woman tapped her on the shoulder. “And Liza Watkins? The waitress? We looked for her for days. When was that? Nineteen ninety-something?”
Turning from the group, Annie didn’t want to hear more. She wondered how it happened that when tragedy appeared, people often felt a need to revisit other misfortunes. Car accident? Right! Remember when what’s-her-name ran off the bridge? Cancer? What kind? I heard Mr. So-and-So had it even worse.
She headed for the front reception area, ducked around the corner, and slipped into the reading room. She couldn’t stand to think that Bella’s story would be future fodder for island gossip, another anecdote passed down for years to come.
Sitting quietly without turning on a light, Annie tried to think about what she’d do next if she were John. Which, of course, she wasn’t, never having had police training or been certified in tactics and strategies. “But you think like a cop, Annie,” her editor often reminded her. “That’s why you’re a good mystery writer.” It was easy for Trish to say; Annie wasn’t sure John would agree. He’d praised her instincts on occasion, but even Annie knew that her hunches often clashed with the legal system. She also knew that once she and John were married—two weeks nearly to the hour—she’d have to back off from getting involved with anything the police needed to handle. She wouldn’t want to get her new husband into trouble.
But they weren’t married yet, and this was about Bella, and Annie knew she’d do whatever it took to find her. She also knew that time was of the essence—a cliché that, like most of them, had been invented for a reason.
The word cliché, however, reminded her of Trish, and that time was also of the essence for her to come to a decision about her career. But because she tended to feel more comfortable creating stories than dealing with real-life issues, Annie decided that her time would be better spent right then if she examined Bella’s disappearance as if it were a plot line for one of her novels. After all, in her books, characters had been known to disappear—some for legitimate reasons, some because they had something to hide, others because they’d met with something evil. Bella didn’t fit into the first two categories. Which, unless she was merely lost, suggested that she’d met with something evil.
But how could that have happened on picture-perfect Martha’s Vineyard?
Rex Winsted seemed the obvious culprit. But the more Annie obsessed about him, the less plausible he was. Rex simply didn’t have a motive. At least not one that Annie was aware of. Any more than she knew the real reason Rose was afraid of him.
Still, he was a curious addition to the island, especially on Chappy. So she decided not to rule him out.
Who else?
Annie knew pretty much everyone who had regular contact with Bella or Francine. The year-round tenants were wonderful and had added vibrancy to the Inn. In the year and a half since the grand opening, the tenants were both compatible and companionable, and hadn’t posed a single problem. She wasn’t surprised that they were helping now.
Then, there were this year’s winter renters. One was Charlie, a middle-aged man who worked for the Steamship Authority. He stayed on the island only during the week, returning to his wife and two kids in Fairhaven on weekends. So far, he’d been no trouble, either. Because it was Friday, his workweek would have ended with a trip on a late-afternoon boat to Woods Hole. He would not have been available to come back to Chappy and steal Bella, which he’d have no reason to do, anyway.
A second winter renter was a nurse named Jenna who was maybe in her forties and worked ten to ten at the hospital; more than once she’d commented how grateful she was to have found the Inn. When high season arrived, she’d move into a small apartment with other nurses until she could return to the Inn in October. No, Annie thought, Jenna didn’t seem to have a reason to bring evil into Bella’s life. Besides, as far as Annie knew, she’d left for work before Bella had gone missing, and wouldn’t return until close to eleven.
And then there was Rose. The woman certainly was curious, but Annie had doubted she was capable of wrongdoing . . . until a bolt of imaginary lightning—Murphy’s doing, perhaps—reminded Annie that she’d found Rose in the chef’s room, where she’d claimed a mouse had run into the cupboard where Bella’s toys were kept. If this had happened in one of Annie’s manuscripts, would Trish call the coincidence a red herring . . . or a viable clue? Would she delete “Rose Atkins” as a possible suspect if a crime had been committed?
John hadn’t mentioned if Rose was among the tenants who were helping, which most likely meant nothing. Rose was no doubt in her room, where she spent each evening alone, as far as Annie knew. Besides, where would she have hidden Bella when Lucy and the OB cops had been searching her room?
And there was Abigail, though even considering her a suspect made Annie feel disloyal. John’s daughter would have no reason to be mean to Bella. Any more than she’d had cause to slash Annie’s tire. She might not like Annie, but if she were prone to being vindictive, surely Lucy would have told Annie by now.
