Donovans 01 - Amber Beach

Honor hung up the phone and leaped to her feet. She thought about a fast shower and a change of clothes, then decided against it. The black sweat suit and new white boat shoes were all the occasion called for. Jake was her teacher, not her date. She hadn’t expected that learning to handle a boat would involve bookwork on land, but it did. The more she learned at night, the faster she could begin searching for Kyle by day.
    All things considered, a hundred bucks a day was cheap wages for Jake. He was willing to put in long days.
    And long nights?
    The unexpected thought shivered from Honor’s breastbone to her knees. She started to chew on herself for being so frivolous as to be interested in a man while her brother was in trouble, but the lecture had no real force behind it. The cold truth was that she needed something to keep her mind off the depressing things that could have happened to Kyle. For all Jake’s rough edges—probably because of them—he was a world-class distraction.
    “Still, this is a really stupid time to rediscover your hormones,” Honor muttered. “You need an affair right now like you need to go fishing.”
    Put that way, fishing sounded almost appealing.
    Smiling wryly, she went to the kitchen, stuck a bottle of white wine in the freezer, and went back to learning more than she wanted to know about small powerboats and big water.
    The phone rang.
    “Damn,” she muttered. “I almost understood that last bit.”
    The phone rang again.
    She ignored it and tried to visualize the changing swath of ocean that was a boat’s danger quarter when under way.
    The phone rang twice more. She grabbed it.
    “Hello,” she said curtly.
    Silence.
    “Hello?”
    There was a soft click as someone hung up.
    She stared at the phone and told herself she was foolish for being uneasy. Wrong numbers happened all the time. Especially here, “at the end of the grid,” as Kyle put it. No big deal.
    But recently it had been every night. Even twice a night.
    Though she tried not to, Honor kept remembering one particular candidate for the job of fishing guide. He had showed up at the cottage without warning. His eyes were greedy, shiny. Reptilian. The kind of man you never want to meet in fog-draped twilight.
    Telling herself she was being silly every step of the way, she got up to check the front and back doors of the cottage. Both were locked. She hesitated, then closed the curtains.
    “Kyle would laugh himself sick if he could see you. Frightened of the dark! Maybe you should check under the bed, too. And don’t forget the closet.”
    Her sarcastic words echoed in the small room. Her breath caught. It was so quiet she could hear the fog dripping from fir branches onto the cottage roof.
    “Kyle, where is your twenty-two pistol when I need it?” she whispered.
    Nothing answered her but random drops of water.
    She knew her brother had the gun because she had found the permit. Yet no matter how carefully or how often she searched the cottage, the gun hadn’t turned up. Nor had she found it on the boat, despite all the nifty little compartments she had discovered while searching for any clue to Kyle’s disappearance.
    “Where could he have hidden it?” Honor asked the cabin.
    The only answer was Archer’s curt advice as he saw his two younger sisters off to college: Anything can be a weapon if you need it. But your best weapon is your brain. Use it.
    In addition Archer had taught Honor and Faith some brutal little tricks to use if a date wouldn’t take no for an answer, but he had always emphasized that it was better never to get into trouble in the first place.
    Honor wondered if he had given Kyle that same advice. And if so, had he followed it?
    “A million dollars in amber gone,” she said to the cabin. “A dead man. A missing brother. If that’s what comes of following Archer’s advice, I’ll stick to Miss Manners.”
    Restlessly Honor checked the windows again. For the first time she noticed that the window locks were shiny, unscratched, obviously new. Curious, she looked at the doors more closely. New dead bolts reinforced the tarnished old locks.
    “This is industrial-strength stuff,” she said, surprised. “Those dead bolts should keep out anything short of a battering ram. Why doesn’t that make me feel better?”
    Probably because she kept thinking about why her brother—who was hardly weak and had a handgun to use if pushed to it—felt he needed to install city dead bolts on a