Sanctuary

what? Yes, yes, of course.” Automatically, she grabbed a pencil and began scribbling on the pad by the phone. “I’ll certainly make some calls right away. Don’t worry now. It’s a very small island. We’ll help in every way we can, Mr. Peters. I’ll come on down there to the cottage myself, right now. No, that’s just fine. I’ll be right along.”
    “Mosquitoes getting in through the screen again?” Brian asked. But he knew it was more than that, much more.
    “The Peterses took Wild Horse Cove Cottage with some friends for the week. Mr. Peters can’t seem to find his wife this morning.”
    Brian felt a quick stab of fear at the base of his spine. He couldn’t ignore it, but told himself it was foolish overreaction. “Kate, it’s not quite seven A.M. She probably got up early and took a walk.”
    “He’s been out looking for almost an hour. He found her shoes down by the water.” Distracted, she ran a hand through her hair. “Well, it’s probably just as you say, but he’s terribly worried. I’ll run down there and calm him down, help him look around until she comes wandering home.”
    She managed a thin smile. “I’m sorry, sweetie, but this means I’m going to have to wake Lexy up so she can take the breakfast shift in my place this morning. She’s liable to be snappish about it.”
    “I’m not worried about Lexy. Kate,” he added as she headed for the door, “give me a call, will you, when Mrs. Peters gets home?”
    “Sure I will, honey. Like as not she’ll be there before I make it down to them.”
     
     
    BUT she wasn’t. By noon Tom Peters wasn’t the only one on Desire who was worried. Other cottagers and natives joined in the search, Nathan among them. He’d seen Tom and Susan Peters once or twice during their stay and had a vague recollection of a pretty brunette of medium height and build.
    He left the others to comb the beach and the cove while he concentrated on the swath of land between his cottage and Wild Horse Cove. There was barely an eighth of a mile between them. The verge of his end forested then, giving way to dune and swale. He covered the ground slowly and saw, when he reached the stretch of sand, the crisscrossing footprints of others who had come that way to look.
    Though he knew it was useless, he climbed over the dunes. The cove below was secluded, but anyone there would have been spotted half a dozen times by now by others who were searching.
    There was only one figure there now, a man who paced back and forth. “Nathan?”
    He turned and, seeing Jo mounting the incline between the dunes, held out a hand to help her up.
    “I went by your cottage,” she began. “I see you’ve heard.”
    “That must be the husband down there. I’ve seen him a couple of times before.”
    “Tom Peters. I’ve been all over the island. I was out working this morning, from about seven. One of the Pendleton kids tracked us down an hour or so ago and told us. He said her shoes were down there, by the water.”
    “That’s what I heard.”
    “People are thinking she might have gone in to swim, and . . . The current’s fairly gentle here, but if she cramped or just swam out too far . . .”
    It was a grim scenario, one that had already occurred to him. “Shouldn’t the tide have brought her in by now if that’s what happened?”
    “It may yet. If the current carried her along for a while, they could find her down the island at the next tide change. Barry Fitzsimmons drowned like that. We were about sixteen. He was a strong swimmer, but he went out by himself one night during a beach party. He’d been drinking. They found him the next morning at low tide, half a mile down.”
    Nathan shifted his gaze to the south, where the waves were less serene. He thought of Kyle, sinking under blue Mediterranean waves. “Where are her clothes, then?”
    “What?”
    “It seems to me if she’d decided to go swimming, she’d have stripped down.”
    “I suppose you’re right. But she might have come down in her bathing suit.”
    “Without a towel?” It didn’t quite fit, he decided. “I wonder if anyone’s asked him if he knows what she was wearing when she left the house. I’m going down to talk to him.”
    “I don’t think we should intrude.”
    “He’s alone and he’s worried.” Nathan kept her hand in his as he started down. “Or he had a fight with his wife, killed her, and disposed of her body.”
    “That’s horrid and ridiculous. He’s a perfectly