Island Getaway, An Art Crime Team Mystery (21 page)

“Then I don’t think I’ve ever been lucky
before.”

He wasn’t sure he had, either. But he didn’t
have time to think about it, because she moved, stretching against
him, and suddenly it became imperative that he move too, or he’d
make her reconsider just how lucky she’d been, to find a guy who
couldn’t even last the first minute inside her.

She was a bit tentative at first, until she
found his rhythm, and then it became perfection, with each deep
thrust bringing him closer to heaven. She matched him stroke for
stroke, each arch of her hips taking him higher, and he soon
learned that whatever her shirt claimed, this librarian didn’t do
it quietly. She moaned, she whimpered, she squeaked and panted. She
laughed, and she breathed his name, over and over again. And when
he reached the end of the world and hesitated on the precipice, not
sure he wanted to go over without her, she clung to him, her cry of
triumph and pleasure caught against his lips as she jumped with him
and started the long, dazzling descent.

It was the first time since she got to Sweden that Annika had woken
up before nine in the morning. Maybe her internal body clock was
finally catching up. Or maybe it was just the fact that there was a
man in her bed, when she was used to sleeping alone.

Not that it was her bed. It was his. And
Nick wasn’t a particularly restless sleeper, either. In fact, he’d
stayed in the same position most of the night: on his side, with
one hand cradling his cheek and the other curled in a soft fist
close to his chest.

His face looked younger in sleep, his lips
soft and those long lashes like dark fans against his cheeks.

Below the neck, though, he was all grown up.
All smooth golden skin and hard muscles and a sprinkling of dark
hair that narrowed to a stripe that disappeared below the
blanket.

Annika swallowed and moved her attention
back up to his face again. It didn’t seem right to ogle him when he
was sleeping and couldn’t defend himself. Not that she thought he’d
mind, really. Not after what they’d done last night. But even so,
she didn’t want to invade his privacy while he was unaware.

And he might feel differently about things
this morning. She wasn’t sure she didn’t. Last night, sex with him
had seemed a fine idea. He’d taken her by surprise when he kissed
her, and then he’d taken her by storm, and she honestly hadn’t had
much time to even think about what she was doing. But now— In the
clear light of day, she wasn’t so sure this had been a good idea.
She didn’t really know him. And the things he’d told her, that she
was supposed to believe, were clearly lies. If he were a financial
consultant working on a merger in Stockholm, how could he just up
and leave to follow her to Gotland? She’d like to think he’d been
so bowled over by her that the idea of never seeing her again had
made him do something impetuous and foolhardy—it was romantic, and
made it likely he might want to see her again after they left this
place—but she was pretty sure that wasn’t it. He’d seemed too
comfortable with Gustav’s body and with the police to be an
innocent bystander.

She had to go to the bathroom, so she
twisted carefully to the side and rolled out of bed. When her bare
feet hit the cool wood floors, she turned back to make sure Nick
was still asleep. She was in her birthday suit, had slept that way
all night, and while it was one thing to have had him look at her
in the dusk last night, it would be very different to stand in
front of him stark naked in the bright morning sun. She didn’t
think she’d enjoy that at all, no matter how complimentary he’d
been about her body.

The bathroom was down the hall, but she
wasn’t about to risk going there without clothes on. What if Lena
was upstairs and saw her? So she reached for Nick’s shirt, crumpled
on the floor, and pulled it around herself, before padding toward
the door on bare feet. The shirt smelled like him, spicy and
masculine, and the cotton felt crisp against her naked skin.

She was almost to the door when she noticed
the bags. A black rolling suitcase and a black overnight bag
standing just inside the door. The suitcase wasn’t Nick’s. She’d
looked at his at the airport just two days ago—and was it really
only two days since she’d met him?

Anyway, this wasn’t Nick’s suitcase. His had
been a high end piece of luggage, with an upscale metal emblem.
This one was plain black cloth, with a scuff mark on one corner. It
looked a lot like hers.

Just like the overnight bag looked a lot
like the one she’d lost at the airport.

The one someone had pushed her onto the
baggage carousel to get.

What was Nick doing with her things? She’d
left the suitcase at the hotel in Stockholm, and when she’d called
to end her reservation, she’d told them to get rid of it. And the
overnight bag... that had been gone since she arrived at the
airport.

Had she been right all along, and Nick had
been working with the people who pushed her? Was that why he’d been
nice to her? Taking her to dinner? Following her to Visby?

Kissing her?

Was that why he’d seduced her last
night?

Over on the bed, Nick stirred, and Annika
turned to look at him, heart in her throat. He looked so innocent
lying there...

Well, no. He didn’t. He looked like sin
personified. And she’d fallen for it.

Stupid, Annika!

Quickly, quietly, she shed the shirt again.
Scooped up her T-shirt, shorts and shoes from the floor and looked
around for her underwear. The blue bra had ended up in the corner,
and she padded over, silently, to retrieve it. But the underpants
were nowhere to be seen. Maybe they were still in the bed,
somewhere under the covers.

Well, she wasn’t about to go hunting for
them. That might wake Nick, and what she wanted least of all right
now was to be faced with him.

She snagged the overnight bag on her way out
the door. He was welcome to the suitcase—there was nothing in it
she wanted to keep—but the bag was hers. The ashes were hers. Her
damn eReader was hers.

She closed the door with the softest click
she could manage and scurried down the hall to her own room. Once
inside, she threw on clean underwear, a clean shirt, and her jeans,
and stuffed her feet back into the white tennis-shoes. She spent a
half a minute brushing her teeth—it was worth it, not to go out
into the world with morning-after breath; she only wished she’d had
time for a shower, too—but she kept an ear out the whole time, just
waiting for the knock on the door that would herald Nick’s
arrival.

She also took a minute to unzip the
overnight bag and remove her eReader—no sense in taking that to
Martebo—and to make sure the ashes were still there. They were; the
semi-transparent Tupperware container looked just like it had when
she’d put it in the bag the day she left Brooklyn. She even opened
it and peered at the cremains. They looked the same too. Grainy,
like coarse sand. Nothing at all like ashes, really.

That done, she zipped up the bag and threw
it over her shoulder. She opened the door as carefully as she
could, and looked along the hallway in both directions before
venturing outside. She tiptoed past Nick’s room to the stairs,
stopping only long enough to put an ear to the door. Everything was
quiet inside. He must still be asleep.

She made it downstairs safely, and then out
the front door without seeing anyone. And then she was on her way
down the street, through a Visby just waking up for the day.

The cobblestones were uneven under her feet,
slippery with dew, and the scent of roses hung in the air, mixed
with the smell of the ocean. The air was so clean here, so sweet.
She’d definitely miss that when she left.

And that wasn’t all she’d miss. Last night,
in the midst of getting lost in Nick’s voice murmuring sweet
nothings in her ear, and Nick’s hands taking her to places she’d
never been before, she’d allowed herself to imagine a life with
him. Maybe not every minute of it spent together—she couldn’t
imagine sharing the two-point-five children or the white picket
fence; there weren’t too many of those in Brooklyn, or for that
matter in D.C.—but for him to stay in her life. For him to visit on
occasional weekends. Of her taking the train to Washington to spend
a few days with him. For what happened last night to happen
again.

It seemed crazy that two days should be
enough time to fall in love with someone, but there was no way
around it. She’d fallen for him, and fallen hard. Why else would
she have let what happened yesterday, happen at all? She wasn’t the
promiscuous type. She could count on one hand the sexual
relationships she’d had. None of them had lasted long—a few weeks
or months each—but neither had been a one night stand, either.

It just figured, that the first time she
relaxed her morals and indulged in one of those, she woke up the
next morning to the realization that the guy wasn’t who she thought
he was.

The bus to Martebo was waiting when she got
to the terminal, and she bought a roundtrip ticket and climbed on.
There weren’t many people traveling so early, and none of them were
people she knew. The bus stopped a few times before reaching
Martebo, at small villages and hamlets along the way, and then it
was Annika’s turn. She hopped off and watched the bus disappear in
a cloud of smoke and dust, before crossing the road.

Curt had insisted on renting a scooter last
night, and had taken her to Martebo. He just hadn’t been willing to
take no for an answer. And yes, she’d suspected he’d done it to
scare her; although it probably hadn’t been for the reason Nick had
suggested, that he’d hoped she’d be scared enough to need
comforting. At least he hadn’t tried anything like that. But he had
insisted on sitting on a dark road, astride the scooter, for almost
an hour, just waiting for those stupid lights to appear. Of course
they hadn’t. The only lights they’d seen had been fireflies and
cars passing on the main road, and a kid on a bicycle with a
headlamp.

And it had been too dark to see anything
else. Any of the things Annika had wanted to see were blanketed in
darkness. She couldn’t care less about the mysterious Martebo
lights. It was a sad story, the one about Knut Stare and his son,
but she really didn’t believe in ghosts. The story about the lights
that had been seen around her grandmother’s house during the days
before the arson were interesting to her for a different
reason.

Exhibit A) Someone had stolen her bag at the
airport.

Exhibit B) Someone had searched her room in
Stockholm.

Exhibit C) Someone had searched—and damaged,
and destroyed—her room in Visby.

Exhibit D) Someone had killed her father’s
old friend just hours before she could talk to him.

On the plane, she’d had the feeling that
someone was keeping an eye on her. She’d hoped that maybe it was
Nick, that he’d found her at least a fraction as compelling as
she’d found him. And it might have been Nick. Nick couldn’t have
stolen her bag or searched either of her rooms, or killed Gustav,
but he could have had an accomplice who did. Like the big blond man
with the gun she’d seen him talk to in Stockholm. If the guy with
the gun had been on the plane, she hadn’t noticed him there, but
truth be told, she’d been a bit too preoccupied with Nick to notice
much of anything else.

Or it could be someone else entirely.
Someone who had been on the plane. Someone who had taken her bag,
and when what he was looking for wasn’t inside it, he had searched
her room. And when he hadn’t found what he was looking for there,
he’d followed her to Gotland and searched her room again, and this
time had shown a bit of temper, either out of frustration, because
she didn’t have what he was looking for, or because he wanted to
scare her.

That brought to mind Curt, who seemed to
delight in telling her scary stories. But it couldn’t have been
Curt. He’d been with her while her room was ransacked. And unlike
Nick, Curt didn’t seem to have any accomplices. Like her, he was a
stranger to Sweden.

She knew where the house had stood that her
father had grown up in. The address had been in the newspaper
article. And it wasn’t difficult to find. Martebo was such a small
place that one could pretty much walk from one end to the other in
a few minutes, and see everything there was to see in between. The
house had stood on
Strandvägen
—the Beach Road—and no one had
built anything in its place in the thirty years since it burned.
There was nothing there now, just an overgrown lot with a few
foundation stones here and there, to show that a house had once
stood there.

Annika lingered for a second on the road and
looked at it. She contemplated walking the lot, just to see if she
might feel something if she did, but then decided against it. There
was a desolate feeling to the place, a sadness, that she doubted
had anything to do with Knut Stare or even with her grandmother,
but simply with the knowledge that her father had left Gotland,
never to return, and now he was back, but it was too late for him
to enjoy it.

According to the note he had left, he had
wanted to go back home after his death, to the place where he was
born. That was here.

Actually, it was probably the nearest
hospital, but it wasn’t like she could dump his ashes there, was
it?

For a moment, she imagined herself traveling
to the Visby hospital and digging a hole in the flowerbed outside
the entrance to pour her father’s ashes into it. No doubt she’d be
arrested, and find herself back in front of Police Chief Steen in
no time, if she tried.

That couldn’t be what her father had meant
anyway. He’d mentioned a stone. What kind of stone?

Digging in her purse, she pulled out the
crumpled note her mother had found among her father’s personal
effects when the police in Brooklyn had released them to her.
When I die I want to be cremated. Ashes to ashes and dust to
dust, in the place I was born. Bury me standing, under the
stone.