The morning after the canceled dinner, Jess sat in her Blazer in Spinnaker’s parking lot, watching the quiet restaurant and the open water behind it for a solid half hour, wondering what she was doing and if she even had a choice.
Tim had barely unlocked the front door and was setting tables along the far wall of the dining room when Jess walked into the restaurant at 11 a.m. on the pin. A bell tinkled overhead to announce her arrival, and Tim was barely more than a silhouette as he looked back at her and stood straight and came over, wiping his hands on his apron and smiling a good morning to her.
“Jess,” he said. “Welcome. Eating by yourself this morning?”
She smiled at him, rueful. Tried to calm the nerves that threatened to set her whole body to shaking, thought semiconsciously how crazy it was she could walk into an enemy village or an outlaw compound without hardly any jitters at all, but ask her to walk into a hometown seafood restaurant and she was more scared than a fox in a snare.
“I wish I was just here to eat, Tim,” she told the restaurateur, and she watched how his smile faded and an understanding came over his expression, and she surmised that he’d been waiting for her to come to him, waiting for the questions he must have known she would ask.
* * *
Tim flipped the OPEN sign to CLOSED and they took a table by the windows, overlooking the strait and the breakwater and the boats moored in the basin just feet from the restaurant’s pilings. Tim poured two cups of coffee, handed one to Jess, and kept one for himself. He sat down opposite her and searched her eyes with his own, and his expression was something of pity, and Jess hated him for it.
“I just need to know,” she told Tim. “How bad was that fight?”
Tim winced, and she knew he was seeing her as Mason Burke’s partner and not as Sheriff Hart’s deputy, and she knew also that Tim liked Burke, that the men got along, and that this mustn’t be easy for him either.
“It was bad,” he said finally. “It was—I mean, Jess, those men really went after each other. I had to call Miguel out of the back to get in between them, and even then…” He blew out a long breath. “If Tyner Gillies hadn’t showed up when he did, I was afraid they might have killed each other right then and there.”
As opposed to killing each other later, she thought.
Jess looked out over the water. She could see the Nootka in the boat basin beneath the restaurant, and though she knew Burke wasn’t there—he was working with Joe Clifford, building her house—she still felt his eyes on her, watching her betray him.
“I haven’t told the sheriff yet,” she told Tim. “Gillies said he’d leave it to me. I’ve just been—” She met his eyes. “I’ve been hoping there’s some other answer.”
“Do you think Mason could have killed him?” Tim asked.
“You saw them fighting,” she replied. “What do you think?”
Tim sucked his teeth and turned to stare out the window. He didn’t reply for a long while. “It was bad, Jess,” he said finally. “Those men didn’t like each other; I can tell you that.”