Amy peered at him as she digested that. “You do realize what this means.”
“Why do I have the impression that you’re about to enlighten me?”
She ignored that. “It means Crabshaw really does have some deep, dark secret. Something he’s hiding from my aunt. Something that is worth paying blackmail to conceal.”
“Maybe.”
“What do you mean, maybe?”
“It’s a possibility,” Owen conceded. “That’s all I’m willing to admit at this point. I will, however, add the simple observation that the blackmailer is probably male. Which does eliminate approximately half the people in town.”
“Male? Oh, yes, of course. The payoffs are being left in the men’s restroom. So whoever goes in to retrieve them is probably of the masculine persuasion. Right. Good thinking.”
“I try,” Owen said.
“All right, Mr. Hotshot PI, what do we do next?”
“We follow Plan A.”
“Which is?”
“We wait for some of my morning phone calls to be returned. I want a little more information in hand before I confront Crabshaw.”
Amy’s mouth went dry. “You’re going to confront him?”
“Sometimes a surprise frontal assault is the quickest way to get an answer. I’ll pin him down this afternoon.”
Amy hesitated. “Shouldn’t we go to the cops or something?”
“With what? A handful of money that we happened to find in the men’s room? There’s no way in hell to prove that it’s a blackmail payoff. They’d probably put an ad in the Villantry Gazette inviting someone to claim it.”
“I see what you mean,” Amy said. “But confronting Crabshaw could be dangerous. If he’s so desperate to protect his secret that he’s willing to pay blackmail, he won’t take kindly to your questions. He might become violent.”
Owen smiled slightly. “I don’t believe this. Are you actually worried about me?”
“Yes, of course I am. I’ve hired you to solve this case. I would feel terrible if something happened to you.”
Owen’s green eyes darkened with irritation. “Have a little faith, Ms. Comfort. I realize that I no doubt appear to be downwardly mobile, professionally speaking, but I think I’m still capable of dealing with the likes of Arthur Crabshaw.”
Amy flushed. “I didn’t mean to insult you. And I don’t think you’re downwardly mobile just because you gave up your business in Portland and moved to Misplaced Island. Heck, I did the same thing.”
“True.”
Silence fell on the picnic table. Amy was suddenly acutely conscious of the chattering of a pair of ravens, the distant shouts of youngsters playing on the swings, and a large, furry dog that was pointing one of the ducks on the pond.
“So why did you move to Misplaced Island?” she finally asked very softly.
Owen shrugged. “Got burned out, I guess. After I got out of the military, I got my PI ticket.”
“Somehow I don’t see you in the military. I’ll bet you don’t take orders well.”
Owen smiled wryly. “You’re right. It wasn’t a good career path for me. But I had married young. No education to speak of. I needed a job, and the military provided a way to support a wife. She left me after I got out of the service. Said she couldn’t take the unstable income. She fell for someone else while I was working to get my business up and running. After the divorce I worked harder. Spent the last ten years doing other people’s dirty work.”
“Dirty work?”
“Staking out people who try to defraud insurance companies. Trapping embezzlers. Finding missing persons. That kind of thing.”
“And you got tired of it?”
“Let’s just say I woke up one morning and realized I didn’t like my clients any more than the people they paid me to catch. The insurance company executives spent their time trying to avoid paying legitimate claims. The corporate executives were more cold-blooded than the embezzlers who stole from them, and the missing persons usually had very good reasons for not wanting to be found.”
Amy smiled sympathetically. “Nothing was black-and-white, huh?”
“Just shades of gray. A lot of gray. I had made some money on the side by buying fixer-uppers, doing the repairs myself in my spare time and reselling the houses at a nice profit. I decided to invest some of the money and use the rest of it to fix up my own life.”
“On Misplaced Island.”
“That’s it.” Owen looked at her. “What about you?”
“Me?”
“What made you decide to move to Misplaced Island?”
“Seattle real estate is hard on a body. I worked the downtown condo market. There was a lot of pressure. I guess I burned out, too. Also, I wanted more time to write. And then something happened last year.”
“Your aunt called it a ‘dreadful incident.’ ”
Amy grimaced. “I still get occasional nightmares.”
“What happened?”
“Most people don’t realize it, but real estate agents tend to lead adventurous lives. They never know what they’re going to find when they open the door of what is supposed to be an empty house or condo. I’ve had a variety of surprises.”
“Somehow, knowing you, that does not amaze me.”
She smiled wryly. “I once showed a condo to a staid, elderly couple. I’d finished the tour of the front room, kitchen, and bedrooms. We walked into the master bath and found two people making love in the jetted tub. They were so involved in what they were doing that they never even heard us.”
Owen grinned briefly. “Make the sale?”
“Yes, I did, as a matter of fact. It was the jetted tub that clinched the deal. The elderly couple couldn’t wait to try it out themselves.”
“I take it that was not the ‘dreadful incident’ that made you decide you’d shown one condo too many.”
“No.” Amy propped her elbows on the table and rested her chin on her hands. “Walking in on a murder in progress did that
“Murder.”
“Uh-huh. I came through the front door just after a respected businessman named Bernard Gordon had shot his partner. A little dispute over investment capital, apparently. Gordon was on his way out of the condo just as I arrived. We collided in the front hall.”
Owen’s gloriously unhandsome features shaped themselves into an ominous mask. “You could have been killed.”