Unearthed Read online

  Unearthed

  Duty Bound

  Book 2

  J.S. Marlo

  Breathless Press

  Calgary, Alberta

  www.breathlesspress.com

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or

  persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Unearthed

  Copyright© 2012 J.S. Marlo

  ISBN: 978-1-77101-139-6

  Cover Artist: Staci Perkins

  Editor: T. S. Chevrestt

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced electronically or in print without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations

  embodied in reviews.

  Breathless Press

  www.breathlesspress.com

  Dedication:

  To my wonderful husband. Thank you for your unconditional love and support and for not worrying about all the Google searches I do about murder, poison, and arson.

  To my amazing children. I’m so proud of you. Thank you for not hanging up on me when I call with one of those peculiar or weird English questions.

  I love you!

  Acknowledgments:

  My writing buddies, thanks for your friendship and support. Without you, Scribblers and Gluttons, I wouldn’t be writing.

  My fitness coaches, Teresa and the gang, thanks for letting me talk about my characters when I should instead be concentrating on my workouts.

  And a special thanks to my editor, Tara. You’re as devious as I am, but you also have the patience of an angel. You truly bring the best out of me and my stories.

  Many, many hugs!

  J.S.

  Chapter One

  “I don’t rent rooms by the minute or the hour.” Appalled at the caller’s audacity, Rowan O’Reilly slammed the phone on the kitchen counter with such force it rattled the spice rack.

  In her will, Aunt Mattie had bequeathed her Buccaneer, a bed-and-breakfast on Prince Edward Island, not a dump in Brothelville. Mosquitoes would stop biting before Rowan served that kind of clientele.

  “Not another one of those inquiries, was it?” Gail, Buccaneer’s only cook and maid, kneaded bread dough on the countertop.

  Downhearted, Rowan pulled out a kitchen chair. The legs skid on the clean ceramic floor, and the padded seat cushioned the impact on her tender tushy as she plopped down. “What kind of patrons has Buccaneer welcomed in recent years?”

  “The good, decent kind, Miss Rowan.” In her late fifties, the plump woman had been in Mattie’s service for over a decade. Rowan valued Gail’s opinion as much as she relished her delicious creations or prized her excellent housekeeping.

  According to Mattie’s past records, the NO VACANCY sign had hung below the pirate sign every summer. Rowan shouldn’t be facing cancellations and empty rooms the second week of June. In the three weeks since she’d moved in and taken over the business, she’d only welcomed a handful of guests.

  She was a geologist—an unemployed geologist—not a businesswoman, but running a decent bed-and-breakfast shouldn’t be that difficult. “What am I doing wrong, Gail?”

  “I don’t think you’re doing anything wrong. All our previous guests enjoyed their stays.” The buoyant woman patted Rowan’s forearm, transferring whole wheat flour onto her skin. “Is it possible you forgot to renew the advertising subscriptions?”

  Not that Rowan recalled. “I better take another look.”

  She exited the kitchen into a hallway and walked by the living room and front vestibule. On her left was a staircase leading to the upper floors, and on her right was a solid oak door blocking the guests from accessing the private quarters she shared with Gail. She opened the door, and since there were no guests on the premises, she didn’t bother closing it behind her.

  Cramped between her bedroom and Gail’s and across the corridor from the laundry room, her office resembled a janitor’s closet. A fresh coat of white paint and a fluorescent lamp didn’t compensate for the lack of a window. One day, she might have the financial means to punch a hole in the outside wall. Or, at this rate, maybe not.

  The recent installation of a wireless Internet connection allowed her to work from anywhere in the house, but she preferred the quiet office. Her laptop sat on a cluttered pink desk, a relic from Aunt Mattie, and behind it was a purple ergonomic armchair. While she wasn’t too fond of the color, the high back provided excellent support and exceptional comfort.

  She opened her Internet browser. Her homepage, set on Icelandic Daily News, appeared on her screen. One headline, followed by a short paragraph, caught her attention.

  Tourists trapped inside volcanic cave - Day 19 (updated at 2:14 p.m. on June 11th)

  The post had been updated nine minutes ago, so the news was as fresh as Gail’s coffee and bread.

  As the rescue team attempted to extract the two Spanish tourists from a crevasse, they experienced another setback. A pulley snapped from the portable crane they were using to lower a rescuer inside the crevasse. Fortunately, the man wasn’t injured, but it will be hours before the pulley is fixed and another attempt is made.

  Ever since hearing of the tragedy, she’d clung to the hope that Bjorn, the man who owned her heart, had joined the rescue effort. If those tourists were a part of the Spanish group he’d taken on a twelve-day incursion inside volcanic caves, he wouldn’t have abandoned them, and it gave a compelling excuse as to why he hadn’t contacted her since she’d departed Iceland a month ago. From the cave, he might have tried calling her old cell phone, which she’d been forced to leave at his grandmother’s house, but he wouldn’t have made a call across the ocean, not until he returned home.

  “If she answered my phone, she may not even have told him I was gone, or she may have told him something worse.” To speak aloud gave a voice to her fears.

  And not for the first time, Rowan cursed the enduring sense of duty that her parents had instilled in her. Writing the letter had been the moral thing to do—the only thing to do—but it might end up costing her everything.

  Caught in a holding pattern, she refused to shed any more tears until the tourists were rescued. With that resolution in mind, she started browsing the most popular vacation websites and found Buccaneer’s guests’ reviews.

  Food not worthy of my dog. Bed with more lumps than oatmeal. Bathroom worse than outhouse. Best place to take a hooker.

  “For thunder’s sake!” The discovery of slanderous reviews rattled her. She didn’t run a bawdy house. “This is defamation.” No wonder she kept getting those weird phone calls.

  Irked by the audacity of the person or persons who’d made the false allegations under the guise of anonymity, Rowan wrote lengthy complaint letters to the webmaster. She was confident the posts would be deleted by the end of next week, but it seemed the damage had already been done. Needing to think of ways to rebuild Buccaneer’s reputation, she closed her laptop, grabbed her sunglasses from a shelf of the narrow bookcase standing between the desk and the door, and stomped out of her office.

  In the hallway, she crossed paths with Gail, who carried a load of clean towels. “I’ll be outside.” Thinking.

  “See you later, Miss Rowan.”

  As she marched through the kitchen, she straightened the chairs around the antique oak table. At the end of the room, a set of French doors led onto a wooden terrace furnished with comfortable lawn chairs and wicker coffee tables.

  She stepped outside, and her gaze roamed over the picturesque landscape.

  From the terrace, a cobblestone path snaked around luxuriant bushes bearing strange berries and along overflowing flowerb
eds where daisies and petunias curtsied to the most exquisite flowers.

  “I need to learn their names before they wither and die.” On the trails back home, alone with her horse, she’d developed the habit of talking to herself, and Bjorn had loved to tease her about it. She engaged in that practice now, relishing the sound of his name coming off her lips like a kiss. “Bjorn…”

  She missed him, and she missed Iceland. Throwing her energy into the bed-and-breakfast venture had been her way to cope while her fate played out on the distant island.

  The uneven grayish cobblestones led to a sinuous stream where a wrought-iron bench rested in the shadow of an elm tree.

  She stopped by the bench and, with the tip of a finger, she touched the royal blue armrest. “Still sticky.” Another day or two, and it would be safe to remove the BENCH - FRESH PAINT sign she’d pinned on the trunk of the nearby elm.

  If only she’d been armed with a spray gun, she could have doused a coat of blues over his grandmother’s true colors, not that it would have changed the outcome.

  ***

  Every Wednesday, Chris Malcolm closed his medical clinic at noon. When the two hands of the clock clapped together, his secretary locked the front door but still fed him every patient waiting in the lobby.

  Down to his last patient of the day, he was pleased to see the rash on Amy Nichol’s arm had subsided. “That looks way better.”

  The teenager smiled, showing off braces laced with pink elastics. “It’s not itchy anymore.”

  “Good.” The cause of the rash remained a mystery, but since she responded to treatment, investigating further became irrelevant. “You keep putting the cream on, and you come back to see me Monday or Tuesday.”

  “Okay, Doc.”

  Most teens called him Doc. The familiar nickname offended some of his colleagues, but he liked it. He made a notation on her file.

  June 15th – Rash is fading. Condition upgraded to satisfactory.

  “Doctor?” His secretary popped her head into the doorway. “The hospital called. There was a mix-up on the schedule again. Anyway, your night shift is cancelled. See you tomorrow.”

  The woman in charge of scheduling at the hospital was on vacation, and her temporary replacement displayed a total lack of organizational skills. How the newbie had managed to get hired was beyond Chris. “Thanks, Heather.”

  After his secretary’s departure, he glanced at his watch and blinked in surprise. Twelve forty-two. Not as late as usual.

  Since he’d taken over his grandfather’s practice four years earlier, he’d spent most of his Wednesday afternoons reading lab results, updating patient files, filling referral forms, or reviewing complicated cases. The files requiring his weekly attention were piled on the right corner of his desk. He grabbed them, stashed them in his briefcase, and headed out the back door where his car was parked. His sudden night off allowed him the luxury of postponing the study of his cases until after dinner.

  From the day he had heard of the arrival of Mattie’s niece on the island, he’d been eager to meet her. The time had come to introduce himself to the new owner of Buccaneer.

  In his brand-new yellow BMW, he sped up the steep dirt road leading to Mattie’s old house, raising a cloud of red dust behind him.

  Built at the top of the hill, Buccaneer had outlived its glory days. The exterior paint, which used to be white, peeled from the cedar siding. The weathered black asphalt shingles curled on the rooftop. Battered shutters, some blue, some gray, framed the windows of the first and second floor. And the small attic windows, with a lone crooked shutter on the left side, bulged out from the roof like a wart.

  He shook his head. Lots of costly repairs or bankruptcy loom on the horizon.

  A young woman with hair as red as the soil of Prince Edward Island jogged on a dirt path atop the ocean cliff.

  The air conditioning of his car drowned out his whistle of admiration. If the descriptions he’d received from his patients were correct, he was staring at Mattie’s niece.

  He parked on a gravel lot between the house and the one-car detached garage, turned the engine off, and stepped out. The fine red dust that seeped into everything on the island tarnished the hood of his car. Washing it had been a waste of time and money.

  A wooden swing chair sat on the large veranda hemming the front façade of the house, and a sign posted near the stairs squeaked on silver chains. Painted in red, the words BUCCANEER’S BED & BREAKFAST arched downward above a black skull and two long crossbones.

  Whoever designed the preposterous pirate logo deserves to be fired or incarcerated.

  The front lawn extended downward to the cliff. Plastering an affable smile onto his face, Chris strolled down the gentle slope. Under his feet, the grass receded, replaced by pebbles and red dirt as he neared the edge of the cliff where the young woman had paused. Fifty feet below, waves rolled against the steep rocky wall. A wrong step, and she’d fall to her death.

  “Miss O’Reilly?”

  As she twirled around, red curls bounced on her shoulders like flirtatious tendrils of silk brushing over a lover’s chest. A delicate left hand, bare of any jewelry, pushed a pair of pewter sunglasses up in her hair. “Yes?”

  Luminous green eyes filled with unconcealed curiosity gazed at him.

  “I’m Dr. Chris Malcolm. I run a practice in town.” He offered his hand, and she squeezed back with more strength than he’d expected from a woman of such small stature.

  “I’m Rowan O’Reilly.” A foreign accent marred her introduction.

  “Rowan?” The name rolled off his tongue like a rogue wave. “Lovely name.”

  “Thank you, Dr. Malcolm.” She retrieved her hand and rested it on the water bottle attached to her belt. “What can I do for you?”

  “Please, call me Chris.” With a sweep of his arm, he gestured toward the house. He was pleased when she fell into step with him. “I knew your aunt. She was an amazing lady. Will you follow in her footsteps?”

  “I’ll try.” A shadow crossed her eyes, and her expression darkened. “But it’s not as easy as I imagined.”

  “Really?” Her youth and vulnerability appealed to his compassionate nature. “Any problems you’d like to share? I’m told I’m a good listener.”

  “Well…” Perfect white teeth nipped at her lower lip. “Over the weekend, I had a closer look at the online sites advertising Buccaneer. Some disgruntled visitors had left very bad comments.”

  The shock of the discovery stopped him in his tracks. “Are you saying you found unpleasant reviews?”

  “Very unpleasant.” She inhaled a deep breath and exhaled sharply. “And I’m afraid they caused serious damage to Buccaneer’s reputation.”

  “I’m sorry. What will you do?”

  Her gaze wandered above his shoulder. “In the last four days, I spent lots of money on advertising, but if it doesn’t generate any bookings, I’ll have to postpone fixing the house or moving the gazebo.”

  Depending how she dealt with her monetary difficulties, disaster might be avoided. “The roof appears in dire need of repairs and should be redone before it leaks, but what’s wrong with the gazebo?”

  She led him toward the subject of their discussion, an octagonal pavilion erected off the garden and nestled in the shadows of the woods. “Mattie’s pet project. Gail said Mattie wanted to relocate it closer to the cliff to make room for a vegetable garden.”

  Mattie had wanted to remove the gazebo so she could grow carrots? Her lack of judgment never ceased to amaze Chris. “I don’t like speaking ill of the dead, but that sounds like a ludicrous idea.”

  Beside him, Rowan shook her head, and the breeze carried her soft laughter to his ears. “Between you and me, I agree. I just wish I could afford to make some of the more urgent repairs now, like the roof.”

  “Rowan…” As long as she remained a reasonable woman, it would be heartless of him not to support her venture. “Your aunt wasn’t just a patient, she was a dear friend, and as such, I
would like to help you financially.”

  Her mouth opened, then closed, like a fish on a cutting board. “I don’t know what to say.”

  “Please say yes. In honor of Mattie.”

  Chapter Two

  Taking advantage of Gail and Bill’s presence at suppertime, Rowan informed her two employees of her plan to renovate Buccaneer.

  From the seat he occupied at the end of the table, Buccaneer’s handyman and gardener rubbed his beard. “And where will you find the money?”

  Rowan resisted a smile. Money was at the center of Bill’s every objection. In his late sixties, the bald man always worried about cost, expenses, and repairs. His peculiar behavior baffled her. Back home on her mother’s ranch, handymen were more interested in spending money than saving it.

  “Dr. Malcolm stopped by this afternoon and kindly offered an interest-free loan.”

  Gail’s squeal of excitement didn’t drown out the snarl that rattled from Bill’s throat.

  At a loss to explain his negative reaction, Rowan fished for an explanation. “I take it you don’t like the doctor?”

  “No, I don’t.” As he stood up, he drew a cap over his naked scalp. “In the morning, I’ll price the supplies for the roof. Good night. And thanks for supper.”

  The door banged behind him before Rowan returned his farewell. “What was that about?”

  “The good doctor wanted to buy Buccaneer.” Gail removed a tray of cookies from the oven, and the sweet aroma of chocolate rose into the kitchen. “He made a big offer, but Miss Mattie was reluctant to sell. In the weeks leading to her death, I often heard Bill and Mattie argue about the doctor and the money. I think he regrets some of the things he said—and he feels responsible for her death.”

  “Why?” The kind of employer-employee relationship that Mattie and Bill had obviously shared puzzled Rowan. “Wasn’t Mattie’s fall an unfortunate accident?”