The Beauclaire Isles Series · Book One
Modern domestic suspense · Beauclaire Isles
Two men are on the steps.
The first wears a jacket with the company’s enamel pin. I’ve met him twice, at Christmas parties, but I can’t find his name. The other man is a stranger. He holds his phone to his chest with both hands, as if someone ordered him not to put it away.
“Mrs. Hayes,” the first one says.
The street behind them is deserted. No golf cart. No boat trailer. Nothing from the county, no lights, and no one from the harbormaster’s office or the Bakkens.
Two men from Langston Holdings are in my driveway on a Sunday morning, and upstairs my son is shouting that he cannot find the other boot.
February
“Mrs. Hayes,” the first one says again, and there is nothing behind it. He brought one sentence, and he has now used it twice.
“There’s been an accident,” he says. “On the water. Last night.”
The bag is by my foot where I dropped it to open the door. His towel is folded on top, next to the sunscreen and the hat he refuses to wear. I packed it at seven, arranging the small pieces of a Sunday we are not going to have. Upstairs, a drawer slams shut.
“Which hospital?” My hand is already going for the keys, and some part of me has worked out that the bag at my foot is the wrong one, that I want the St. Laurent tote, the only one that fits Solly’s comfort toys, his books, and the six snacks he won’t eat.
They both remain silent. The person holding the phone glances at the step. In the kitchen behind me, the washing machine shifts gears and begins its spin cycle, prompting me to speak.
“He’s dead.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
The one with the phone moves it from his chest down to his side, as if that would help either of us.
“Say it, then.”
“Julian passed away last night,” the first one says, and his voice goes at away, and he is a man who has met me twice at Christmas things and is not going to get through this, and neither of us is going to help the other one.
It is nine past nine on a Sunday. The seawall will be full by ten. Somewhere down the hill a horn goes, a small, flat sound that has nothing to do with me.
“He’s upstairs,” I say. “Our little boy. He’s upstairs. He’s getting his boots.”
“Mrs. Hayes…”
“He’s four.” I hold the door where it is, which is halfway. “Don’t come in yet.”
The marina on Monday afternoon is most of the way back to being a marina. The tents are coming down along the top lot in sections, and there is a man on a forklift with a stack of barriers, and the whole thing has the cheerfulness of people finishing a job that went well.
There is a woman from the harbormaster’s office running this, and a county officer with a clipboard who thinks he is, and she lets him. Nine years here, and I can read a lanyard at forty feet, a skill I have never once wanted and am grateful for exactly now. She has a lanyard and a windbreaker, and she is somewhere near sixty, and she says my name once, at the beginning, and does not say it again.
The log is an actual book, which surprises me. I had pictured a screen, and I could not tell you why I had pictured anything. It is a hardbound book with a ribbon in it and a page for every day, and she opens it on the counter between us, and there is a line for the squall in a hand that is not hurried: 23:05, hard from the southeast. 23:22, through. Somebody made a note of it, before it was the note that mattered.
“It came through so fast,” she says.
“It was flat at nine,” I say. “There was nothing to see.”
The officer with the clipboard tells me about the report, how long it takes, and who signs it, and I say yes at the end of his sentences. I recognize the strategy. He has a form, and if he follows the boxes, he can get to the end of this without having to feel a thing.
He reads the list of personal effects from a form. A watch. A phone. A wallet, untouched. A tidy, administrative part of my mind is pleased he wasn’t robbed, and I hate that part for it. When he asks if I want them now, I hear myself asking what most people do, as if there are rules for this club that has just made me a member.
“Whatever’s easier for you,” he says.
“Hold them.”
He writes HOLD in the box and makes sure I see him do it.
“Can I see him?” I say.
The pause is not long. It is long enough.
“Not today,” the woman says.
A version of me wants to say, “Why not?” I can feel her straining against my ribs. But she is not the one who runs things. The one in charge nods, thanks the woman, and asks about the service. There is always a next thing to manage. Today, that is the next thing.
I am so good at this. I have always been so good at this.
She writes a number on a card and gives it to me. The county for the report.
I put the card in the pocket of my coat, then take it out and put it in my bag, because a coat pocket is where things go to be lost. As my hands move, a script is already running in my head for the next phone call and the one after that. A loop of me saying it endlessly.
Out past the fuel dock a boat comes in under power with two people on the foredeck coiling line, and one of them laughs at something the other one said, and it carries all the way across the water, and then it is gone and there is just the forklift.
As I walk away from the docks, the sound of the forklift fades, and my mind, free for a second, lands on the chair. He was going to carry it down today. He has carried it every year since before Solly, complaining loudly and letting no one else help. It’s still in the garage. I left it there this morning, and I am not going back for it.
Graham Vale is standing at the end of the dock when I come back up.
Everyone on this island knows who Graham Vale is; it is one of the three or four things we agree on. In nine years, I have been in rooms with him four times, yet I have never received an introduction. He moves in a world above ours, and I have never tried to cross into it.
“Mrs. Hayes.” He does not put out his hand. “I’m sorry. I knew him a little. He was good.”
“Thank you.” He was good is what you say about a man you knew a little.
He says nothing else. He just looks out at the water, and the moment goes on, and he lets it.
“May I walk you to your car?”
It is not a question, and it is not an order, and I go with him, so it cannot have mattered much.
He walks on the outside, nearer the water. Halfway along he lifts a hand very slightly, and the woman from the harbormaster’s office comes over. “Everything for Mrs. Hayes comes through my office directly,” he tells her, his voice quiet but absolute. “No more forms today.” The woman looks from him to me, then nods twice. Just like that, the bureaucratic wall I’d been hitting all afternoon dissolves. I do not ask how. He does not explain. I shift the bag to my other shoulder. My shoes slip on the wet boards, yet I keep pace with him. He does not offer an arm. I am grateful for that. I’m not sure why he won’t let me slow down.
“Three things,” he says, “and then I’ll leave you alone. Say no to any of them.”
Some appalling committee part of me begins, immediately, to number them.
“All right.”
“There’s a woman in our office who does this. Not for me. For the families. She’ll call the bank and the county and the insurers, and she’ll do it in the order that works, which is not the order they’ll tell you. You’d be signing, not calling.”
“I can call a bank.”
“You can.” He steps over a cleat without breaking stride. “Or you can let my office do it. They will first call the county recorder because they know the bank will eventually send you there, and they know the counter closes on Mondays.”
“Yes,” I say. “All right. Yes.”
“Second…” He breaks off, waiting for a man with a hand truck to pass. “There’s a car and a driver for the week. You have a six-year-old boy and forms to sign and you should not be doing both in traffic.”
“He’s four.”
He takes that. Graham doesn’t offer an apology for it and doesn’t claim he didn’t say it; for a moment, he’s a man who’s read a fact about me, not one who knows it. He looks down the lot at the tents coming apart and back.
“Four,” he says. “Then you especially should not be doing both in traffic.”
“That’s a lot.”
“It’s a car.” He says it lightly, and it is the first thing he has said that has any air in it. “The third one is that I’d like to handle the Bakkens. They’ll want to come and see you. They were on the boat and they are not going to be able to help themselves, and it isn’t good for them or for you. I can have that conversation.”
The Bakkens. The name drops into the orderly path of my thoughts. I’ve managed the service, the chair in the garage. I hadn’t let myself get to them: the two men on the deck, the ones who saw it, and the ones who will need to tell me.
“They’ll want to say they tried.”
“They will.”
“Did they?”
He does not answer immediately, and he does not look away either. A gull comes over the fuel dock low enough that we both hear it and neither of us looks up.
“I don’t know yet,” he says. “When I do, you’ll get the full report, not the version they’ve edited for your comfort.”
“Yes,” I say. “Please. Take them off me.”
We are at the car. The keys are already in my hand and have been since the top of the ramp. Some part of me is still doing her job. He does not open the door for me. I notice.
“Nothing here is a favor,” he says. “Julian was a valued executive. This is what the company does. I want to be clear about that now, because someone will eventually try to call it one.”
“All right.”
“Mrs. Hayes.” He steps back, one step, and puts his hands in his pockets. “Go home.”
The Gundersens bring food over at six and stay seven minutes. Neither of them comes past the mat. One of them looks once at the front room door, at the sound of the digger going, and says nothing about it, and I could kiss her for it and do not. There is a dish on the counter with a note on it about the oven and another dish in the fridge with a note on it about the first note. I am going to be governed by notes for a month.
All day, every time Solly has looked up from his cars, some muscle in my chest has tightened, waiting for the question. But he never asks.
He is on the floor of the front room with the digger and a plastic tub of cars, doing the voices, and he has been doing the voices for forty minutes, which is the longest he has ever done anything. I’m in the doorway with a tea towel in my hands, wrung into a rope. My hands have been busy without me. I have stood in this exact spot on ordinary days, watching this same scene, and thought nothing of it.
“Is Daddy at work?”
He does not look up when he says it. He puts the digger against the tub and reverses it and puts it against the tub again.
My hand grips the back of the armchair, the weave of the fabric coarse under my fingers.
“He’s not here right now, Solly. He’s not coming back.”
The digger stops.
“Ever?”
“No.”
“Okay.” The digger goes back into the tub, and he sorts the cars into the ones that are fast and the ones that are not, which is a system he made up and changes, and after a minute he is doing the voices again.
Then he holds one up without turning around. “This one’s fast.”
“That one’s very fast.”
“It’s the fastest one.” It is the yellow one with the black checks, which was the slowest one last week.
“Do you want the tub in your room or left down here?”
He goes back to it.
I put the tub where he can reach it in the morning. I do the bath, the teeth, and the three books he has had every night since he could say their names. He picks the middle one twice, same as always. He does not ask again, though the answer sits on my tongue the whole time, practiced and useless. Then I stand in the kitchen without turning the light on, next to a dish I have not opened, and the refrigerator cycles on and I listen to it run.
The phone rings at eight. The tap is running hot enough to fog the window over the sink, and I turn it off with my wrist because of the phone.
“I won’t keep you,” Graham says. “Two of them have called our office already. There’ll be more tomorrow. Someone always finds the home number.”
“What is there to say to them?”
“You’d tell them the truth, and they’d only print the half of it that sells papers.” Something goes down on a desk on his end. “Don’t talk to them. Not tomorrow, not next week. If they come to the door, you say nothing at all and you shut it. Then you tell the office, and it stops.”
“And if they’ve already got something?”
“Then they’ve got it, and it doesn’t matter what you add.” A pause. “They’ll write that he was an executive at Langston and that the weather turned. That is also what happened.”
“Yes.”
I turn my back to the sink and put my hand flat on the counter, on the cold part where nothing has been standing.
“If the phone rings, let it. We’re diverting the calls, but if one slips through, don’t answer. You’ll recognize the numbers you need.”
“All right.”
“You don’t have to explain yourself to anybody for a year.” Silence falls on the line for a moment. A chair scrapes on his end. “Is there food in the house?”
I pause, wondering if that’s a question about whether I’m a competent mother or whether the community has shown up. I’m unsure which, and I decide not to find out.
“Thank you,” I reply instead. “Truly, I thank you.”
When someone solves every problem in front of you, how long does it take before you ask why he was there first?
That is the rest of Shadows of a Stolen Heart: a widow trying to understand why her husband’s company knows what she needs before she does. Publishing 29 September 2026.
Another house on the same island
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