“I told the police I would take you back to the Reserve, Brad,” Michael said. “ASAP.”

  Brad pulled a brown betty teapot off the shelf and threw in a couple of Red Rose tea bags. He placed it on the table as the simmering tea kettle whistled.

  “Fine, whatever,” Phil said, standing up and closing the fridge door before collapsing onto a seat at the kitchen table. “But I need a cup of tea before anyone goes anywhere.”

  “Alright, alright, one cup,” I muttered as we all pulled out a seat.

  “Brad, the cookies are in the cupboard.”

  Brad placed a bag of Peek Freans Fruit Cremes on the table before filling each mug with the amber liquid.

  “Milk for me,” Phil ordered.

  “None for me,” Michael said.

  I placed a dribble in Phil’s cup and my own before adding a teaspoonful of sugar.

  “God, that taste’s good,” Phil said as he took a long sip, smacking his lips in contentment. “So what is all this fussin’ about?”

  I took a sip from my mug. “I already told you, Phil. The Wet Witch was gone, and no one was answering any of the radio calls from the Coast Guard. Brad was missing, and we didn’t know what the hell was going on.”

  Phil snorted and rummaged in the bag for a cookie. “It’s not my fault the radio cut out. It’s finicky like that.

  “You mean old,” I murmured quietly before raising my voice a bit louder. “Well, the RCMP thought Brad might have done something stupid.”

  “Like what?” Brad rummaged one hand in the half-empty cookie bag. He pulled out a biscuit and took a bite.

  I studied his face. Yes, he was calm now, but I could tell from the dark shadows beneath his eyes that he hadn’t slept well. Worrying about his mother, most likely.

  “I don’t know, stolen the boat, run away.”

  “But why would I do that?”

  Michael sighed. “A lot of people have been worried about you this summer, Brad. Your mom, your uncle, a lot of us.”

  “I don’t understand why.”

  “Because you’ve been struggling,” I finished for Michael. “You keep disappearing. Nobody knows where you go or what you’re doing. And with Will gone and your mom under suspicion after the death of Rosalie, people began to get ideas.”

  Brad took another bite out of his cookie, staring into the middle distance. “So by ideas, you mean people thought I was doing drugs or stealing.”

  “Yeah, I guess,” I said. “Or something worse.”

  His eyes narrowed in to focus on my face. “Worse? What could be worse than that? You mean that I may have killed Rose?”

  We stared at each other for a lengthy moment before I curtly nodded.

  Phil slammed his mug down on the table. “What in the name of all that’s holy are you talking about, Kate?” he shouted. “Are you saying that you think Brad had somethin’ to do with Rose’s death!”

  Rather than the shock or anger I expected, Brad’s head fell backward, and a roar of incredulous laughter spat out of his mouth. He half sputtered out his remaining cookie, wiping his mouth with one hand before rattling to a stop. ‘I don’t know why I’m laughing. It’s not funny. None of this is funny. I guess it’s just so crazy, I can’t help but laugh.”

  “Crazy is one word for it,” Phil barked out. “Bloody stupid is another!”

  Unlike Brad, Phil did not find anything funny in this, his grey brows dropping so low that they formed bushy arches just above his eyelids.

  “Why would anyone think I would want to hurt Rose?” Brad asked.

  Michael shrugged. “Your family has a long, and not particularly happy, history with her. She hurt your mother terribly and ultimately played a role in your parents’ divorce.”

  He nodded. “Yes,” he said with a matter of fact tone that surprised me. “That’s true. She told me all about it.”

  “Your mom?” I asked.

  “Oh no.” He shook his head and drained the last tea from his mug before looking me straight in the eye. “Rose did.”

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  My heart stopped for a moment in my chest. Beat. Pause. Beat. “She what?”

  “Rose told me all about it. All of it.”

  “When?”

  “When she’d stop by to visit me, for Christ’s sake,” Phil said. “I don’t know what’s so hard for you to understand about all of this, Kate.”

  “But what were you doing here, Brad? I mean, at Phil’s house before Rosalie died? I know you came to help him afterward, but… "

  Brad and Phil shared a long look before Phil curtly nodded his head. “Go ahead and tell her,” he said. “It’s going to come out now anyways.”

  “What’s going to come out?” Michael asked, his eyes moving back and forth between the two.

  “I’ve been working with Phil all summer.”

  “All summer?” My voice rose in surprise. “Doing what?”

  “I’ve been teaching the boy, alright? Teaching him how to fish,” Phil said, pointing in my direction. “And you can wipe that shocked expression off your face. You think I’d been teaching him how to rob banks the way you two are looking at me.”

  “You have been teaching Brad how to fish,” I repeated, my mind trying to make sense of this unexpected turn of events. “Why?”

  “Because I want him to become a chartered accountant, that’s why.” He snorted. “Why do you think? So that he can become a commercial salmon fisherman when he graduates from high school.”

  “Become a commercial salmon fisherman?”

  “Yes,” Brad picked up the narrative. “I don’t want to go to college. I don’t want to work in an office. I know that’s what Will wants, but it’s not for me. I want to be outdoors, doing something with my hands.”

  “Fishing,” I repeated, still in shock.

  “Yes, fishing. One day, I was sitting down at the docks when Phil came in with the Wet Witch. He asked if I’d help him get the catch out of the hold. And that was the start of it.”

  “He started showing up all the time,” Phil continued. “I just gave in and began to teach him.”

  “And I knew it was the right thing for me,” Brad’s broad, genuine smile pushed against the outer reaches of his cheeks. “It was something I enjoyed doing that didn’t involve reading a book or writing something down.”

  “But why all the skullduggery?” Michael asked, taking another sip of his tea. “Why not just tell your mother you’d decided to become a commercial fisherman?”

  Brad shook his head. “My mom went to college, Uncle Sam went to college, and now Will is off to college. She wanted me to make something more of myself. More than just being a fisherman.”

  “Surely she’d accept your decision?” I asked.

  Brad shrugged. “That’s what I’ve been battling with all summer. I wanted to tell her, but I knew she’d be so pissed off with me. I just kept avoiding it. And her.”

  “No wonder she thought you were in trouble, Brad. You wouldn’t talk to her and kept disappearing at all hours. I’d have thought the same thing if I was your mother. And it was all because of…fishing.”

  “Yes, at least until Rose died. Then I had to look after Phil.”

  “And he’s been a good boy,” Phil said with a gentle gruffness I had never heard from him before. “Kept me going in those first weeks.”

  “But you said you’d talked to Rose,” I continued. “That she told you about what happened between her and your parents.”

  “Yes, she’d stop by the Wet Witch or visit the cottage to see Phil. That’s how I met her. And when she found out who I was, she wanted to know everything about my family. And she wanted to talk to me about why she returned to Wynter Island.”

  “To work on her autobiography.”

  Phil snorted. “Bah, that was just a time filler for her. That’s not why she came back.”

  “What?” I repeated in confusion.

  “She was a Buddhist,” Brad started.

  “Yes, I know. I went to her funeral.”

  Brad nodded. “She believed in all that Buddhist stuff. That she needed to make peace with her past so she could ‘adjust her karma for her future existences.’”

  “A smart girl, but what a load of rubbish,” Phil grumbled.

  “Well, it wasn’t to her,” Brad continued. “She believed that every person has the power to change their destiny.”

  “Still not getting where this is going,” Michael said.

  “She said she had been hurt a lot as a kid. When she got older, she turned that pain into a weapon she could use to hurt others. Other people like my mom.”

  “Are you saying she came to Wynter Island to apologize to everyone? To ask for forgiveness?” I couldn’t keep the shock from my voice.

  “In a way.”

  Michael sighed. “That was a bit overly optimistic of her.”

  “She realized that, but she had to try. It wasn’t as important for them to forgive her as it was for her to admit she was sorry for all the pain she had caused. That’s why she wanted to do the thing with mom.”

  A sudden zing of realization shot from the top of my skull to the tip of my toes. “You mean the TV show?”

  “Yes. I told her there was no way Mom would willingly sit down and talk with her, even if I asked her to. She has a temper and a bad habit of,” he hesitated, “holding a grudge.”

  “So Rosalie insisted on doing the talk show because it was the only way she could force your mother to sit down and listen to her.”

  Brad nodded. “Yes. And at the same time, have a chance to apologize to the entire island. But she never got the chance.”

  I pondered this for a moment. “Brad, did you ever go and see her by yourself? At the Glass House?”

  He hesitated, surprised. “Yeah, a few days before she died. How did you know that?”

  “I have my spies. Why? Why were you going to visit her?”

  “She asked me to stop by. To park the car at the end of the road in case Scott and Jason returned home early. She wasn’t ready to talk about her plans with them yet.”

  “Talk about what plans?”

  Brad’s eyes locked with Phil’s again.

  Phil finally spoke. “I was close to Rose’s dad, Bill. Her mother, Nancy—I always fancied her, you know. Rose got her good looks from her mom. And then, when Nancy died so young,” His eyes filled with unshed tears, “Bill fell apart. And Rose was just left to look after herself. I didn’t know how to fix things. And I was grieving Nancy myself. I should have done more,” he hesitated, “but I didn’t.”

  “I’m sure you tried your best, Phil.”

  He waved his hand in the air, brushing away my platitudes. “Rose wrote to me occasionally from California, so I was able to contact her when her father died. She didn’t want to come back for the funeral, so I handled everything. And then, out of nowhere, she wrote to me a few months ago to tell me she was returning to Wynter Island. To live here.”

  “You must have been as shocked as everyone else,” Michael said.

  He shrugged. “She bought the old Wintford place, and her boyfriend and that other guy moved in along with her. Before long, she started dropping by the cottage for tea. That’s how she met Brad and came up with her crazy plan.”

  “What plan?” I repeated.

  “Rose asked me to come to the Glass House so we could talk,” Brad said and paused. “She said she’d made a lot of money in Hollywood and wanted to pay Phil back for his kindness to her and her father. She wanted to buy the Wet Witch so that he would have enough money to retire and….”

  Phil continued for him. “And then she would sign the boat over to Brad so he could start his career as a fisherman debt-free.”

  “What the hell!”

  Phil looked over at me, his mouth pursing with a touch of puritanism. “Your language today, Kate. Really.”

  “So what happened?”

  “What happened,” Brad continued, “was that she was murdered. Before she could do any of that.”

  I paused as the numbers in the slot machine in my head spun around and then skidded to a stop. “Which means you had nothing to gain from her death,” I said.

  “Yes,” Brad nodded, “and everything to lose.”

  Chapter Thirty

  Ipulled into the drive of the familiar log farmhouse and idled to a stop. In the numerous pens, an assortment of injured and abandoned animals that had come to call Shea and Lesley’s farmhouse their temporary or, for many of them, permanent home were resting. There was the llama, Hercules, so named because he believed he was the strongest creature on earth. He was surrendered to Shea when his owners could no longer handle his escape attempts. In another, a small clutch of barn owls hopped around their enclosure. Their mother had been hit by a car, and it had fallen to Shea to hand-rear them until she could transfer them to a permanent wildlife center.

  Shea had the kindest heart of anyone I knew. But could I count on that kindness once she heard what I had to say to her today? That I didn’t know.

  I pulled the keys out of the ignition and stepped out of the truck.

  I knocked on the thick, hand-hewn front door. I knew she was home. Her blue Toyota Highlander was parked outside. Finally, I heard footsteps coming toward the front door. The door opened to show Shea, but a very different-looking Shea than I was used to.

  Her shoulder-length blonde hair, thin to the point of wispiness, had been crushed into a messy bun on the back of her head. Violet half-moons hung suspended beneath her blue eyes. Eyes that usually held joy and curiosity were now dull and leaden.

  “Hi, Shea. Sorry to pop in without warning. I wondered if we could talk?”

  She said nothing, merely opened the front door wider and gestured me inside.

  The interior of the house was an odd mixture of old and new. It had been one of the original settler’s homes on Wynter Island, still evident in its thick log walls and the massive pine beams supporting its dark wood ceiling. Electrified oil lamps swung from those beams, making the house hazardous for anyone over 5’ 8”. Luckily for them, both Lesley and Shea were shorter than that. I, on the other hand, had to make sure to duck or find myself clobbered by the base of one of the swinging lamps.

  I sat on the sofa, moving one of her rescue cats, an orange tabby named Oskar, to another cushion. Shea sat down in a rocking chair opposite me.

  “What’s up?” she eventually asked as she rocked back and forth with a metronomic rhythm.

  “I wanted to check in on you. See how you’re doing.”

  Shea waggled her head indecisively as if she lacked the strength to hold it steady.

  “About what you’d expect. Selesia is in Victoria jail awaiting her bail hearing. Lesley will be going over to help with that.” She ground the last words out through her teeth.

  “Lesley is just doing her job, Shea.”

  A spark illuminated her dull eyes, adding a sudden flush of crimson to her pallid face. “I don’t want to talk about Lesley.”

  Oh boy. She’s in worse shape than I thought.

  “Okay. Did you hear about Brad? That Michael and I found him and Phil yesterday? They were fishing up by Ucluelet. Apparently, Phil’s radio broke down.”

  She nodded. “Yeah, I heard. Thank goodness he’s okay. That was the last thing Selesia, " she stuttered on the name, “needed to be worrying about right now. And Sam, too.”

  “I heard Rick arrived from Prince George.”

  “Yeah. He’s staying at Selesia’s with the boys for the time being. Brad is adamant that he won’t return with him to Prince George, so he may stay here, under Sam’s care. After all, it’s not like he’s a toddler. He’ll be eighteen in four months.”

  I hesitated. “I found out some other stuff, too, Shea.”

  Her eyes focused on my face. “What stuff?”

  “About what Brad has been up to this summer.”

  “Ohh.” One eyebrow raised with only mild interest. “It seems such a trivial thing to have been worried about after everything that’s happened. What was he doing? Hanging out with friends? Drinking?”

  “No. He was with Phil.”

  “Yeah, I know he was with Phil. You already told me that.”

  “No, I mean he’s been with Phil all summer. Even before Rosalie died.”

  “Really?” Shea said, confused. “What were they doing?”

  “Fishing.”

  Oskar butted my arm out of the way with his thick orange head so he could crawl into my lap.

  “Fishing? You mean salmon fishing? On the Wet Witch?”

  I nodded. “Yes. Phil has been teaching him the ropes to become a commercial fisherman. That’s what Brad has decided he wants to do for a career. Fish.”

  Shea was temporarily dumbfounded. “Selesia never mentioned anything about this to me.”

  “She didn’t know. That’s why he was skulking around the island. He didn’t want his mom to find out what he was doing.”

  “Why?”

  “Because he knew it would make her mad. She wanted him to attend college like Will or, at the very least, get training in something.”

  Shea nodded. “Yes, he’s right about that. She had high hopes for both boys.”

  “That’s not all of it, Shea.”

  Her eyebrows rose. “This is quite the information dump. What else is there?”

  “He met Rosalie.”

  Shea sat quietly for a moment, letting that soak in. “I’m not surprised he didn’t tell his mom about that. Selesia would have been livid.”

  “Rosalie visited Phil a lot. She got to know Brad pretty well. They talked about his hopes and dreams…”

  “And?”

  “And about what happened between her and his parents.”

  Shock stilled all movement in Shea’s face. “So she was trying to rewrite history. To make herself look better.”

  “No, not at all. Quite the opposite.”

  “What did she say?”

  I stroked one hand down the white speckled stripe that ran along Oskar’s spine, his head tipping up to stare dreamily at my face.

  “That it was her fault. All of it.”

  “You’re kidding.”