On The Edge Read online

  Bougainvillea.

  David.

  She was exactly where she wanted to be.

  SHELTER ISLAND

  Carla Neggers

  To Sherryl Woods—

  a wonderful writer and friend

  1

  “Antonia…”

  Antonia Winter stopped abruptly in the middle of the mostly empty hospital parking garage, certain she’d heard someone whisper her name. She glanced at the parked cars and the exits, but saw no one else. She took a cautious step forward, her dress shoes echoing on the concrete. She’d changed from the more casual clothes she wore in the E.R.—she had a dinner date in Back Bay.

  It was tension, she decided. Simple tension had her turning ordinary garage sounds into someone whispering her name.

  “Antonia Winter…Dr. Winter…”

  She gasped and ran the last five steps to her car, clicking the button on her key that automatically unlocked the door. Her hands shaking, she ripped open the door and threw herself in behind the wheel. She hit the button that locked all four doors.

  This couldn’t be happening to her. She had to be imagining it.

  This wasn’t the first incident.

  Wasting no time, Antonia stuck the key into the ignition and started the engine. It was just after seven o’clock on Saturday evening. She’d been on duty a full twelve hours. She was a trauma physician in the busy emergency room of a downtown Boston hospital. None of her cases today had been easy ones. But that was her job, and she was good at it—she was accustomed to dealing with its demands. She wasn’t one to go off the deep end and imagine things that hadn’t happened, draw the most dramatic conclusion to innocent events.

  At least she’d never been that sort. Maybe the demands of the rest of her life had finally gotten to her. Demands like Hank Callahan, she thought. He was her dinner date that night. She’d been half in love with him for months, but their relationship had complications. Her work, his work. Her family. His past. Her past.

  Hank…

  No. She couldn’t blame him—she wouldn’t.

  She wasn’t hearing things or making up things that hadn’t happened. That was the problem. They were real.

  Someone had just whispered her name in the parking garage.

  She edged out of her space, glancing in the rearview mirror and side mirror every few yards as she made her way to the exit. She almost asked the parking attendant if he’d heard anything, but she knew he wouldn’t have. Once out on the street, she forced herself to take several deep breaths.

  Yesterday, it had been an anonymous instant message. The third in a row. Your patients trust you, Dr. Winter. What if you betrayed their trust?

  All were on the same theme. A doctor’s trust. A doctor’s betrayal of that trust. Without going into detail, she’d asked a friend more familiar with computers than she was about instant messages, and he’d said that tracking down an instant messenger who wanted to remain anonymous was very difficult, if not impossible.

  There was nothing overtly threatening in the messages. And certainly no mention of Hank Callahan, a candidate for an open U.S. Senate seat from the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. The election was the first Tuesday in November, less than two months away. If the messages had mentioned him, Antonia would have to report them, tell Hank. She didn’t want to cause an unnecessary stir—she wanted a sensible explanation for what was going on. If something was going on. She still didn’t want to believe someone was trying to get under her skin. Creep her out.

  But who would want to?

  Why?

  Was someone stalking her?

  No. It couldn’t be. Tension, fatigue and her imagination must have turned the whir of a car engine or an exhaust fan into someone whispering her name. Maybe the instant messages were from someone whose screen name she just didn’t remember. A friend or colleague working on a paper or struggling with an ethical question, idly instant messaging her. Maybe they weren’t meant to be anonymous or creepy.

  But when she reached the restaurant, Antonia paid extra to have her car valet parked and avoided another parking garage. She stood in the warm evening air and took several deep breaths to calm herself. There. It’ll be all right. I can do this.

  She had on a simple black dress, black stockings, black heels. Gold earrings. Her dark auburn hair, chin-length and straight, was tucked neatly behind her ears. No lipstick—she didn’t have time for it now.

  As promised, Hank was waiting for her at their table. He was, she thought as she smiled at him and waved, the most drop-dead handsome man she’d ever met. Forty-one and tall, with graying dark hair, a square jaw and eyes so blue they took her breath away. She’d met him last November in Cold Ridge, her small hometown in the White Mountains of New Hampshire. Almost a year ago, she realized. He’d just thrown his hat into the senate campaign in bordering Massachusetts. His weekend in New Hampshire was to have been a break. Hiking with his air force pals, Tyler North and Manny Carrera. Instead they’d come upon Antonia’s younger sister, Carine, a nature photographer, being shot at in the woods. Later that same weekend, Hank, Ty and Manny had rescued a wealthy Boston couple stranded on the ridge for which her hometown was named.

  Complications, Antonia thought. So many complications.

  Hank smiled, getting to his feet. Other diners watched. He was a man in the spotlight. There didn’t seem to be any reporters around, but she couldn’t know for certain, another reminder that it wasn’t just her reputation as a respected physician that would suffer if she rushed to judgment or cried wolf about a possible stalker. His would, too, as a man who was asking Massachusetts voters to trust him. With just weeks left in the campaign, she had to be sure before she said anything, although she had to admit, her own nature made her reluctant to speak up. She was thirty-five and accustomed to handling her own problems.

  But it wasn’t just Hank’s campaign or her own reserve that made her cautious—it was Hank himself. He was a Massachusetts Callahan, the current most visible member of a visible family of dedicated men and women who were expected to do their share in the military, in public service and in business. Hank had left the air force two years ago as a major, a helicopter pilot who’d flown countless search-and-rescue missions: on his last mission, he and a team of pararescuers had performed the dangerous high seas recovery of five fishermen whose boat had capsized. It had put his picture on the front pages of newspapers across the country. While emergency operations conducted in conjunction with civilian agencies sometimes hit the press, his many combat search-and-rescues hadn’t received such coverage—Antonia had learned that the military didn’t necessarily publicize when and how it went after aircrews downed behind enemy lines.

  Hank would come to her rescue in a heartbeat.

  And not just because he was trained to rescue people.

  He lost his family ten years ago when his wife and young daughter were killed in a car accident while he was serving overseas. It still haunted him—everyone knew it, could see it. He wasn’t even on the continent when the accident happened, a head-on collision with a car driving on the wrong side of the interstate. The other driver was a woman in her mid-fifties who’d had a stroke. Brittany Callahan, three, was killed instantly. Her mother, Lisa, thirty, never regained consciousness and died in the hospital three hours later. Hank wasn’t with them—it wasn’t possible for him to have been with them. But he didn’t look at it that way, at least not emotionally, and probably never would, no matter how much he’d come to accept that his wife and daughter were gone.

  No, Antonia thought, making her way to their table. She couldn’t just think she might have a stalker or some weirdo trying to get under her skin. She had to be certain before she breathed a word of her fears to anyone—even Hank. Maybe even especially Hank.

  Robert Prancer peered through the restaurant window. The bitch doctor was sitting across a small, candlelit table, drinking wine and having dinner with the wannabe senator.

  Didn’t she know?

  Robert h
ad to struggle to keep from screaming into the window and drawing attention to himself. Damn it, didn’t she know what she was doing to him? Seeing her with another man. Knowing she didn’t care about him. That all his fantasies were just that. Fantasies. Delusions.

  He didn’t know what to do. He’d been lashing out, acting on impulse for the past couple of days. But there was no satisfaction in instant messages—he couldn’t see her getting them, could only imagine the look on her face. Her curiosity about who it was, whether the messages meant anything. Was she in danger? Was someone trying to scare her? She wouldn’t know for sure. He’d designed the messages so she wouldn’t.

  And she wouldn’t overreact. Not Antonia Winter, M.D. Robert had watched her work for almost three years. She wasn’t one to panic. Her coolness under stress was just all the more reason to build to a crescendo and see her quivering with fear, incoherent with it, begging for her life.

  He thought a moment, watching the two in the restaurant laughing with the waiter. Was that really what he wanted? Dr. Bitch begging for her life? Was he willing to go that far?

  Farther?

  Tonight in the parking garage—brilliant. He’d heard her stop and gasp. But, still, he couldn’t see her.

  And he wanted to, he realized. He really, really wanted to.

  He’d taken the subway from the hospital. He could still smell oil from where he’d sat on the concrete floor in the parking garage. How had he missed a damn oil slick the size of the Exxon Valdez spill? Fucking thing was huge. But he hadn’t dared to move. He’d spotted Antonia Winter, M.D., Dr. Winter, the bitch doctor—he’d spotted her walking to her car, her heels click-clicking on the concrete. She was in a rush to see the wannabe senator. She didn’t rush with her patients. Then she was all calm and empathetic and dedicated.

  What crap.

  Robert thought back to a few weeks ago when he had shot himself in the foot and had gotten a good dose of her idea of dedication to her patients. She’d turned him in. He’d had to explain the gun to the cops and the shooting himself in the foot to them and the shrinks. Took him days and days to get that all straightened out. His damn foot still hurt. He’d meant only to get her attention, try to bridge the gap between them. Her a doctor, him a fucking floor-mopper in the same hospital. He figured he needed to do something dramatic to test her, as a doctor, as a woman. As the woman. He had never loved anyone else. Never. He’d been completely true to her.

  He should have shot someone else. Another of the floor-moppers, maybe. Get her attention that way. He could have delivered the victim to her. She liked heroes, right? Look at the hero wannabe senator, saving pilots and fishermen.

  Live and learn.

  After his foot healed, it was back to pushing his broom and wringing out his mop in the E.R. Putting up with the assholes and losers who thought it was a good job, patronizing doctors and nurses and administrators who told him what a contribution the cleaning crews made. Listening to them all talk about a hard day’s work for a hard day’s pay and how the hospital couldn’t run without it being clean. His co-workers bought lottery tickets and followed the Red Sox and took their kids to school, exchanged recipes and fifty-cents-off coupons and thought they had a life.

  Robert had a goddamn 156 IQ. He knew he should be running the place. His nitwit co-workers didn’t see that. They teased him about his name. Dancer and Prancer, Comet and Vixen…

  He didn’t tell them his zero of a mother had made it up. He’d never known his father. She probably hadn’t, either. But leave it to her to name her one and only son after a reindeer. She’d died when he was eleven. Good riddance. Stupid people annoyed him.

  He’d thought Antonia Winter had recognized his brilliance, his potential. He’d seen in her a kindred soul. A soul mate. A woman who understood him.

  Fat chance.

  He walked up the street, trying to control his breathing. No! He couldn’t talk like that. Maybe he still did have a chance.

  “Maybe.”

  She was so damn beautiful, with her auburn hair and blue eyes, that straight nose and small, slim body. Brainy-looking but also physical.

  His type.

  “No.” He shook his head, aware of people passing him on the street, looking at him like he was some loser who talked to himself. But he had important issues on his mind. “No, she’s not my type.”

  His type wouldn’t have betrayed him.

  The bitch doctor had. As a physician, as the woman he loved. On every level. Broke his damn heart. He was smart—he wasn’t bad looking. Sandy-haired. Fit. He’d taken up running on her account, before the foot thing.

  The balmy late summer temperatures had brought out the crowds. Robert figured the bitch doctor and the wannabe senator would be at dinner for a couple hours, anyway.

  Well, what the hell. He knew where she lived.

  And he had a key.

  2

  Hank Callahan had exactly one hour between the lunch at the Cambridge homeless shelter he’d just left and his upcoming three o’clock meeting with local small business owners—enough time, surely, to drag information out of Antonia Winter’s little sister.

  If not, he’d just have to come back.

  Antonia had gone missing on him, and he intended to find out what was going on.

  He parked in front of the tenement building off Inman Square where Carine Winter had rented an apartment in late spring, a move that had caught her family and friends by surprise. She didn’t belong in Cambridge. She belonged up in Cold Ridge, New Hampshire. She should be taking pictures of birds and mountain scenes, living in her little log cabin in the shadows of the ridge that gave her hometown its name. She was a nature photographer, a good one. But she’d had her life turned upside down in February when her fiancé walked out on her, and she’d made up her mind that she needed to live in the city.

  Once a Winter made up her mind, that was usually it.

  Tyler North—her ex-fiancé and one of Hank’s closest friends—had tried to warn him about the Winter siblings, not that Ty had heeded his own advice. He’d fallen for Carine after some smugglers had shot at her last November, and then he’d asked her to marry him. They’d known each other all their lives, but the prospect of Tyler North and Carine Winter actually marrying had taken everyone by surprise.

  No one need to have worried. Ty pulled the plug a week before the wedding. He still insisted it wasn’t cold feet—he said he’d come to his senses in the nick of time. He couldn’t marry Carine. She’d lost her parents when she was three and wanted to lead a peaceful life, and Tyler North wasn’t a peaceful man.

  But now Hank had to suffer for his friend’s bad behavior, too. It had put Antonia at arm’s length from him for months. Only recently had Hank managed to get her not to think about her broken-hearted sister when she looked at him. It didn’t matter that Antonia had known Tyler even longer than he had—they’d shared a military career. They’d performed missions together.

  “The Winters are thick as thieves,” Ty had once tried to explain. “Don’t let their bickering fool you. Hurt one, you’ve hurt them all. They’re about as hard-bitten and stubborn as anyone you’ll ever meet.”

  It was true. When it came to being hard-bitten and stubborn, the only one who rivaled the Winter sisters, their brother, Nate, and Gus, the uncle who’d raised them, was Tyler North. He’d grown up in Cold Ridge and still called it home, although he was a master sergeant in the air force, a nearly twenty-year pararescue veteran. Ty had seen it all, and he’d done it all.

  Except marry Carine Winter.

  Which complicated Hank’s life, but he wasn’t just going to stop being Ty’s friend. The mutual respect they’d developed for each other in the military had solidified into friendship now that Hank was out of the military and fraternization rules were no longer an issue. Ty was the one who’d invited him to Cold Ridge in the first place. Otherwise, Hank thought, he wouldn’t have been there last November to meet the Winter sisters.

  But he knew he had to be
patient. Although Antonia didn’t say so in as many words—she didn’t have to—she felt she was being disloyal to her sister by falling for one of Carine’s ex-fiancé’s military pals.

  Hank gritted his teeth. He’d trust Tyler North with his life, but there were days he wouldn’t mind tracking his friend down wherever he was—on a training mission, deployed to some remote battlefield—and knocking the shit out of him. Had he ever intended to marry Carine?

  Five minutes, Hank thought. Five minutes he’d wasted dithering over his situation. He couldn’t change reality. Carine Winter was living in Cambridge. She insisted she hated Tyler North. And Antonia was on her sister’s side. Unconditionally.

  And Hank now had less than fifty-five minutes to get her younger sister to give him the information he wanted.

  He kicked open his car door and climbed out onto the busy, narrow street of multifamily houses. He’d been in combat. He’d ditched helicopters. He’d endured the media onslaught that came with being a candidate for the senate. Damn it, he could handle the Winter sisters.

  Carine almost didn’t let him in.

  Hank frowned at her through the grimy front door window. “Carine—I’m worried about Antonia. I just want to talk to you.”

  It wasn’t true—he wanted to pump her for information. But with obvious misgiving, Carine pulled the door open about a foot. She was two inches taller than her sister, her auburn hair a couple of tones darker, but she and Antonia had the same blue eyes. “She’s not here.”

  “I know that. May I come in?”

  “I’m kind of busy—”

  “Carine. Please.”

  She sighed, and he could see that her heart wasn’t into being rude to him. It wouldn’t be nearly as satisfying as pitching Tyler off a cliff, which, last Hank had heard, was what she’d threatened to do the next time she saw him. But Ty hadn’t surfaced in Cold Ridge in months, and Carine, too, had stayed away. Hank could see it worried Antonia, but Carine’s state of mind was, by unspoken agreement, a forbidden topic.