Island Getaway, An Art Crime Team Mystery by Jenna Bennett Page B

medium eyes,
pleasant if unremarkable features. It was just that Nick was so drop-dead
gorgeous that anyone else paled by comparison.
    Although Nick’s fabulous looks
were the least of his appeal, really.
    He had a wonderful personality. He
was nice. Funny. Charming. He’d taken care of her when she hurt
herself. When they were together last night, he hadn’t looked past
her to scope out other women, not even when the receptionist at the
Lady Hamilton Hotel gave him an eyeful of her charms. He’d smiled
at her—Annika—like he meant it, and when he’d told her she was
beautiful, the surprise in his voice had made her believe he meant
that, too. It wasn’t too flattering, she supposed, but it was
honest. Honesty was good.
    And she’d connected with him in a
way she didn’t with Curt. Strangely, since on the surface of it,
she and Curt ought to have more in common. Usually, Nick would be
the type to make her feel tongue-tied and awkward, while she’d be
more comfortable around someone like Curt. But there was something
about Nick that made him easy to talk to. And something about Curt
that made her wonder why he’d picked her up on the ferry and why
he’d asked her to dinner tonight when he didn’t seem all that
interested in her. At least when she was with Nick, he gave her his
undivided attention. While Curt was four car-lengths ahead by now,
and didn’t even seem to have noticed that she had fallen
behind.
    Then again, she had questions
about why Nick had asked her out too. And about his friend with the
gun. At least Curt didn’t seem to be a threat to her life, or for
that matter her virtue. Nick she wasn’t so sure about. On either
count.
    “Are you coming?”
    The voice cut through her reverie.
Up ahead, Curt had finally realized she wasn’t keeping up and had
stopped to hustle her.
    Annika nodded. “I’m enjoying the
walk. The roses are beautiful, aren’t they?”
    “Sure,” Curt said. “Come on.”
    “Where are we going?”
    He grinned. She could see his
teeth gleaming in the darkness. He had very nice, straight, white
teeth. “I thought we’d check out the Maiden’s Tower. See if she’s
awake.”
    She?
    Annika swallowed and let him take
her arm to pull her along.

Chapter Eight
     
    The Maiden’s Tower was definitely creepy. Tall and gray and
forbidding, it dominated its part of the Ringmur . Annika stood in the
shadow between the western wall and a line of tall trees and peered
up at it, trying not to turn tail and run.
    Curt grinned, teeth flashing in
the dusk. “Scared?”
    Annika pushed her glasses more
securely up on her nose. “I don’t believe in ghosts.”
    OK, so that wasn’t entirely
true.
    She liked to read about them,
certainly. The idea that the soul could linger after the body was
gone was fascinating. The reality of it, perhaps not quite so
appealing. Not that she’d ever experienced anything even remotely
supernatural. As susceptible as she was to a good story, she seemed
to lack the sensitivity to actual paranormal phenomena, if they
existed. Too much of a bookworm, maybe. Too scholarly. Too much in
her head to be observant of things outside. Especially things on a
different plane. Paying attention to the one they all lived on was
hard enough.
    “That’s not an answer,” Curt
said.
    Annika shrugged. “This is an eerie
place. The whole town is eerie. The age of it, and the history. All
the bloodshed. If that poor woman really was walled up here, that’s
creepy enough. I don’t need ghosts to make it creepier.”
    “But if you were walled up alive,”
Curt said, seemingly unwilling to let the subject go, “wouldn’t you
come back and haunt the place?”
    Honestly? Probably not. She was
more likely to want to haunt the people who did the walling up, to
be honest. And they were long gone. What would be the point of
haunting a piece of ground some seven hundred years later? Just to
scare random tourists?
    She looked around, at the bulk of
the tower and the length