Harbour Falls (A Harbour Falls Mystery #1)(52)

With a sigh I pulled out of the bank parking lot. Hensley Discounters, located a block away, made me think of Ami. At the last second, I turned into the gravel lot and parked. I hadn’t heard anything from her since the day I’d signed the lease. And that had been almost three weeks ago. By my calculations, the baby would be here any day now. Maybe Sean was working today. If so, I could get an update on Ami. Not to mention I hadn’t seen Sean in ages. Spending the afternoon with my dad had made me feel a little nostalgic, and I longed to stay connected with the few people from my past that, unlike J.T., hadn’t changed.

It was Sunday and close to closing time, so when I walked into the store, the first thing I noticed was how empty it was. A young girl of about sixteen was ringing up a sale, while the only other customer—an elderly woman with gray-blue hair—was rummaging through a sale table overflowing with discounted backpacks.

Once the teenage boy who’d been checking out left, I approached the young girl. She was plain but cute, with long dark hair and a name tag that read, “Cami.”

“Hi,” I said, smiling. “Is Sean Hensley in today?” The girl eyed me up and down suspiciously, probably wondering who the hell I was. So to avoid any misunderstandings, I added, “I’m an old friend of both his wife and him.”

“Oh, that’s cool,” she said, interest apparently waning. “But he’s not here today. Neither is his wife. Sorry.”

Damn. “Can you tell them Maddy Fitch stopped by?”

“Yeah, sure,” Cami answered distractedly. “But it’ll have to be after they get back from their trip.”

Trip? They? I thought. As in Sean and Ami were away? Instantly I had the sense that something was amiss.

But just as I was about to question Cami further, the elderly lady with the blue-tinged hair called her over to the sale table. “Honey, I need some help over here picking out a backpack for my grandson.” Cami brushed past, effectively halting my opportunity to dig for more information.



Back behind the wheel of my car, I sat, ignition off, lost in thought. How could Ami be traveling with Sean? She’d been huge; she’d told me her due date was only a month away. That would’ve put the expected delivery at no more than a week from now, give or take. I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was missing something vital. Turning the key in the ignition, I made a mental note to ask Adam about Ami once I was back on the island. Surely he’d know something, since she was, after all, one of his employees.

Brody took me back over to Fade Island, and Adam met me, as promised, at the dock.

Never one to miss much, he immediately noticed something was off. “What’s wrong?” he asked as we got into the Porsche. “You look distracted. Did everything go well with your dad?”

“Everything was fine with my dad,” I replied, fastening my seat belt.

I’d eventually get the nerve up to ask Adam if he’d been checking Chelsea’s cell phone records, but at this moment, the strange Ami development took precedence.

So I said, “There is something kind of bothering me.”

Adam turned to me, the car idling, and raised a questioning eyebrow.

“I stopped by Hensley Discounters on my way back. Uh, to ask about the baby—”

“Baby?” Adam interrupted, his tone clearly troubled.

“Yeah, Ami’s baby.”

Adam sighed and raked his fingers through his hair. “Did Ami tell you that she was pregnant?”

“Adam, yes,” I looked at him in disbelief. “I mean, haven’t you seen her lately? It’s kind of obvious.”

“Maddy,” Adam said softly. “There is no baby. Ami is not pregnant.”

My first thought, which I voiced loudly, was “Oh my God, did something happen to the baby?”



Adam placed his hand over mine, and said, “No, nothing happened. There never was a baby.”

“Yes, there was,” I insisted. “I saw her! She was definitely pregnant, Adam.”

“No, Maddy,” Adam said slowly, as if I wasn’t comprehending what he was saying. “Sean and Ami can’t have children.”

That sick feeling was back. “Adam, what’s going on?” I asked, my voice shaking.

Squeezing my hand gently, he said, “I think I’d better tell you about what happened to Ami Dubois-Hensley a few years back.”





Chapter 14



Before delving into the tale of Ami Dubois-Hensley, Adam drove me back to my cottage, where he pulled in behind the Lexus he and Trina had, as promised, picked up earlier from the café. With a turn of the key, the purr of the Porsche’s engine silenced. In the shadows I watched as Adam breathed in deeply and then shifted his tall form so that he was angled toward me. “I should have told you sooner,” he said, sighing. “But I had no idea it had started up again.”

“Adam, you’re scaring me. What’s wrong with Ami?”

In the darkness of the car, lit only by the ambient glow of a half moon, Adam told me Ami’s story. And what a story it was.

Unbeknownst to me, my former best friend had suffered some kind of a mental breakdown four years earlier. Ami had ended up in a mental health facility that autumn. After locking herself in the master bathroom of the house she shared with her husband, she’d attempted to commit suicide by downing a crazy cocktail of prescription pills and booze. Luckily Sean had come home from work early that day and found her lying unconscious on the cold tiles of the bathroom floor.