Free Face the Fire by Nora Roberts Page A

viewed the twenty-odd years they’d spent on Three Sisters as a kind of exile. Which, he imagined, was why they’d found excuses to leave it so often during that period—and then to pull up stakes permanently when his grandfather had died.
    It had never been home for them.
    Coming back had proved that to him, just as it had proved the island was home for him. One answer he’d come back to find was clear to him now. Three Sisters was his.
    Pleasure boats were skimming along the water, motors humming or sails fat with wind. It brought him a steadying kind of pleasure to see them. Buoys bobbed, orange, red, white, against the cool blue surface. The land jutted or curved or tumbled out to meet the water.
    He saw a family clamming and a young boy chasing gulls.
    There were houses that hadn’t been there when he’d left. And the time between came home to him as he noticed the weathered silver of cedar and the thick clumps of vegetation. Growth, he thought. Man’s and nature’s.
    Time didn’t stand still. Not even on Three Sisters.
    As he approached the north point of the island, he turned onto a narrow shale road, listened to his wheels crunch. The last time he’d driven this stretch he’d had a Jeep, with its top off so the air had streamed over him. And his radio had been going full blast.
    He had to smile at himself as he realized that while he might be in a Ferrari, he had still put the top down. And turned the stereo up to scream.
    “You can take the boy off the island,” he murmured, then pulled off the side of the road opposite the bluffs and the house that rose from them.
    The house hadn’t changed, he decided, and wonderedhow long it would take the islanders to stop referring to it as the Logan place. Two stories, it rambled over the bluff, jutting out, shooting up as if on its own whim. Someone had recently painted its shutters a dark blue to contrast with the silvered wood.
    The screened porch and the open decks offered stunning views of the cove, and the sea. The windows were wide, the doors glass. He remembered that his room had faced the water, and how much time he’d spent staring out at it.
    How often its changing and unpredictable moods had reflected his own.
    The sea had always spoken to him.
    Still, the house didn’t bring him any tug of sentiment, or any lovely haze of nostalgia. The islanders could call it the Logan place for another decade, but it had never been Sam’s. It was, in his opinion, a good property in a prime location that had been well maintained by its absentee owners.
    He hoped the man who owned the Land Rover parked outside it felt he’d gotten his money’s worth.
    Dr. MacAllister Booke, Sam thought now, of the New York Bookes. A man with a brilliant mind, and an unusual bent. Paranormal science. Fascinating. He wondered if Booke had felt like a round peg in the square hole of his family, as he himself had.
    Sam got out of his car, walked toward the bluff. It wasn’t the house that called him, but the cove. And the cave.
    It pleased him, more than he’d expected, to see a bright-yellow sailboat tied to the dock below. And it was a honey, he mused, studying its lines. He’d had a boat tied there too. For as long as he could remember. For that, at least, he felt the tug, the soft haze.
    Sailing had been the single real interest that father and son had shared.
    The best times he’d had with Thaddeus Logan, the only times there had ever been that click of kinship between them, Sam remembered, had been when they were sailing.
    They’d actually communicated, connected, during those hours on the water, not just as two people who happened, through circumstance, to occupy places in the same family, the same house. But as father and son who shared a common interest. It was good to remember that.
    “Pretty, isn’t she? I just got her last month.”
    Sam turned and, through the lenses of his shaded glasses, watched the man who had spoken walk toward him. Dressed in faded jeans and a