Free Holidays at Crescent Cove by Shelley Noble

Sonny-boy’s defense team was preparing to coerce an eyewitness.
    She dropped the file back to the table. Winning was everything to these guys. Including her father. Stubborn, yes. She didn’t agree with his insistence that “the law is the law for everyone, even the crooks.” Still, she would never, never have suspected him capable of this if it wasn’t staring her in the face.
    And now she had been dragged into the whole sordid mess.
    She threw the folder back on the table, her whole world tumbling around her ears. Opened the next folder without thinking and came face-to-face with the color police photos of the dead girl. Dark hair, matted and covering one part of her pale face, her arm flung out and her rounded belly vulnerable, its precious cargo dead.
    She closed the folder, pushed it away.
    There was no longer a question of walking away from this case. But she wouldn’t be working for the defense. Harrison Cavanaugh wouldn’t get out of paying the price this time. This time she would fight. And if it meant bringing down her father, then she’d do it.
    She picked up the phone.

Chapter Eight
    T EN MINUTES LATER Grace was walking out the door, armed with the e-mail folder and a photo of her father she’d downloaded from the Internet. She walked the two blocks to the parking lot where she kept her car. Her stomach churned as her mind replayed the image of that poor girl lying broken in the street, her rounded belly, her dark hair, her pale lifeless face. Neither the mother nor the baby had survived.
    Grace shook her head, trying to drive the image away. Trying to give herself the courage to do what needed to be done.
    She was usually fine with sharing personal stuff with her two best friends. But not this. Bri knew the barest details because she had been here when Grace moved back, hurt and humiliated.
    And Grace had told Margaux just this past summer, when Margaux was going through trials of her own. They’d never mentioned it again. But she would now. Today. Ask Nick for his advice. Take the chance of losing her friends forever when they heard what her father was planning to do and what she was planning to do to stop him.
    Grace stopped by her office and put up a Closed sign; she wasn’t sure how much time this would take. And a spasm of fear shot up her arm. That she would be tainted by the whole sordid case.
    But it wasn’t just that. Grace had lost her belief in the law for the second time in her life. And she wasn’t sure she could ever recover from this final bow.
    She turned into the Little Crescent Beach community where she’d spent so many summers. She drove down Salt Marsh Lane toward the beach. Passed the house her family had rented every year until she graduated from high school. They’d spent many happy summers there, with her father—like many of the fathers—coming for the weekend, and taking the train back to their respective cities on Monday morning.
    Grace always loved that little house, had good memories of their summers there, and thought that when she came back to Crescent Cove she’d buy it. But now she was content to live in town. She wanted nothing to do with the beach houses.
    She noticed a thin ribbon of smoke coming out of the chimney and hoped that whoever was renting it off season was enjoying it. Then she shoved it to the back of her mind, where it belonged.
    Margaux was waiting by the back door when Grace pulled into the gravel parking area behind the Sullivan beach house. She looked concerned. And Grace’s first reaction was to pretend that nothing was really that bad. But she couldn’t hide those things from her friends. And if she were honest, she didn’t want to.
    She’d been carrying “stuff” alone for far too long. She gathered her purse and the bag of papers, and got out of the car. And was hit by the tingling chill of salt air. It was so much stronger here than in town, it was hard to