Free 44 Cranberry Point by Debbie Macomber

reading her thoughts, he said. “I would’ve been there had I known.”
    The hostess reappeared just then. “Sorry to keep you waiting.” She automatically reached for two menus.
    Cliff looked to Grace and she saw the indecision in his eyes. It would mean the world to her if he asked her to join him for lunch. She held his gaze as long as she dared.
    He stiffened, and his resolve had obviously returned. “Table for one,” he said and walked away from Grace.

Chapter Nine
    R oy McAfee hadn’t been a private investigator for more than a few years, but he’d been in law enforcement his entire career. He was retired from the Seattle police force; after a few months, however, he’d thought he’d go stir-crazy sitting around the house doing nothing. Soon after his move to Cedar Cove, he’d hung out his shingle.
    Retirement wasn’t for him. Some men took to it, got involved in hobbies and interests. That kind of life was too predictable for Roy. Nothing lured him faster than a good mystery, and he didn’t mean one between the covers of a book, either.
    Few mysteries had intrigued him more than what was happening right here in Cedar Cove.
    He sat down at his desk and reached for Bob Beldon’s file. If he reviewed the facts as they’d unfolded, perhaps he’d pick up on something he’d overlooked before. He didn’t think it was likely, but it wouldn’t hurt to refresh his memory.
    It all started the night a stranger had arrived on the doorstep of the Beldons’ Thyme and Tide bed-and-breakfast. By morning he was dead.
    Bob Beldon had notified Troy Davis, and the coroner came for the body. Soon afterward, it was discovered that the man had undergone extensive plastic surgery and carried false identification. For a few weeks there’d been a lot of speculation as to who he could be. Then silence-and things had died down for a while.
    From the first, something about their guest had disturbed Beldon. Bob had experienced a recurring nightmare ever since his return from Vietnam. On occasion, he’d been known to sleepwalk.
    Roy stopped reading and leaned back in his chair, recalling his initial thoughts when Beldon had asked him for help. Davis had questioned Beldon for the second or third time and Bob had considered contacting an attorney, but hadn’t. Instead he’d come to Roy. Not too far into the conversation, Roy had realized that the other man was afraid he might have been responsible for the stranger’s death.
    Roy was quick to assure him otherwise, although he’d wondered the same thing in the beginning. But Maxwell’s door had been locked from the inside and there’d been no sign of a struggle. The fact of the matter was that until recently, they couldn’t be sure what had caused the other man’s death. The autopsy had shown that his vital organs were in fine shape.
    Not long before Bob’s appointment with Roy, Grace Sherman had come to him. A year earlier, her husband, Dan, had gone missing. When Dan didn’t return, Grace had sought out Roy to help locate her husband. But every lead had been a dead end.
    Unanswered questions didn’t sit well with him, although he’d shocked Grace with the few things he’d unearthed. One of them was the matter of thirteen thousand dollars Dan had somehow managed to keep from her. Grace had no ideawhere Dan could’ve found that kind of cash, which he’d apparently used to buy a trailer. He’d handed over his paycheck every Friday, regular as clockwork. Like most couples, they’d apparently lived month to month.
    Then Dan’s body had been discovered and with it a suicide note he’d left for Grace. In his last letter to his wife, Dan had described an incident that had taken place during the Vietnam war. He and three others had been separated from their squadron, and they’d stumbled into a village, which they feared was Viet-Cong controlled. Something had happened, and they’d started firing and before the smoke cleared they’d wiped out the entire village,