Kiss the Moon

Praise for the novels of Carla Neggers

“No one does romantic suspense better!”

—Janet Evanovich

“Worth the wait. Well plotted, with Neggers’ trademark witty dialogue and crackling sexual tension, this is a keeper.”

—RT Book Reviews on The Whisper

“Suspense, romance and the rocky Maine coast… The Harbor has it all. Carla Neggers writes a story so vivid you can smell the salt air and feel the mist on your skin.”

—Tess Gerritsen

“A believable, gripping story that will keep armchair sleuths guessing… Here is intelligent writing that remains highly entertaining.”

—Publishers Weekly on Betrayals

“Neggers’ trademark use of atmospheric mood and setting, including the mist of the title itself, comes front and center. What she’s done is add aspects of the high-action thriller to traditional romantic suspense, combining the best of both in creating a genre all her own. Flat-out great.”

—Providence Journal on The Mist

“Well-drawn characters, complex plotting and plenty of wry humor are the hallmarks of Neggers’ books.”

—RT Book Reviews

“When it comes to romance, adventure and suspense, nobody delivers like Carla Neggers.”

—Jayne Ann Krentz

Kiss the Moon

Carla Neggers

www.mirabooks.co.uk

Dear Reader,

Whenever I think about Kiss the Moon, I can feel early spring in northern New England, with its lengthening days, maple-sugaring and end of “cabin fever.” It’s the perfect time of year to set a story about an adventurous woman who discovers the wreckage of a long-missing private plane and a mystery that’s anything but forgotten.

Many of you have asked when Kiss the Moon will be available again—it’s great to see it back in print! I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it. If you’re ever in New Hampshire, be sure to visit the lakes region! We go there often, first having visited as a child when my family joined friends on a small island in beautiful, crystal-clear Lake Winnipesaukee.

Next up for me is the paperback edition of The Whisper, due out in paperback this July. It’s the fourth book in my loosely connected series about Boston detectives, FBI agents, spies and experts in Irish archaeology and folklore. The Widow, The Angel and The Mist are all available now in paperback. In The Whisper, Cyrus “Scoop” Wisdom takes center stage when a Celtic archaeologist looks him up, convinced that the bomb that almost killed him is connected to the night she was left for dead in a remote Irish cave.

In the meantime, I’m hard at work on a new book. For all the details, please visit my website and sign up for my newsletter.

Thanks, and happy reading!

Carla

P.O. Box 826

Quechee VT 05059

www.CarlaNeggers.com

To Kate and Zachary

Contents

Prologue

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Epilogue

Acknowledgments

Prologue

Frannie Beaudine had the intelligence of a Katharine Hepburn and the sexiness of a Marilyn Monroe, and he couldn’t believe she was his. That such a woman had fallen for him, Colt Sinclair, a skinny twenty-one-year-old, filled him with a pride and contentment he’d never known.

She paced in front of the tall windows of his family’s sprawling apartment on Central Park, Manhattan glittering at her feet. Her long, dark hair was swept into an elegant twist, and she wore diamond studs at her ears—fake diamonds, for she couldn’t afford real ones. She’d even borrowed her gown, a swirl of black velvet that barely contained her breasts. Her lips and nails were painted a deep red, sexy, vibrant.

Colt said nothing about the thrill he felt just watching her. Complimenting her appearance would only irritate her, add to her already heightened state of impatience. Frannie despised being beautiful. She believed it distracted people from noticing her other attributes—her skills as a pilot and art historian, her independence, her spirit of adventure. She wanted everything, she’d told Colt last summer in New Hampshire, when she still regarded him as a gawky Dartmouth graduate, a pampered rich boy. She was already something of a legend in her hometown, a poor girl from the hills who’d become an accomplished and daring pilot while simultaneously studying art history, not at a college, not with a tutor, but on her own, at the public library.

Colt, who’d been born with the “everything” Frannie wanted, knew she would get her wish. But he also knew her beauty wouldn’t be a hindrance, it would be an asset. And it was.

She’d asked him to fly tonight. Just six weeks ago she’d seemed so remote and unattainable. He fell short as a Sinclair. His father had told him as much less than an hour ago.

But now he was with Frannie, and all things were possible.

Her eyes, a deep, almost navy blue, were vivid, shining as they focused on him, and she stopped pacing just for an instant. He could feel her urgency. “You’re sure there won’t be a problem with the plane?”

“I’m positive. Everything’s ready, Frannie. Unless you change your mind, we’ll be on our way before midnight.”

She nodded, taking in a sharp, shallow breath. They had everything planned almost to the minute. First they would make an appearance at the reception honoring the donation of the Sinclair Collection to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Colt’s father had offered Frannie a job last fall as an assistant curator for the collection, and she’d seized it as her chance to live in New York. Colt had been barely aware she was in the city. She worked exhaustively all winter, seldom emerging as she catalogued, picked, chose, examined, checked and rechecked the history and authenticity of every painting, sculpture, artifact and bit of treasure that the Sinclairs had collected over the past century and stored in their warehouse on the lower east side. His family’s trips to South America, Central America, Africa, Asia, Russia, Australia had all yielded their prizes. Frannie worked without a break, and Colt had to admire her dedication even as he worried about how pale and weak she was from overwork, even now, six weeks after he’d spotted her at the museum and she’d turned his life upside down.

She would want to collect her kudos tonight for the brilliant work she’d done. Colt understood. Frannie Beaudine was a woman consumed with the need for recognition and affection.

In the second stage of their plan, they would make their apologies and leave early, separately, within a decent interval of each other. They had warm clothes waiting in the hangar north of the city, and Colt’s Piper Cub J-3, ready to fly. A grand adventure. That was what he and Frannie were embarking on. It wasn’t a lion hunt in Africa or an attempt at Mount Everest, but it was, finally, an adventure Colt felt the courage to undertake. He loved Frannie with all his heart and soul. That she wanted to run away with him, now, tonight, didn’t have to make sense, didn’t require a five-year plan, a vetting by a menagerie of Sinclair advisors. It required only faith, trust and the willingness to take action. All his life, one of those had been missing. Not now.

“Then there’s nothing more to do but get on with it,” Frannie said. “Your father and mother are already at the reception. We should go.”

“I’d just like to say goodbye to Brandon.” Colt observed a rare flash of nervousness in her eyes. She knew if anything could give him cold feet, it would be his baby brother. “He’s asleep.”

“Hurry.”

Colt had rehearsed this moment a thousand times in his mind. He hurried down the hall, hardly making a sound on the thick carpeting, his heart racing, his hands clammy. He passed portraits and photographs of uncles and great-uncles, cousins, his grandfather, on various adventures. There would be no photographers to record his adventure. He didn’t want notoriety or adulation.

He just wanted Frannie Beaudine, he thought, his pace slowing as he approached his brother’s half-closed door.

He pushed the door open, and his throat caught at the sprawl of boy and stuffed animal in the bed, the city lights silhouetting his bony figure. He wore pajamas with little cars and trucks on them.

Unexpected, unrehearsed tears stung Colt’s eyes. He doubted he would see his brother again for months, perhaps a year. He would have given up Bear by then, lost his boyish imagination and possibility. Sometimes Colt longed for his own boyhood, when he had liked nothing better than to roam around in the Museum of Natural History. His father had assumed his mind was filled with fantasies of becoming a Sinclair. Instead he’d memorized the form and the colors, the shapes, the essence of the birds and animals and tools on display. In dark corners, where no one would find him, he would pull out scraps of paper and a nub of charcoal and try to capture what he’d memorized.

Sinclair men did not become artists.

If Frannie hadn’t fallen in love with him, Colt was certain he would have thrown himself off the Empire State Building by now. And then he would never have seen Brandon again. Now, at least, there was a chance.

He gave his sleeping brother a mock salute and tiptoed down the hall, where Frannie was waiting for him. She had no brothers and sisters. She couldn’t know the agony of what he’d just done.

Ten minutes later they were at the museum. They made small talk and drank champagne and pretended not to be in love, and Colt thought Frannie was the most beautiful and alluring woman in the room. She seemed at ease with everyone—scholar, rich donor, journalist, poor art student—and she talked knowledgeably and passionately about the collection of art and treasure she’d helped put together even as people asked her when she would again climb into a cockpit. She was unique, and Colt could hardly contain himself at the thought that she loved him.

He avoided his father, fearful Willard Sinclair would penetrate his older son’s mind and find out what he was planning. When the time came, Colt had no intention of telling his father goodbye. His mother, either. She would be impossible to extricate from her friends and her champagne.

Across the room, he saw Frannie, impatient, unable to stay still, slip down a dark corridor past indulgent guards. Colt followed, stifling a surge of panic. What was she doing? They were to make their apologies and separate exits in minutes. He glanced at his father, who was regaling eager listeners with tales of his latest expedition up the Amazon. If only he could give his two sons as much care and attention, Colt thought bitterly, and tried to ignore the tug of regret for his brother, who would no longer have a buffer between their father’s increasingly domineering temperament and Brandon’s zeal to take him on. After tonight, Brandon, just eleven, would be on his own, at least for a while.

Colt shook off his sudden melancholy and followed Frannie into the bowels of the museum, where she had been granted a closet-size office to continue her work on the Sinclair Collection. She used her key to open it, moving quickly. He could hear her rapid breathing. She left the door ajar, but he remained in the dark shadows, trying to ignore a sense of foreboding. This wasn’t in their plan.

Seconds later she emerged from the tiny room, and he heard her check a laugh.

In her hand was a black, hard-sided case the size of a small artist’s painting case.

Colt took a step forward, and she stopped, her already pale face going paler still. “Colt, good heavens, you startled me!”

“Frannie?” He pointed. “What’s in the case?”

She caught him by the arm and pulled him down the corridor. “It’s no time for questions,” she whispered fiercely, “or for the fainthearted. You’re in, Colt. You’re in all the way.”

“Frannie…”

“We have to go.”

He didn’t move. He didn’t speak.

“Now.”

Wisps of hair dripped from their pins, her dark blue eyes shone even in the shadows, and her chest heaved, not from fear but breathlessness. Excitement. She was so certain. Always so certain. He hadn’t asked about how many men she’d loved. She was twenty-six, and she was Frannie Beaudine, beautiful, intelligent, spirited.

Her expression softened. “Colt…I can’t do this without you.”

Still he didn’t move. “What’s in the case, Frannie?”

Her lower lip quivered, the red stain gone, and he could see uncertainty creep into her eyes.

“It’s something from the collection,” he said.

“Of course it’s something from the collection. Diamonds, Colt. Valuable, perfect diamonds of an uncertain provenance. No one but me even knows they exist. God knows how long they sat in that dusty warehouse.”

“Frannie, I can’t.”

Irritation set her jaw. “It’s the only way for us to be together. You know that as well as I do. Colt—please, we have to go. If the guards catch us now, it won’t be Canada we’ll be seeing at dawn, it’ll be the bars of the jailhouse.”

He followed her out. There was nothing else he could do. They would take a cab to the airfield where his Piper Cub was waiting. She’d asked him to fly it. He’d been so stupidly pleased. Now he knew he was a romantic, idealistic fool, just as his father had told him.

In the cab, Frannie covered his hand with hers. “I do love you, Colt Sinclair.”

Maybe she did. He stared out the cab window as they crossed the bridge. It was a cold night for flying, but they had a full moon. It was so huge, and it seemed so heavy and big that even the night sky couldn’t hold it. Colt pretended he was on it, looking down at the shiny cab, at the beautiful aviator, the rich twenty-one-year-old and their stolen diamonds. He had fancied them living by their skill and wits in Canada until his family accepted them and what they’d done. But Frannie had wanted it all, and she’d wanted it now.

For six weeks, Colt had deluded himself into thinking he was enough.

He remembered reading Treasure Island aloud to his little brother under a full moon last summer, and he wished he could be with Brandon now, poking him in the ribs and sneaking him into the kitchen for hot cocoa.

Wouldn’t their father be surprised, Colt thought. He was a Sinclair, after all. He had given up the love of his brother for a misguided, wild adventure, and in so doing, he had given up himself.

It was, of course, the Sinclair way.

One

Five hours after she’d headed onto Sinclair land to check out sugar maples for tapping, Penelope Chestnut sank onto a granite boulder and admitted she was lost. The sun had sunk low in the sky, the temperature had already started to drop, she was down to the last of her water, and she didn’t have the vaguest idea where she was. New Hampshire, in the woods above Lake Winnipesaukee, probably still on Sinclair land. More specifically than that, who knew?

Her parents were expecting her for Sunday dinner at six. If she didn’t show up, they’d worry. Given her history, they’d worry all of ten minutes before calling out a search party. Dogs, snowmobiles, helicopters, men on snowshoes with flashlights. They’d all join in the hunt. Not one would be a stranger. And not one wouldn’t be just a little pissed at her for taking them out on a chilly March night.

It was galling. She’d rather spend the night in the woods. She could make a little fire, boil snow if she couldn’t find a stream, survive quite nicely until daylight. With the clouds pushing out, the temperature would drop overnight. Not that she minded—the cold nights and above-freezing days of early March made the sap run. Her current predicament notwithstanding, Penelope was an accomplished hiker. She wouldn’t freeze.

Maple-sugaring season was what had ostensibly brought her onto Sinclair land in the first place. A tiny corner of their vast tract of central New Hampshire wilderness abutted the ten acres she’d inherited from her grandfather, and she’d wanted a few more maples to tap. So she’d set off for an hour survey, with anorak, gloves, a hip pack of water, a Granny Smith apple and two Nutri-Grain bars. One thing had led to another—through a clearing, up a hill, over a stone wall, across a stream—and pretty soon she was sitting on a rock in the middle of nowhere.

All because she didn’t pay attention. She’d spotted a woodpecker fluttering among the hemlock, an osprey nest high in a tall half-dead pine, followed the sound of a waterfall newly formed by the melting snow, thought about tea and warm scones with her cousin Harriet tomorrow afternoon, when she would return from ferrying two businessmen to Portland, Maine. Provided her father let her carry passengers. He didn’t like the way she’d been flying lately. A wandering mind was a dangerous thing on foot in the wilds of northern New England, but in the air, it could be fatal.

Which, Penelope decided, didn’t bear thinking about while she was lost in the woods with dusk encroaching.

She had hoped to find something on top of the hill to orient her. A view of the lake, a stream, a stone wall, smoke curling from the chimney of a nearby house, something. But below her was just another steep, narrow, dry ravine. There were no landmarks. No promise of a way out. She had to go down this hill and up the next and just keep hoping for the best.

“I need another Nutri-Grain bar,” she said aloud in the stillness and silence that seemed to envelope her. But she’d consumed her last one an hour and several over-hill-and-over-dales ago.

She blinked back fatigue and the eye strain that came with hours on snow-covered hills without sunglasses. She hadn’t brought a compass, either. Or her wilderness medical kit. If she tripped and fell, she’d just have to lie there until someone found her. She’d tried following her trail in the snow, but it wasn’t good snow for tracks, and the two times she did pick up her trail, she found herself back where she’d started. So she’d given up, figuring that even if she could follow her tracks, there were five hours worth of them. They wouldn’t exactly provide the shortest, most straightforward route home. And she figured she had no more than ninety minutes of daylight left.

She was doomed. A search party was inevitable.

The sun poked through gray clouds that had been hanging over the lakes region for three days and were due to move out tonight. Everyone’s mood seemed to have suffered because of them, including her own. Heading into the woods by herself had seemed like a damned good idea five hours ago.

She scooted to the edge of her boulder and looked at the steep, tree-covered, rock-strewn hill. The going certainly wasn’t getting any easier. It was a north-facing hill, still encased in snow and ice, with small patches of wet, slippery leaves where the snow and ice had melted in circles around trees and rocks. She was sweating from temperatures in the upper forties, exertion, frustration. She’d worn none of her specially designed hiking clothes, just jeans and an anorak over a red plaid flannel shirt she’d been maple sugaring in since she was seventeen.

“Might as well get on with it,” she muttered, the silence and stillness almost eerie.

She lowered herself off her boulder, and her foot slipped on a patch of wet, brown leaves. She caught herself before going down on her butt, her heart rate jumping at the close call. A broken ankle and hypothermia were just what she needed. She scooped up a handful of snow and stuffed it down her back. It melted instantly on her overheated skin, cooling her, soothing her. There were worse things than having her parents call out another search party on her. She just needed to stay focused and make their job as short and simple as possible.

She wished she’d brought her cell phone. Flares. Even a book of matches would be welcome.

The sun glinted off something down the steep hillside, drawing her eye to her right. Her heart skipped. Now what? She edged down a few steps, trying to get a better view through the pine, hemlock and naked birches and oak. She squinted, wondering if the sun had just caught a rock with a lot of mica at the right angle.

No, there was something there.

Penelope took another couple of steps to her right. The snow was wet and slippery on the steep hillside, and getting a good purchase in her day hikers wasn’t that easy. She grabbed the thin trunk of a birch for balance and leaned over as far as she could for a better look.

Metal for sure, a lot of it, in a compact heap amidst the tumble of rocks and half a dozen pine trees. In summer, ferns and brush would leaf out and make the pile even harder to spot. If not for the sun striking a bit of metal at just the right moment, Penelope would have gone past it even at the end of winter with the landscape at its starkest.

And for the sun to glint off it, it wasn’t completely rusted, and that meant it was aluminum.

She held her breath. No.

The frame of Frannie Beaudine and Colt Sinclair’s Piper Cub J-3 was aluminum tubing. Its fabric covering would have rotted away by now, forty-five years after it had disappeared in the skies above Cold Spring, New Hampshire, last seen by a half-dozen locals out on the clear, chilly night. Penelope wouldn’t expect to find much more than a crumpled heap of struts and trusses, rusted engine, bits of wing and tail assembly, whatever hadn’t succumbed to the crash and decades of exposure to the harsh weather of northern New England.

But she hadn’t expected to find Colt and Frannie’s plane here. According to her own pet theory, they’d faked a crash in New Hampshire and made it to Canada. Whether they’d crashed there or were living happily ever after was open to question.

Except it wasn’t anymore. This had to be Colt and Frannie’s long-missing Piper Cub. Penelope suddenly shivered as she stared at the wreckage. What else could it be?

A leap of the imagination, brought on by fatigue, low blood sugar, her own fascination with the ill-fated flight of the two lovers. Even as a kid, she would wander the woods with one eye searching for a downed Piper Cub. Later, she’d started collecting information—newspaper and magazine articles on the weeks-long search, headed by Willard Sinclair himself, then articles on the Sinclair Collection and Frannie’s role in pulling it together, turning it into a magnificent, coherent whole instead of a mishmash of stuff generations of Sinclairs had picked up on their various expeditions. In the past year, Penelope had started interviewing local residents who remembered Frannie Beaudine as a little girl and a young woman, who had known the Sinclairs from their years of mountain climbing, fishing, hunting and boating in the lakes region. The men were all Dartmouth alumni. Colt was barely a year out of Dartmouth when he disappeared.

The intensive, exhaustive search for the missing plane had turned up nothing, not one clue beyond the separate, positive sightings of it in the sky over Cold Spring. It was possible it wasn’t Colt’s Piper Cub J-3—but who else’s could it have been? When the news came out of New York that he, his plane and Frannie Beaudine were missing, the search was mounted, focusing on the New Hampshire lakes region.

After a while, people stopped looking. If the plane turned up, it turned up. Most believed if it was in New Hampshire at all, it was at the bottom of a deep part of one of its many lakes. Sections of Winnipesaukee, a clear, glacial lake, were ninety feet deep—nobody could see that far down. If the plane was ever to be found, whether in water or on land, it would have to be by accident.