Book 1 High Tide Suspense
Diana Jennings, or as she’d been known in her previous existence, Robin O’Shea, was leaving it all behind. It was worthless anyway. Pain, loss, horror and complete futility filled the last few years of her life, but no more. She was finished with it all. She was having a do-over, going back to square one. New name, new life, no past. God, she hoped it worked. She couldn’t go on mired in her past, consumed by the death of her unborn baby at the hands of her husband. She had to start living again.
On this perfect spring day, she wasn’t going to think of the past. She drove her new SUV along a narrow bumpy road in eastern Maine, Highway 189, but the name was a stretch. A bit pretentious to call this country lane a highway, but that’s what the sign said as she turned off Route 1. Maybe she should have gone south instead of north on 1. By now she’d be basking on a beach in the Keys, or sitting at a bar drinking something out of a coconut shell. No. She didn’t need that life. She’d had that life: exotic locales, limousines, paparazzi, hangers-on. She needed a change—she needed to heal, to restore herself, to hide. And Sandra Hastings, her lawyer and friend, suggested Maine, somewhere she’d never been.
Over a rise, Diana pulled her car to the side of the road. Stretched before her was a sight to make her gasp in awe. Water, islands, a peninsula with houses and church steeples, boats in the sea, birds in the air and fog rolling in from the east, slowly hiding the distant islands in the bay from view.
“Now this is nice,” she muttered.
Getting back into her car, she drove down the hill and into the village of Stone Bay, a good strong name, hopefully a good hiding place, the perfect location to start her new life as Diana Jennings. Although she hadn’t a clue what that life would be. She knew how to be a model, she was relatively intelligent, but she’d never attended college. Her husband had literally taken her off the streets of New York when she was only eighteen.
As her agent, he controlled everything in her life from that moment on, scheduling shoots for prestigious magazines as well as runway gigs. Then later as her husband, he continued his control of their married life—until eleven months ago. Well, she didn’t want to think about that right now. She wanted to think about what to do from now on.
Thank goodness, offshore accounts administered by her lawyer hid her finances. She guessed she wouldn’t really have to work at all. But wouldn’t that put up a red flag—a rich woman moving into such a tiny town? She had to be careful. At her husband’s trial, the fact of his upbringing came to light. He was the nephew of Emilio Delvecchio, the biggest crime boss on the eastern seaboard. In fact, the Delvecchio attorneys defended him along with a second-rate ambulance chaser, a friend of Gary’s from his childhood. At least he had some loyalty to his friends. Then the bomb dropped. When Sandra picked her up from the Oceanside Rehabilitation Hospital a few weeks ago, she told her that at Gary’s urging the Delvecchios had put a hit out on her. Confusing information because Diana felt that Gary had done all he could do to hurt her already. However, he obviously had other ideas.
Sandra, with help from a friend in the New York Police Department, arranged for Diana to hide until the situation resolved itself. It didn’t look like that would be long in coming as the Delvecchios were under investigation for racketeering, murder and a few other major crimes. Once they were behind bars, the risk would be over. Sing Sing Prison had her ex-husband for at least twenty years before any chance of parole, and the way his psyche was deteriorating, so Sandra said, he’d not make those twenty years alive. That was the hope in Diana’s mind at least.
Now, she needed to stop thinking about hit men, and evil husbands, and think about her new life, a life out of the limelight of magazine spreads and talk shows. The small changes she’d made in her appearance would help in keeping her anonymity. And establishing herself in this tiny village as a mid-thirties working woman, would go the rest of the way… she hoped.
