Ellen scrunched her nose, her shoulders relaxing for the first time since they’d arrived. “It’s not like there’s a lot of options here.” She shrugged. “And Sammy . . .”
“Sammy what?” Mia prodded.
The question seemed to jar Ellen, and she lost that ease she’d worn, a quick insight into what she’d be like when she didn’t have her back up against a wall.
“No, nothing.” Ellen’s voice was too casual.
“Was he jealous?” Izzy pressed. “Did you want him to be?”
Ellen’s eyes slid to the side again; then she drew in a deep breath. “He’s been, I don’t know, distant lately. More so than usual.”
“When did that start?” Mia asked, thinking back to the phone call Brandon Sonder had overheard. Whom had Sammy called after they’d found the body? What had he said that made it stand out enough in Brandon’s memory for him to tell the cops about it?
“Summer, I’d say, but maybe earlier,” Ellen said. “We’ve been more off than on these days. So.”
Mia didn’t want Sammy to be involved; she wanted him to stay Stoner Sammy B., the boy who listened to The Dark Side of the Moon on vinyl, on repeat, while lying on the shaggy carpet of her bedroom, talking about life and snails and wondering what color mirrors were. Her ulcer throbbed, and she ignored it.
“You said Jimmy and Cash were talking about finding the Bells.”
“I honestly didn’t hear much else than that.” Ellen brought one leg up to her chest so she could wrap her arm around her shin. She rested her chin on her kneecap and stared them down. The tight lines around her eyes and mouth had relaxed almost completely, and her lids drooped as if fear and tension had been the only things keeping her awake.
“Not why Cash wanted to find them?”
Ellen tilted her head, considering. “Something about the father contacting Lacey again? Or bothering her? Or Lacey being upset about something.”
Charles Bell. Mia couldn’t forget Martha Lowe’s resolute face, her utter and total belief that the reason that Asher was dead was because of something that had happened to Bix Bell. So where did it all fit in?
The unsure half answers were more likely to be true than if Ellen had given them something verbatim, so Mia almost trusted them. What she didn’t trust was Cash’s portrayal of the situation to Jimmy. Overheard information should be taken with a grain of salt at best, and this was even secondhand.
But Mia couldn’t deny there was a long line of questions stacking up for Cash Bishop.
The storm had moved in while Mia and Izzy had interviewed Ellen, and the hail had already started by the time they made it back to Mama’s house.
Mia had wanted to talk with Cash or Earl Bishop, but even running from the shed to the kitchen had been enough of a challenge that Mia knew she’d have bruises and welts where the brutal ice had pelted her arms, her cheeks.
And Earl’s dementia added a complexity to how they approached any questioning. They would have to be sensitive to how they handled him, and a surprise interrogation in the middle of a storm probably wasn’t the best option.
“Tell me what you thought of Lacey,” Mia said once they’d shaken off the snow that clung to their jackets and stripped down to long shirts and jeans.
The windows protested as the wind pummeled the glass panes, and the lights flickered, a quick blink that always made Mia hold her breath. They had backup generators that would kick in if the power went, but there was something terrifying about the vulnerability that came with the first plunge into darkness.
Izzy had been quiet most of the time they’d talked with Lacey, and then after Ellen’s house, too, so Mia didn’t have a read on what she was thinking.
Now Izzy settled into the kitchen chair, popping it back on two legs, her arms long enough to grab the counter and keep herself balanced. “Lacey,” Izzy said before humming low in her throat, her eyes on the ceiling. “That one’s an odd bird, isn’t she?”
An echo of Mia’s previous thoughts. A bird, poised for flight.
“She’s an artist.” Mia shrugged. It became a joke on St. Lucy’s. If an islander did something strange or outlandish, or broke the strict norms for acceptable behavior, someone would faux whisper, “Oh, they’re an artist now.”
“I think that term can be applied loosely,” Izzy said, dropping her gaze back to Mia. “Did you see her paintings?”
“They’ve sold for more than ten thousand a piece,” Mia said, amused at the way Izzy let the chair’s feet hit the ground.
“Get out.”
“Did a quick search on her,” Mia said, nodding toward her phone. Wi-Fi was spotty even in the best of times. But if you stood just right, sent up the right kind of prayers, and threw salt over your shoulder, you could sometimes get a signal of some kind if you weren’t in the middle of a storm. “There wasn’t much to find, beyond the fact that apparently she’s taken over the Boston art scene.”
“Man, did I get into the wrong profession.” Izzy shook her head, then leaned forward, her elbow on the table, her hand propping up her head. “Anyway, you want to know my thoughts?”
“Please.”
“It feels like there’s something big we’re not seeing,” Izzy said. “And we’re trying to work two cases, without really working either.”
“The reporter’s death,” Mia said slowly. “And whatever he was poking into.”
“What if we keep chasing him down this hole but there’s nothing at the bottom?” Izzy pushed her fingers through her hair, disrupting the style so that the pink strands stood on end, a ruffled cockatoo. “I’m not saying we’re not onto something. The phone message was strange. I just . . .”
“Don’t want to get bogged down,” Mia finished for her. There was also an elephant in the room, and Mia was part grateful and part uneasy that Izzy wasn’t mentioning it.
Did you kill them?
It was Ellen’s voice in Mia’s head, but the question flitted across Izzy’s face anytime she thought Mia wasn’t looking.
Mia scratched at her wrist. That figure in the woods on their first night, the man under a streetlamp, the questions digging into Mia’s past—they were itches she couldn’t scratch, and they burned beneath her skin. But they had to stop dancing around this. “If we’re completely on the wrong track, if he got into a fight with someone on the island and this is a personal beef, I think Mama would have told me.”
There was a beat of silence. “Would she?”
Mia thought about their conversation from the first night. “She’s worried about me.”
“Isn’t that what mothers do?” A slight smile turned the question almost teasing, rather than challenging.
How to explain it?
“Living here isn’t easy,” Mia started, because that couldn’t be said often enough. “Everyone here depends on each other in some way. All those people with multiple jobs? It’s because people stepped up where there was a need.”
Izzy nodded.
“That tight community forces everyone to be kind of in tune with each other,” Mia said. “Say someone gets sick. On the mainland, it’s not a big deal. But here, one person has the flu, that could wipe out the island. And what if it’s the plumber on the same day a pipe bursts in Sammy’s office. A few other people could probably do a quick patch job but not enough to really fix it. Then someone has a heart attack, but the doctor’s office is flooded because someone sneezed on someone at the wrong time.”
They sat with that for a minute.
“People learn each other’s rhythms here, better than on the mainland,” Mia said, wondering if she was making any sense at all. “They notice a cough days earlier, or a pregnancy, or who’s sleeping with who, because no matter how small that thing might seem, it affects everyone else’s survival.”
“Your mama is worried about you,” Izzy said, like she actually understood.
Mia shrugged. “She’d know if Twist’s death was because of a fight. But she warned me to be careful. Which means she thinks h
e was killed because of whatever he was working on.”
“Then there’s a good chance that’s true, right?”
“Yes,” Mia answered quietly, admitting it to herself fully for the first time. It was why no one was acting all that worried about a possible murderer on the loose; it was why Mama still hadn’t been locking all their windows, which is how the intruder had gotten in last night. People weren’t worried, because they knew the target had been Robert Twist.
The lights shivered again, went out, came back. They stared at each other across the expanse of the table while they waited to see if this was the time the power would give up. When it stayed on, Izzy glanced over at the bullet that was still lodged in the kitchen’s doorframe.
“She was right to be worried, I guess,” Izzy said. “But our visitor last night was probably Ellen.”
The waitress had watched them with haunted eyes as they’d zipped into the jackets earlier, leaving Mia wondering if she was running a risk–benefit analysis on fleeing from the island. “She could have been playing us.”
“Just now?”
Mia nodded.
Izzy pursed her lips; then her face relaxed. “Do you think she was?”
“No,” Mia said, quietly.
“Me neither,” Izzy said with a big, dramatic sigh. “Which means we should probably keep going through these, huh?”
They both looked down at the pile of notebooks they’d picked up off the floor after last night’s scuffle. When Mia just grimaced, Izzy leaned forward, grabbed one of them, and tossed it to Mia.
“Down the rabbit hole we go.”
A frustrating hour of jumbled words later, Mia dropped the notebook she’d been working on into her lap. “Theo.”
Izzy glanced up, blinking too fast as she tried to catch up to Mia’s non sequitur. “What now?”
Mia stood up without bothering to answer. She couldn’t believe she hadn’t thought about it earlier.
Mama still had an old-fashioned landline hooked up in the kitchen. It was a step up from a rotary phone, but just barely. Her cell was hopeless at this point, though, and beggars couldn’t be choosers.
She hopped up on the counter next to the phone and checked her contacts list for the right number.
Theodore Schaffer answered on the second ring even though it was a Saturday and she was calling from an unknown number. She wasn’t surprised.
“Schaffer.” He was distracted, she could tell.
“Hey, it’s Mia Hart.”
“Ah, Mia.” There was some shuffling on the other side, and then a door closed. “My favorite detective.”
“I bet you say that to all the cops,” Mia said, lacing it with fondness.
Theo was currently the editor for the daily newspaper in Portland, but before he’d given in to the call of the North, he’d worked for decades on the politics desk for the New York Times.
He also was in a forty-year-long partnership with Gina Murdoch, the Rockford chief of police and Mia’s boss. Once, Mia had asked why they’d never married, and Murdoch had laughed for a long time, then insisted she could never be tied down.
“Only the best ones,” Theo said now, and Mia rolled her eyes, though she couldn’t stop the smile that tugged at her mouth.
“What can you tell me about shorthand?” Mia asked, without any further preamble. Theo would appreciate it, he was a busy man.
“I could tell you more than you ever want to know about shorthand, my dear,” he said, his deep, cigar-and-whiskey voice rumbling with leashed laughter.
“Is there a universal one reporters use?”
There was a pause at that. “The Gregg method is popular.”
Mia jotted the name down. “I’ve heard of it. We were taught a bit in training.”
“Well, that’s part of the problem,” Theo said. “Journalists aren’t really taught the technique. They just pick it up as they go. So even if the main principles are there, everyone’s comes out a bit different.”
“Like an accent? But in writing?”
Theo hummed. “More like German and Dutch. You can muddle through, but you might miss some big concepts and some small nuances.”
“If I sent you some samples, could you try deciphering it?” Mia asked.
“I can try. Can’t promise anything, though,” Theo said.
It was something. “You’re amazing.”
“I bet you say that to all the reporters.”
Mia laughed. “Just the best ones. I’ll send you some pictures when I can.”
Izzy was watching Mia as she hung up. “You going to run down to the FedEx and scan these over to Portland?”
Waving her cell in Izzy’s direction, Mia hopped off the counter. “There is this invention called a camera. You may have heard of it? You can even send the pictures via this little device.”
A balled-up napkin hit Mia’s face. “Smart aleck. You don’t have any service.”
That was true. She could still save them to her phone, though. Send them to Theo when the Wi-Fi kicked back in. If it ever did.
Mia pulled out her chair. “Hand me the ones with Earl and Cash Bishop, will you?”
Izzy threw her the notebook she’d been paging through. “What’s up with them? The Bishops.”
“Not counting the Bells, since they only came in the summer, the Bishops are St. Lucy’s royalty,” Mia said, as she flipped open to the sections with their initials. She lined up the little lens on the phone so she could capture the full page. “Earl is the island’s leader for all intents and purposes. Or he was. Now Cash might be.”
Mia clicked a picture and then moved to the next part. “Mr. Bishop always made me nervous.”
Izzy latched onto that. “In what way?”
“Not in . . .” Mia shook her head, strands of hair falling into her eyes. She pushed them back. “Not in an inappropriate way. He was just stern. Never smiled. I don’t think he thought I was good enough for Cash.”
“They’ve lived here forever?”
“And a day,” Mia said, thumbing to the page that had the notes about Cash on them. “They claim their relatives founded the port.”
“So you think they had something to do with this?”
Mia included the notes on Jimmy Roarke for good measure, then looked up. There was a thought lingering on the outskirts of her mind, fuzzy at the moment but waiting to be fully formed, nudging and knocking for attention. “What Lacey said today.”
It was kind of a high for her, you know. Playing men.
Izzy’s eyes flicked up and to the right, like she was relistening to the exchange. “Christ. An older man.”
“If Monroe was seeing someone older on the island . . .”
“Maybe it was Earl Bishop,” Izzy finished for her, and it was a relief that Mia didn’t have to actually say it.
For all that he’d scared her, Earl Bishop was an institution. A father figure, even though the last thing she’d needed was another one of those. Her tongue scraped against the dry roof of her mouth, seeking moisture it suddenly lacked.
“How old would she have been? That summer,” Izzy asked.
“Sixteen. We were all sixteen,” Mia said quietly. The older man Monroe had been seeing could have been someone else. It could have been Danny Acker, who had been home from college on the mainland. A lot of the younger girls had their eyes on him. He would have been a nice challenge. Or Timmy Stern, the man who used to run the plane from the island.
But Earl had been the last person Robert Twist had talked to before he’d died.
She didn’t need to glance outside to know the storm had set up shop over St. Lucy’s. They wouldn’t be going over to Earl’s anytime soon.
“So what now?” Izzy asked, her own gaze on the darkness outside.
“Now we wait.”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
IZZY
Izzy had never been good at waiting. Especially when there was a killer out there, and she was trapped in a tiny kitchen, stuck in limbo. Moving might not actuall
y be productive, but at least it would feel like she was doing something.
In the past few hours, the snow had tapered from a rageful blizzard to a steady fall that was almost pretty.
Mia seemed perfectly content with the reprieve from the interrogations. She was hunched over, staring hard at the notebooks, still trying to decipher gibberish despite the fact that she couldn’t understand it. Something to do, Mia had said a while ago when Izzy had pointed out that it was mostly pointless.
Izzy pushed her chair back, the feet scraping against the linoleum floor. Standing up, she paced to the window. “I’ve got to get out.”
“Antsy?”
Izzy rolled her shoulders to try to ease the itch between the blades. Her wound protested the movement. “Do you think I’d make it to the bar in this?”
Mia’s eyes slid past her to the window, then came back to Izzy’s face. “Sure, if you’re really determined. The hill back up is going to be a pain in the ass.”
Right now, being able to escape the suffocating house felt worth the risk. “Think I might pop down,” Izzy said.
“All right,” Mia said, and moved to gather up her things. “I’m going to take these upstairs. Maybe try to draft a few emails to the uniforms. We need to look into Twist’s phone records. Peter especially.”
Izzy bounced on the balls of her feet, frustrated that they hadn’t had even a blip of reliable Wi-Fi that day to google the guy.
“You want to come for a drink, then?” she asked Mia. “If we can’t do anything else.”
“No, I’m going to do a little more digging,” she said, lifting her armful. “The door’s unlocked for when you get back.”
“Okay, I won’t be long. If I don’t return, send a search party.”
“That would be a search party of one.” Mia pointed to herself. “And it would be a very grumpy search party.”
“I’ll try not to get myself killed, then,” Izzy said, the offhand comment landing with a thud between them. “Sorry.”
Mia smiled, but it was definitely out of pity. “Be careful.”
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