“I didn’t say that. We spent our money on different things.” There it was, she thought. The past tense. Her eyes filled with tears, but she didn’t explain them to T.J. Kowalski. “Money was never a serious issue between us as friends, if that’s what you’re getting at.”

“She have enough money to do what she wanted to?”

“Do any of us?”

He shifted his gaze from the water and settled it on Quinn. “You don’t have to defend her, Ms. Harlowe.”

“Please, just call me Quinn. And I’m not defending her. She was upset yesterday. Frightened, paranoid. She didn’t say anything about wanting to kill herself. In fact, the opposite. She was afraid of being killed.”

“By an osprey,” Kowalski said.

Quinn didn’t respond.

“The local police are in charge of the investigation into her death, but it’s still too early to make a judgment about what exactly happened.” The FBI agent sounded almost sympathetic. “Are you going back to Washington tonight?”

“No, I can’t imagine making the drive.” She glanced at the pot of cheerful yellow pansies that Alicia had left for her. “This place is supposed to be my refuge. I love it here.”

“You have any friends around here who can stay with you?”

“No, I-” When she realized what he was implying, Quinn groaned. “Oh, come on, Agent Kowalski. I am not afraid to stay here by myself.”

His eyebrows went up.

“I’m not!”

“I’d be scared if I found a friend of mine-”

“No, you wouldn’t be. You’d be sad.”

He didn’t argue with her. “What about your neighbors?”

“We get along. Why? Are you going to talk to them?”

“After I finish up here.” But she could tell that wasn’t what he was getting at. “Are the Scanlons the kind of neighbors who will take you in if you get creeped out in the middle of the night?”

Quinn looked at him with what she hoped was a measure of resolve. “I’m not going to get creeped out. Alicia’s drowning was almost certainly an accident. There’s no evidence that she-of anything else, is there?” But when he raised his eyebrows again, as if she should know better than to ask such a question, she sighed. “Right, you wouldn’t tell me if there were.”

He reached into an inner pocket of his crisp dark gray jacket and withdrew a card, setting it on the small painted table next to her wicker chair. “Call me if anything else comes to you. Anything at all. About what you saw this morning, what your friend said yesterday. Don’t dismiss anything as unimportant. Call me.”

“All right, I will. What about the guy this morning-Huck Boone?”

“What about him?”

“Is there anything I should know about him?”

“He seems legit, but next time he runs past your cottage, I’d let him keep running.” Kowalski pointed to his card. “If for some reason you decide you don’t feel safe, you’ll call me, right?”

“As opposed to Breakwater Security?”

He didn’t smile. “As opposed to anyone.”

Quinn tried not to let his serious tone affect her. If he had information she didn’t, or if he had any suspicions, he wasn’t sharing them with her. She had never met him before today, but FBI agent or not, T.J. Kowalski was obviously closemouthed by nature.

She glanced at his card. “It says T.J. there, too. What do the T and the J stand for?”

Now he smiled. “T.J.”

After he left, Quinn sank against a porch post and gazed out at the water, watching a fishing boat make its way into shore just to the south of her cove. Seagulls hovered over it. In the bright late-afternoon sun, the osprey nest sprawled undisturbed on its buoy, no sign of the birds that had so preoccupied Alicia in her last hours.

When Quinn started to sob, she pulled herself from the peaceful scene and dashed inside, putting on a kettle for tea. As the water came to a boil and the kettle whistled and rattled, she almost missed the quiet knock on her side door. She saw her neighbors in its window and turned off the heat under the kettle, then let them in.

Maura Scanlon sniffled, tears in her eyes. She was in her early sixties, a sturdy, five-foot-tall retired nurse with more energy than most people half her age. “Oh, Quinn. We’re so sorry.”

Don, her husband, a retired accountant, nodded in agreement. “We know it’s an awful day for you. Alicia was a good girl. We enjoyed seeing her.”

Maura tried to smile. “She was so proud of those yellow pansies she put out on your porch.”

“They’re beautiful.” Quinn could feel the steam from her tea kettle warming the small kitchen. “Alicia…”

“We’ll miss her.” Maura held up a steaming covered pot. “We brought you dinner. We couldn’t think of what else to do.” She walked straight to the stove and set the pot on a gas burner. “Crab stew. Nothing fancy. It’ll stay hot for a while, but if you need to reheat it, just don’t let it come to a boil.”

“Thank you so much. I love crab stew.”

“Well, you could hardly have a cottage on the Chesapeake and not love crab, could you?” But Maura’s lightheartedness was forced, and she shook her head sadly, her amiable face drawn and pale. “What an awful day.”

“Did the FBI talk to you?”

“Oh, yes. Special Agent Kowalski.”

Don, a lanky man at least a foot taller than his wife, remained by the side door. “We weren’t around much yesterday. We saw Alicia leave in the morning-”

“In her car?”

“That’s right.” He paused, glancing over at his wife as he scratched the back of his neck. “We knew she’d had an emotional weekend.”

“We could hear her crying out on the front porch,” Maura added. She shook her head again, as if she was still trying to absorb the reality of what had happened. “We thought she just needed a good cry. You know, sometimes people do.”

Her husband sighed with a palpable sadness but said nothing. Quinn grabbed the old cookie tin where she kept tea bags. “I was just making tea. Would you like to join me?”

But they declined, and she understood. If they stayed, they would end up either rehashing everything or avoiding the topic altogether and staring awkwardly at each other, talking about anything but the events of the past two days.

Quinn followed the couple out the side door and down the driveway to the road, the air still, the tide going out again. “I met a man from Breakwater this morning,” she said abruptly. “Huck Boone. He was out here jogging just before I found Alicia.”

Don shook his head. “We didn’t see anyone this morning. To be honest, Maura and I didn’t realize anything had happened until we heard the police sirens.”

His wife took his hand, her eyes shining with fresh tears. “I wish we’d been able to help.”

“I don’t know there was anything any of us could have done,” Quinn said quietly.

Maura stood up straighter, dabbed her eyes. “The Breakwater Security people are out this way from time to time. Jogging, boating. It wouldn’t be unusual to see one. They’re generally polite.”

“Do they happen to drive black Lincoln Town Cars with tinted back windows?”

“Black SUVs for the most part,” Don replied. “Why?”

“Alicia came to see me in Washington yesterday. She was upset. Before she could tell me what was wrong, with any clarity, a black sedan picked her up and whisked her off. I have no idea who it was.”

The Scanlons exchanged glances with each other. After more than forty years together, they were on each other’s wavelength. Maura said, “I don’t know whose car it was, Quinn, but I don’t mind saying that we don’t approve of Oliver Crawford turning his estate into the headquarters and training facility for this private security firm. Too much can happen. It’s not his field of expertise. I know he went through a terrible ordeal, but how is having a bunch of guys with guns on his place out here going to help him feel safe?”

“It seems to us he’s leaped without looking,” Don said. “A lot of people in town feel that way, even if they’re sympathetic to his situation.”