“What?” Kathleen prompted.

“I think it’s possible that Jerry and Allison met at work and she introduced him to June… Allison’s sister,” Susan explained to Rose.

“I remember Jerry telling me that,” Kathleen spoke up. “But Allison hasn’t worked with Jed and Jerry for decades, has she?”

“No. She quit around the time June and Jerry were married, and she moved to an agency in Chicago. She came back to visit on holidays, but she was in the midwest for years and years. I think she returned to New York around the time of June’s death.” Susan stopped and considered all this for a moment.

“Do you think that could be significant?” Rose asked, leaning forward. “Because in the book, one of the sisters leaves the country, and moves to Paris, and changes her life-becomes beautiful and then returns home and marries the man of her dreams.”

“Sounds a bit like the script for Sabrina,” Kathleen said.

“Such a beautiful movie. It’s one of my favorites,” Rose responded enthusiastically. “I actually bought the videotape so I can watch it over and over again.”

“But it does sound kind of like Allison’s life. She really doesn’t look at all like she did when June was alive,” Susan mused.

“What else did she tell you about her novel?” Kathleen asked.

“She said it had a surprise ending. I could tell that’s what she liked about it the most. She kept saying that readers would never know what hit them when they got to the end. She seemed really pleased about that.”

“What else did she say about her life?” Susan asked. “Did she tell you how she ended up here? How she even knew about Compass Bay?”

Rose thought for a minute before answering. “No. I told her about my wonderful travel agency and how they got me such a great deal here, but I don’t believe she said anything about how she found Compass Bay.”

“When you came in here you said that something Allison said didn’t make any sense,” Kathleen pointed out. “What was that?”

“Oh, heavens. I do get off the point, don’t I? She said that she had thought about writing a murder mystery, but that was too close to her real life. But the murder happened after she told me that. And, of course, it happened to Allison herself. So how could her life be close to a murder mystery without a murder in it? And that’s not all. We were talking about our lives and she said that she had spent much of her life being a victim, but now all that was changing.”

“But it didn’t, did it?” Kathleen mused. “She ended up being a victim. A murder victim.”

“I know.” Rose’s jiggling with her jewelry became almost frantic. “That’s something else that doesn’t make any sense.”

“What do you think about that?” Kathleen asked Susan when Rose, promising to return if she remembered “anything else important,” had departed.

“She’s not the most reliable reporter, but she wants to help and she may be the type of person people talk to. I was stunned to hear that Allison was going to have a book published.”

“Do you think it will turn out to be as autobiographical as it sounds?” Kathleen asked.

Susan looked at her friend. Kathleen was staring into the large mirror hung between the two windows on the wall across from the bed, idly arranging and rearranging her hair. Her shoulders were sagging, and even from behind, she looked tired and discouraged. “You know, I can’t imagine Allison writing a book, but then I guess I really didn’t know her all that well. I thought about her as an extension of June.”

“You know what’s bothering me?” Kathleen spoke up, still facing the wall. “What’s bothering me is that you won’t talk to me about June.”

“I-”

“You never wanted to talk to me about June. No one wanted to talk to me about June. Damn it, even Jerry keeps me in the dark about her.”

Susan, realizing Kathleen’s shoulders were shaking as she began to sob, hurried over and embraced her friend. “You’re right. I didn’t realize. I’ve been stupid. Maybe we’ve all been stupid.”

With a loud sniff, Kathleen pulled herself together. “I’ve been stupid, too. I should have encouraged Jerry to talk about her before we got married, but I didn’t. To tell the truth, he talked so much about their children that I thought he was talking about her. It wasn’t until we were married and living together that I realized how little I knew about her.”

“What do you mean?”

Kathleen sat down in the rocking chair Rose had so recently vacated, bit her lips, and started to explain. “When you introduced me to Jerry he was living in that condo down by the water, remember?”

“Yes.” Susan couldn’t imagine what was coming.

“Well, he was subletting the place and it was furnished-pretty much. He’d brought his computer, stereo, and some personal things. Then we got married and both agreed that it was a good idea to buy a house. I had some savings and Jerry had the profits from the home he had sold just sitting in the bank getting almost no interest. So we found our house, bought it, and a week later a huge moving van pulled up from the company that had been storing his stuff and began to unload.”

Susan nodded. “I remember.”

“That’s right! You came over to help. I’d forgotten.”

“Probably because you were so upset.”

Kathleen laughed bitterly. “And I thought I hid it so well.”

“Nope. And I didn’t blame you. It was insensitive of Jerry-and me-not to realize what you were going through. God, Kath, I feel awful about it now and that was years ago. You may have thought you were hiding things, but when the first piece of furniture out of the van was that pencil bed-”

“Their bed,” Kathleen agreed, nodding.

“Yes. Of course. I remember the expression on your face.”

“And you offered to go furniture shopping with me. I’d forgotten.”

“Do you remember the salesman at Bloomingdale’s?”

Kathleen laughed. “I sure do. He was positive that they couldn’t deliver the bedroom furniture for at least a week.”

“And we convinced him that it could be done in twenty-four hours.”

“And it was!”

“I’d forgotten all about that.”

“And you probably never even knew that the next thing off the truck, the double dresser, was full of June’s clothing.”

“I had no idea. I thought all of that had been cleaned out.” Susan paused, walking over to the window and looking out at the beach before continuing. “I helped Jerry clean out the house before he sold it. Emptying the children’s rooms was heartbreaking. I remember emptying June’s closet. And the nightstand on her side of the bed. I guess I just missed the dresser.”

“You missed her desk, too.”

“Her desk? Oh, that’s right. The little cherry desk. It sat in the corner of their kitchen.” Susan had a flash of June sitting there, organizing a fund-raiser for the PTA, piles of paper before her. “Was it full of stuff?”

“Yes. Mostly notebooks and sheets of paper. I became obsessed with those papers. I put the desk in the guest room-that’s what it was then, now it’s Emily’s room-and went through those papers over and over. They told me a lot about her. How organized she was, how involved in the lives of her children, what a wonderful cook she must have been. There was even a box of letters that Jerry had written her before they got married.”

Susan didn’t know what to say. This didn’t sound at all like her self-confident friend. Kathleen and Jerry had always seemed so happy. Susan had no idea that Kathleen might be haunted by the memory of his first wife.

“I think my problem was that everyone loved June. I mean, I didn’t want Jerry to have been married to an awful person, but June was always talked about as being perfect. She was everything I wasn’t. She was petite and cute, she was domestic, and she had perfect children-”

“It wasn’t really like that at all,” Susan interrupted gently.