She types Tony—then corrects it to Anthony—Kerwin, taking a guess on the spelling.

She got it right; an obituary pops up.

She scans it.

. . . died suddenly at his residence on Monday, June 10 . . .

But of course the cause of death isn’t listed. It never is.

If he’d been murdered, though, there would be online newspaper coverage, as there was after Meredith’s death.

There is none for Tony.

Going back to his obituary, she rereads it, then the funeral notice.

In lieu of flowers, the family would appreciate donations in Tony’s memory to the American Heart Association.

That, Landry thinks, would certainly indicate a heart attack.

He died at home. There would have been an autopsy. If it had shown anything unusual, that would have come up by now. Because you can’t disguise murder as a heart attack . . . or can you?

She returns to the search engine.

Two minutes later she has her answer—and the implications rock her to the core.

Beck has gone through every e-mail exchange in her mother’s files, going back a couple of years.

Nothing in her sent or received folders indicate that anyone was out to get her; not a shred of evidence to incriminate anyone.

Least of all her father.

Is that really what you were expecting to find?

There are only a few e-mails between her parents—mostly references to job hunting and household paperwork. But there were plenty of e-mails Mom sent to friends that seem to indicate the marriage was as solid as ever.

I miss Hank, she wrote to Jaycee, one of her blogger friends, just a few days before she died. I can’t wait until he’s back home and things are back to normal. I hate being alone at night.

I do, too, Jaycee wrote back. I wish I had a Hank!

There was another e-mail, further back, sent to a neighbor asking for the recipe for the potato side dish she’d made for a dinner party the night before. Hank devoured it, in case you didn’t notice, Mom had written. I want to make it for dinner some night.

Recipe . . .

That reminds Beck.

One of the bloggers she met at the funeral had mentioned that Mom e-mailed her about the cheesecake Beck had brought over on Mother’s Day.

She doesn’t recall seeing anything about that in the files.

She goes back to May 12, Mother’s Day, and begins working her way forward through the sent mail, looking for the exchange.

That’s strange. It isn’t there.

She checks the received e-mails.

Not there, either.

It’s nothing earth-shattering, and yet . . .

It’s bothering her.

She can’t remember which of the bloggers even said it. So much of last Saturday’s service is a blur. There were so many people . . .

She sighs, rising from the kitchen table.

Maybe the e-mail was there, and she’s so delirious she just missed it. She needs a break, and it’s time to go back to the living room to check on Jordan again. He’s been asleep on the couch for over an hour now. She turned off the television and covered him with a blanket when she first found him like that.

Looking down at her sleeping nephew’s sweet face, she’s swept by an overwhelming sadness.

He may not remember Mom. Beck lost her maternal grandmother when she was his age; she doesn’t remember her at all. Mom used to try to jog her memory, showing her photos of her sitting on her grandmother’s lap as a little girl or holding hands with her at the zoo . . .

“Remember that day?” she’d ask.

Beck wanted to remember so badly . . .

But she just didn’t.

That bothered her mother.

“You loved her so much,” she told Beck, “and she was crazy about you and your brothers.”

Maybe so. But she died, and every trace of her disappeared from Beck’s mind.

That’s going to happen to Jordan, too. Everything Mom did for him, and with him . . .

He’ll only know about it because they’ll tell him stories and show him pictures. He won’t know, in his heart. He won’t remember.

He opens his eyes abruptly, as if sensing that she’s there. “Hi, Aunt Beck.”

“Hi, sweetie. Did you have a nice nap?”

He nods sleepily. “I dreamed about Grammy.”

“Really? What happened in your dream?”

“She was just laughing and laughing, and Grampy was giving me horsey rides on his back like he used to.”

She smiles, eyes suddenly swimming in tears. “That sounds like a really nice dream.”

“Yeah. It was happy. Do you think Grampy will play horsey again when he gets back?”

“Maybe not today,” she says. “But someday. Someday, I’m betting he will.”

In the past hour the sky above the bay has gone from deep blue to pale blue with patchy clouds to completely overcast. The air hangs heavy with humidity and the incessant rattling hum of locusts in the coastal grasses that sound to Elena like a perpetually shaking tambourine, further rattling her nerves.

Forcing down a final bite of the pecan pie Landry served for dessert, she fights the urge to jump up and excuse herself from the table . . .

Just as Landry did a short time ago, when she left to get the dessert and didn’t come back for so long that Elena finally went into the kitchen to see if she needed help. She wasn’t there, and a pair of pecan pies sat at the ready beside a stack of plates.

What, Elena wondered, was she up to?

It could have been innocent—maybe she was on the phone with her husband, or tending to some household chore . . .

But when Landry reappeared with a dessert tray, she neglected to make eye contact with anyone, and her hands were shaking so badly the stack of plates rattled.

Now Elena sips the sickeningly sweet tea, wishing it were laced with vodka, and wipes her soaked hairline with a napkin. The drenching heat is nearly as oppressive as the paranoia that’s fallen over the group like a storm cloud.

Why aren’t Landry’s kids going to be here tonight, as planned? Does she even have kids? A husband? Or did she stage this picture perfect bayside house right out of Southern Living? Is it filled with mere props, everything from the gallery of framed photographs in the dining room to the teenage bedrooms to the sneakers in the mudroom cubbies carefully positioned to make herself appear to be an ordinary mom, when in fact she’s . . .

“I hope y’all are going to have more of this pie, because I’ve got plenty,” she tells them, and Elena wonders if she might even be faking the accent.

Nobody wants more pie.

Or, when she offers, more sweet tea.

Nobody wants anything but to be someplace, anyplace, other than here.

Kay is quiet by nature but paler than the cloth napkin she’s twisting in her hands, and her pie has gone untouched.

Does she realize it’s a trap? Elena wonders. Or is she in on it? Is it a conspiracy?

Playing the role of charming hostess, Landry chatters brightly—too brightly—about the restaurant where she’s made a dinner reservation.

“And I hope y’all like seafood, because—” She breaks off to look out over the water as thunder rumbles in the distance. The sky has gone from milky to ominous black layers mounting along the horizon.

“It’s going to rain,” Kay says unnecessarily.

“It is.” Landry is on her feet. “We should go inside.”

Reluctant to go into the house with them, Elena points to the ceiling overhead, where the fan still rotates in a futile attempt to cool things down. “We won’t get wet here.”

“We will if it rains sideways. It’s blowing in across the water. Let’s go in.”

She doesn’t want to go in, dammit. That’s why they’re out there in the first place. Inside, she can’t escape quickly if she needs to.

But Kay, too, is already standing. “I’m going to lie down for a little while, if no one minds.”

“Are you feeling all right?” Elena asks her, and she shakes her head.