“They think he committed suicide. The police do. I don’t think he did, but I don’t know. I don’t think my husband was capable of killing anyone, including himself.”

She looked directly at me for the first time and, as I had seen when we met on the boardwalk, the remnants of her beauty were visible. She had pretty eyes.

“Mrs. Dalgetty,” I said, “we have both lost our husbands recently, and I’m sure your husband’s death was as devastating to you as mine was to me—”

“Glynnis,” she said. “My name is Glynnis.”

“That’s a lovely name,” I said. “Thank you. And I’m Josie. Josephine, actually, but—”

“Wayne Honeysett was murdered,” she interrupted. “Somebody crushed his head under the bridge. Didn’t they? That’s what everybody around here says.”

I told her yes, that’s what I thought. It was horrifying to imagine it, but I believed that’s what happened.

“And if your husband didn’t commit suicide and somebody killed him,” she said, “were they all murdered by the same person? Your husband and my Dougal and Wayne?”

“Then you knew him. You knew Wayne Honeysett.”

She nodded and stared out the window. “We grew up together. We were kids here on the beach strip. Wayne had his problems. He wasn’t perfect.” She smiled, looked down, and straightened the front of her cardigan. “He was kinda nice-looking, and he liked me. He knew me when I was young, and he liked me because he thought I was pretty. And I was. Not beautiful, maybe. Just pretty.” She opened her cardigan, revealing a small silver brooch in the shape of a peacock, with a green stone for its eye, pinned to her blouse. “He gave me this because he liked me. It’s white gold. The stone is an emerald. A real emerald.”

“It’s lovely. When did he give you that?”

“Two, three months ago.” She was fingering the brooch. “I never told Dougal that he gave it to me. I said I bought it for a couple of dollars at a garage sale and that it was just a cheap piece of junk. Dougal never knew nothin’ about jewellery. He bought my wedding ring when we got married and that’s all, so he didn’t know this is real gold and has a real emerald.” She looked up. “It is. I went into the city and had a jeweller look at it, and he said it’s a real emerald and real white gold. Said it’s worth a lot of money.”

“Mr. Honeysett must have liked you very much.”

“He liked women. He always did. He liked women to like him. It wasn’t even about sex, I think. I mean, I don’t know for sure. But he would give you gifts if you were a girl, a pretty girl. I knew him when we were kids, and he was always like that. I think Wayne became a jeweller so he could make things for women. Men, too. But he loved making things for women, brooches and earrings and stuff.”

She looked out the window, remembering. “We both grew up here on the strip. He was kind of sweet on me when we were fourteen, fifteen years old. I married Dougal and he married Florie, whose family had the money to get him started in business. The jewellery business.” She looked away from the window and, with her head down, said, “I should have gone to his funeral, Wayne’s, I guess. I thought about it, but I don’t like going too far from home nowadays. People talk.”

“Mr. Honeysett had his problems, I understand.”

She looked up and nodded. “Only after Florie died. Poor Wayne. People said terrible things about him, or said he was doing terrible things. Bad things. I don’t know if any were true. We’ve all done bad things in our lives, I guess. Most of us, anyway. I just know he was nice to me and some other people, I hear.”

“When did you see him last?”

“Two, three weeks ago. He stopped me when I was walking on the beach strip. He wanted to know how much I liked the peacock pin. He was always asking me that. Whenever we met after he gave me the brooch, he wanted to know if I still liked it, and if I still liked him, I guess. I told him it was just about the most beautiful thing I’d ever owned, which was the truth. That seemed to make him happy.” She shook her head and smiled. “Some men are strange that way. They like to make women happy because that’s what makes them happy. The men, I mean.”

“Some women are like that,” I said. “About men.”

She nodded and stared out the window again, across the strip and toward the lake.

We sat in silence as the cat returned, passing within reach of me without looking in my direction. Out of respect, I waited until it was settled in the same corner of the room it had occupied when I arrived. Then I said, “I need to know why you think my husband was involved in your husband’s death.”

“Mike Pilato told me.”

“When did he tell you that?”

“At Dougal’s funeral.” She closed her cardigan, hiding the peacock from view. “He paid for it, Mike did. The funeral.”

“Why?”

She shrugged. “Dougal did some work for Mike. Mike’s a nice guy, no matter what a lot of people say. I mean, he’s, you know, he does a lot of stuff, but listen, Mike didn’t do nothin’ bad to us, Dougal and me. He did some good things for us. We helped each other out, Mike and Dougal and me.” She looked at a picture on the wall. “We helped each other out.”

“What kind of work did your husband do for him? For Mike Pilato?”

“None of your business. None of anybody’s business.” Her eyes were still on the picture.

“Do you think Mike Pilato would talk to me?”

She looked across and smiled. “Sure,” she said. “You’re pretty. Mike always talks to pretty women.”

“Thanks.” I stood up. “What do you know about this man called Grizz? Have you really never heard of him?”

“No.” Her smile was gone. “You in cahoots with him or something?”

“With Grizz?”

“With that son of a bitch who keeps coming here asking for him. He’s crazy.” She pulled back into herself, hugging her chest with her arms and pulling her legs onto the chair, avoiding my eyes again, withdrawing into her madness. “He comes here again, I’ll kill him. You tell him that. He comes here again, I’ll get a knife and I’ll kill the son of a bitch.”

She was shaking with fear or anger, or perhaps both.

“Is this man about thirty, bearded, dresses like a bum?”

“You tell him,” she said, pressing her face into the back of the chair. “You tell him I don’t know nothin’. I just want people to leave me alone.”

“Mrs. Dalgetty,” I began. “Glynnis. He’s been to my place as well. I have no idea who he is, honest.”

She remained enveloped within the chair, seeming to will it to embrace and hide her.

I thanked her and walked down the stairs and out into the sunshine, where I stood thinking about all she had said and listening to a tap-tap from within the upholstery shop. It was open, after all. Someone was inside, driving tacks into wood.

20.

Power is different depending on who has it and uses it. You talk power to a man and he thinks about a football team or a truck engine, the kind of power that’s dynamic, in motion, like a railway locomotive. Or maybe political power to get other people to do what you want or not do what you don’t want. Or the power of money, which is nearly the same thing.

Talk power with a woman, especially a woman who knows her way among men or even around just one man, and her idea is different. It’s not dynamic. It’s subtle. All right, it’s sexual.

I remember my first husband, the good years with him, the early years when we were both working and struggling. We had an old car that wouldn’t start in the rain or if it was too cold, and we lived in a small apartment where we were trying to save money for a down payment on a suburban split-level.

Anyway, we had a fight about something. It must have been substantial, and I know it was at the dining-room table, because my clearest memory of the fight is tossing my dinner plate at him, and it missed and splattered against the wall. The point of the fight is long forgotten, but I recall the broken china and mashed potatoes and canned peas all over the floor and my husband fleeing the house because he was either frightened that my aim might improve or concerned that he might kill me.