“How may I help you, sir?”

“I need you to help me make sense of something odd, ma’am.”

“Your words frighten me, sir. But I’ll do what I can.”

I pulled the laptop from my flight bag. “Are you familiar with sites like YouTube?”

“A warehouse for pictures? Richard mentioned it.”

“You’re basically right. YouTube is a huge data-bank, hundreds of thousands of videos that –”

“Who keeps all the videos?”

“Pardon?”

“Who sorts and arranges all the videos? Is it like the Mormons having all the names inside the mountain? And who sends you the pictures when you want to see them?”

“It’s all digital, ma’am. The videos are in computer code. They’re kept in computer memory.” I wondered if she’d ever used a computer.

“What a scary world it’s become,” she whispered. I wondered if I held up the granola bar in my bag would it frighten her? Behold the amazing concoction of grains and raisins! I also wondered if she’d ever been under the care of a shrink to help her counter her timidity.

I turned my laptop so Mrs Scaler could see the screen. She was emotionless as the odd video played, either thinking so hard it overwhelmed expression, or trying to blot out thought. When the screen faded to black, her hand reached out and covered mine.

“This, this storehouse…did it tell you how the pictures of Richard got there? Where they came from?”

“There are ways to prevent that sort of thing, though we’ll try. Did you understand anything Richard was talking about?”

“No. Richard was having…one of his bad days. Like I told you about.”

“Would you know the expert he refers to?”

“God? The divine specialist in everything?”

“Um, I get the impression this was someone your husband hired. A less omniscient expert.”

“I wouldn’t know, Richard was gone so often. He’d go out at night, be gone for hours. I was terrified the police would stop him. Then I wanted them to. To make him see into himself, to stop.”

“To see himself doing what?”

She looked away. “He’d come in and go to his bedroom. There was the smell of strong drink. And strange perfume. And smells I couldn’t identify, ugly things.”

“No one else saw this?”

“We’d do the show and he was Richard, then we’d get away from all the workers and audience and people from the college, and he became someone else.”

She dabbed at her eyes with a tissue. I turned the laptop off, waited for it to beep itself to sleep. I noticed Mrs Scaler’s mouth was less puffed, the damaged teeth attended to, perhaps with temporary crowns. She had put on a bit of make-up, giving her pale face a semblance of color.

“You’ve had dental work done, I take it?” I said, small-talk to fill the dead air.

“The restoration is just starting. But little by little God is fixing my body.” The eyes turned expectant. “Will I see you again, sir? I hope to.”

“I…truly don’t know, Mrs Scaler.” I stood.

“May I see you to the door?” she said. “I’d very much like that.”

“Certainly.”

“Let me visit the little girl’s room first.”

She sat up and tugged the robe tight, slipped her small feet into the slippers and padded off to a dressing closet. My gaze fell over her tight-robed derriere and watched it bob in a rhythmic motion before shame pulled my eyes away.

I took a final look at the room, saw a photo on a corner dresser that caught my eye, drew me over. I hadn’t seen it before.

It was an eight-by-ten head shot of a woman, typical portrait pic. A relative of Patricia Scaler, I figured; there was a family resemblance in the eyes and ovoid facial structure. But where Patricia Scaler was plain at best, the other woman was lovely, with a fairy-princess nose and straight and gleaming white teeth behind lips so full I wondered if they were enhanced. Her cheekbones were model-high, her jaw firm and symmetrical. Bright highlights shone in rich auburn hair. Her skin was firm and tight and she looked in her mid thirties.

Though the woman was – in the jargon – a hottie, the photo itself seemed cold and mechanical. There was a name printed lower right: Blackburn Studios.

I heard a throat cleared at my back. Mrs Scaler had returned so quietly I hadn’t heard her. She was in a loose-fitting pantsuit and watching me study the photograph.

“I, uh…”

“Don’t be embarrassed, sir. You’re a policeman. I expect you’re allowed to search my room.”

“I, uh, wasn’t searching, ma’am. I was just looking and saw the, uh…”

“The picture. It drew you in, right? Like it was calling you?”

“I have to admit it did.”

“That’s my sister. Isn’t she lovely?”

“She is rather attractive, Mrs Scaler.”

Her eyes fixed on me. There was something in them I couldn’t read.

“Rather attractive, sir? Some say she’s gorgeous.”

I smiled and set the picture down. “Your sister’s very pretty.”

“She has her pick of men, you know. A banquet. But she’s very selective.”

“Pardon me?” For a moment I felt as if I’d wandered into a chapter of Great Expectations, Miss Havisham speaking to young Pip. It fit in its own small and sad way, aspects of Mrs Scaler seemingly minted in Victorian times.

We walked slowly downstairs, crossed the room to the door. Patricia Scaler held out her hand. It was surprisingly firm and I figured she gardened.

“I wanted to thank you for your time, sir. I’m sorry you had to listen to the failures of the lives in this house.”

“May I make a suggestion, ma’am?” I asked. “I don’t mean offense, it’s just my take.”

“Of course, sir.”

“You can’t change the past, but you have a much different future than you did a few days ago. That’s the direction I’d be looking.”

I went back to the department and grabbed Harry. We had two more dominatrixes on our list supplied by Mistress Layla, one of them over in Pensacola. We did the visits and the interviews and came up empty-handed. We were running out of leads, and left with the horrible feeling that, unless forensics pulled some kind of evidence from the cabin, or someone unknown stepped forward with new information, the case would always have a question mark at the end.

We got back to town at seven in the evening. Harry tottered off for his fix of Noelle, and I stopped by a health-food store for organic brown rice and quinoa, another of Fossie’s recommendations. By the time I got home, I was too tired to fix anything and fell asleep on the floor watching Andy Griffith re-runs. Somewhere in the night I dreamed of the beautiful woman who was Patricia Scaler’s sister, jolting awake with her breath in my throat.

Chapter 27

My sleep was as thick and juicy as a thirty-dollar steak, eight hours’ worth. In the morning I drank tea on my deck, though I couldn’t tell what kind, the writing on the package so artsy as to defy translation. I ate something rectangular made of lentils and popped my vitamins. I got a call on my way in, a number I hadn’t called before, no ID on the phone. I pulled to the side of the road and popped it open.

“Ryder.”

“Detective Ryder, this is Archie Fossie.”

“What can I do for you, sir?”

“I’m over at the Scalers’. I-I found something in Richard’s office. It seemed kind of hidden.”

“I’ll stop by.”

“Can I meet you on the corner? I don’t want to alarm Patricia.”

“Fifteen minutes.”

Fossie was on the corner when I arrived, pacing in circles beneath a magnolia tree. I swooped up, pushed open the passenger door.

“Get in, we’ll take a ride.”

He slipped in my truck. “I told Patricia I was going for a walk. I should be back soon to prepare her meals for today.”

“What’d you find?”

“Just a phone number. It was on a Post-it, like you suggested. Stuck under the monitor on Richard’s computer.”