There was a moment of complete stillness. And then Stephanie White spoke as if we were two adults trying to solve a problem, two adults who just happened to be inches apart from each other. “It was a horrible thing and nobody is trying to say it wasn’t. But trying to pin it on the Gregorys is wrong.”

“And is that because none of them did it?”

She heard the taunt and she understood it. “It’s because all you’re doing is playing into the hands of some right-wing extremist who’s trying to get revenge on the Senator.”

“You know who this extremist is?”

She hesitated. “You know who it is.”

“Who?” I demanded.

“Josh David Powell. Isn’t that who’s behind Buzzy’s campaign?”

I wondered how so many people seemed to know so much. I wondered, for a moment, what I was doing trying to be involved at any level. But my head was still tilted forward, my face was still nearly against hers, so close that I had only to whisper. “What do you know about Josh David Powell?”

“I know you’re his stooge, George. You and all that guilt you’ve stored up over what happened in Florida. He’s playing you, and I’m just telling you, if you allow this to keep going, everybody’s going to get burned—you, Mitch, the Senator, the Gregory kids, your meat-head friend Buzzy. And none of it is going to result in the real killer getting caught.”

“She was at the house, Stephanie. She was there the night she was killed.”

“And then she was gone. Pushed out the side gate because she wouldn’t put out, okay? It’s not very nice, it’s not very pretty, it doesn’t look good for the Gregorys, but that’s what happened. So yes, one or two of them have some responsibility because they put her in a position where she got picked up by someone on her way home. But they weren’t the ones who killed her.”

“And so we should protect them?”

“And so we shouldn’t turn this into something more than it is, all right? Gregorys act bad sometimes, but they don’t go around killing people.”

She dipped her knees then, managing to do it without coming into contact with me and without ever taking her eyes off mine. She came up holding the canvas bag. “There are things my husband will do, George. You can say it’s for the greater good. You can say it’s for his own self-interest. But they’re no different than what any of the rest of us are doing. Understand?”

Her hand went onto my chest one more time and pushed. I staggered back, not because I had to but to give us both some room. She twirled her finger. “Now turn around,” she said. “I have to get dressed.”

2

.

MY EYES POPPED OPEN. I STARED THROUGH THE WINDOW THAT faced the backyard. Something was out there. Something was moving. A critter bigger than my friend the squirrel. But it was not the noise that woke me. It was the thought of Stephanie White. The suddenly sexual, suddenly direct, suddenly forceful Stephanie, who seemed to know so much about me and what I had done.

Who was informing her? Mitch could have told her about Hawaii, about Detective Landry, but if Mitch knew about Marion he did not need to send his wife to talk to me about her affair with Buzzy. And if Mitch knew about Palm Beach and Josh David Powell, why had it never come up before?

And those thoughts led to a question that would keep me up the rest of the night. I looked out the window, I looked at the ceiling, I buried my head in the pillow, and I asked myself over and over who she was really protecting.

3

.

BARBARA LOOKED SURPRISED. THEN SHE SMILED. SHE LIT UP the room with her smile. She came over to me, took both my hands in hers, and said, “You’re back.”

I was, of course, back. I acknowledged as much with a squeeze of her hands and then let go.

“Did it all work out? Did you get everything you were looking for?”

“I’d say so. Pretty much, anyhow.”

“You saw Jason?”

“Oh, sure. He says hi.”

“He did?”

“Absolutely. Asked about Tyler, too.”

Barbara Belbonnet stood in front of me looking puzzled.

We didn’t get any further because one of the secretaries came in and said Mitch wanted to see me right away. I was being called to the principal’s office.

MITCH WHITE SAT looking lost in his big leather swivel chair. Reid Cunningham sat in one wing chair at the side of his desk; Dick O’Connor sat in another on the other side. It occurred to me that something had changed since I last appeared in this office; that maybe I was about to get fired, after all.

“How was the trip?” Dick asked. He was a heavyset man, fat really, thinner in the chest than around the waist. He wore black-framed glasses and a black-and-white checked sport coat. He smiled. Dick was a man who had perfected the art of smiling without meaning it.

“Very productive,” I said. I was hoping to throw them off guard.

Mitch fiddled with the arm of his chair. Since the arm was covered with smooth leather, he had very little with which to fiddle. So his fingers just splayed and twitched. Dick continued smiling. Reid stared. I was not part of Reid’s team and he and I had almost no relationship at all.

“Tell us what you learned,” Dick said. He raised and lowered a hand, like he was inviting a third-grader to describe his summer vacation.

“I learned that on the night Heidi Telford died, Ned Gregory, then married and the father of three kids, was in bed with his eighteen-year-old au pair.”

No reaction.

“I learned that Howard Landry found out about this and informed, at the very least, Chief DiMasi. I learned that he was told not to record that anywhere, not to tell anyone.”

“Except he told you,” Reid Cunningham said. He was a man with a military haircut and a military bearing. As far as I knew, he had never been in the military. He liked to swim long distances in the ocean.

“It’s been, what? Nine years? And Howard Landry is a broken man.”

“Broken in what way?” It was Reid again. He appeared to be assuming control of the interview. Or interrogation. Whatever it was.

“He ran off with one of the people he was investigating in connection with the Telford murder, one of the people who was at the Gregorys’ that night, a young woman named Leanne Sullivan. That’s who got him to take early retirement, move to Hawaii.”

I was standing in front of Mitch’s desk. Nobody had asked me to sit. Now nobody asked me anything at all. I stuck a hand in my pocket and continued.

“Then she dumped him,” I said. “Went off to Costa Rica to join up with another one of the people who was at the Gregorys’ when Heidi Telford died. Howard took to the bottle after that.”

The ruling triumvirate of the Cape & Islands district attorney’s office did not seem pleased by what I was telling them. Even Dick stopped smiling, although he looked as though he might take up the effort again if given even the slightest reason to do so.

“Who was this other person, the one in Costa Rica?” Reid wanted to know.

“Jason Stockover.”

“Do you think he had something to do with Heidi Telford’s death?”

“I think everyone who was at the Gregorys’ place that night had something to do with Heidi’s death.”

Now the senior staff all looked at one another. It began with Mitch cutting a glance Reid’s way. Dick looked at Mitch, saw where he was looking, and looked that way, too. Reid, who had gray eyeglasses to match his iron-gray hair, stayed stoic as long as he could and then slid his eyes to Mitch without moving his lenses.