I thought of the film I’d hidden in the turtle shell and the stolen picture in my copy of Aphrodite’s book. I thought of Aphrodite herself, and how it wouldn’t take a crack team of investigators to dust for fingerprints under the bed and find mine.
I assumed John Stone wouldn’t bother. Aphrodite had been lit up like Las Vegas when I’d last seen her alive; the toxicology report would prove that. End of story, unless I tried to write something up for Mojo.
But I kept thinking of Kenzie Libby, making jewelry out of broken glass and beer cans; a kid in the middle of nowhere who knew the words to “Marquee Moon.” What must it have been like to hear those guitars for the first time, here on a rock in the middle of the winter, everything around you black and white and that music like a message in a bottle tossed to you from a city five hundred miles away?
What was it like to be so desperate to escape your life that someone like me looked like a way out instead of a way down?
I hunched against the cold and swore, and wished I had another bottle of Jack Daniel’s. I wasn’t crazy about the idea of hitching a ride back to the mainland with a cop. Or a corpse. I’d wait till everyone left then head down to the harbor and see if I could find Toby. I already owed him money for the ride over. I’d make it a round trip and call it even and get the hell out of Dodge.
I glanced back through the window to see if Gryffin and John Stone had come downstairs. The kitchen was still empty. I jammed my hands into my pockets. My feet in the cowboy boots were already freezing. I headed toward the pine grove, hoping to warm myself by moving.
That was another bad idea. The wind blasted me, and the trees offered little in the way of shelter as a flurry of snow whirled up. My ears throbbed from the inside, like someone had jabbed a pencil in there. I swore again.
Above me, something growled. I looked up.
An animal crouched in a pine tree—cat sized, with blackish brown fur and glittering eyes and a small red mouth, a sleek furry tail. It glared at me, teeth bared in a hiss. I stared back, too stunned to run away. I’d seen foxes and coyotes in the woods back when I was a kid, and once even a bobcat, but nothing like this, all rage and teeth. It looked like the Tasmanian Devil in the old cartoons. It crept to the edge of the branch, its back reared like a cat’s about to spring. For a moment it was silent. Then it snarled.
I’ve never heard anything like that noise. It didn’t even sound like an animal. It sounded like a human, like a person growling in pure rage. The snarl grew louder, the fur around the animal’s face fanned out in a brown-gold halo. It moved forward, gaining better purchase on the tree limb. It was going to jump.
I took a stumbling step backward, heard a flurry of barks, and turned.
Aphrodite’s deerhounds ran along the top of the hill. Behind them strode a tall figure in a police parka. Sighting me, one of the dogs broke away and raced down the hillside. I looked back at the pine tree, but the animal was gone.
The man walked toward me. “These your dogs?” He sounded pissed off.
“No. They belong to them.” I pointed at the house.
The dogs rushed past us, sniffed hopefully then loped toward the beach.
“You part of the family?”
“They’re inside.”
The man nodded. He was broad shouldered, with a square face and blue eyes, close-cropped blond hair and a nick on his chin from shaving. Tom’s of Maine meets Tom’s of Finland. His name tag read Jeff Hakkala.
“I’ll be doing the investigation,” he said. “You said next of kin’s in there? And the sheriff?”
“Yeah.”
He headed toward the house. I let him get a few yards ahead of me then followed.
Gryffin opened the door. Hakkala introduced himself and went into the kitchen to confer with John Stone. Gryffin remained in the mudroom with me.
“You look pretty bad,” I said.
“I am. God, this is awful.”
I hesitated then asked, “Do they have any idea what happened?”
“‘They?’ Who’s ‘they?’” He glanced into the next room. “There is no they. There’s John Stone, and now this guy. He’ll call the medical examiner, they’ll do an autopsy. I have to arrange some kind of funeral…”
He buried his head in his hands.
“I’m sorry.” I felt a real pang of grief—not for Aphrodite but for him. I touched his shoulder. “Really. It’s—well, I’m just sorry, is all.”
He nodded and put his hand on mine, just for an instant.
“Yeah,” he said at last and looked away. “I gather this guy is going to ask us a few more questions and then do whatever he does up there at the crime scene.”
The back of my neck went cold. “Crime scene?”
“That’s what they call it. An unattended death—they treat it like a homicide. He didn’t think it was anything but her falling, three sheets to the wind, as usual. That’s what the autopsy will tell them, anyway. I guess it takes a few weeks before they sign off on everything.”
“Do I need to wait around?”
He shot me a grim look. “No. This guy’ll question you, and the sheriff wants to question us about the girl in the motel. Then you can go, I guess.”
For a minute we stood in silence. Finally I said, “Me being here … I guess I made it worse.”
“No, Cass.” He started for the kitchen. “You just made it weird.”
18
The detective didn’t spend much time with me. I answered his questions, he wrote everything down. Then he went to see Gryffin in the living room. I remained with John Stone in the kitchen, watching as he fed the woodstove.
“Been up here before?” He nudged the stove door shut with his foot.
“No.”
“Probably won’t be in much of a hurry to come back, now.”
I shrugged. “I dunno. I kind of like it, except for the cold.”
“Not much besides the cold. For the next six months, anyway.”
He looked up as Gryffin stepped back into the room.
“He’s on the phone,” Gryffin said. “This could take a while.”
John Stone glanced from him to me. “Mind if I ask you a few quick questions about Merrill Libby’s girl?”
Gryffin sank into a chair. “Go ahead.”
“Well, did either one of you see her the other night? I gather you did—Everett said his daughter was on the computer with Merrill’s girl. She said she’d seen you at the Lighthouse.” He turned to me. “And that Robert Stanley, the one works for Mr. Provenzano—he said you was talking to Merrill’s girl. That’s what she told him, anyway.”
“MacKenzie,” I said. The sheriff looked confused. “Libby’s girl—she’s got a name. MacKenzie.”
John Stone blinked. “Well, yes, of course she does. But she—did you see her?”
“She checked me into the motel. Afterward, she came to my room—I’d asked her father if there was someplace to eat. He said no, but she wanted to tell me there was a place, that restaurant down at the harbor. The Good Tern.”
“She enter your room?”
“Yeah. For, like, a minute. It was freezing, I didn’t want to make her stand outside. She told me about the restaurant. Then she left. End of story.”
“Some of the kids—well, one of them, Robert, he said that the girl—that MacKenzie told him you were going to give her a ride somewhere.”
Fucking Robert. I felt myself grow hot. “I didn’t tell her that. I didn’t tell her anything. I said about five words to her, and that was it.”