“We’re terribly sorry for your loss, Miss Kemmer,” Vince said gently. The kindly uncle act. “I apologize for the intrusion. We know this is a tough time for you.”
“I already spoke to detectives yesterday,” she said, looking worried. “I answered all their questions.”
Vince guessed she was probably around thirty. She was probably a pretty girl when she hadn’t been crying for a couple of days.
“Yes, ma’am,” Mendez said. “We’re just following up.”
“Having been Ms. Fordham’s best friend,” Vince said, “we’re hoping you might be able to give us a little more insight into who she was as person.”
“Oh.”
“May we come in?” Mendez asked.
Gina Kemmer nodded, tears welling up. She was in gray sweatpants and a McAster T-shirt that looked like she had slept in it. But she had made an effort and brushed her blond hair back into a ponytail. The girls from the boutique might have called to tell her the cops were on the way.
She turned away from them and walked back into the house, leaving them to follow.
“I can’t believe she’s gone,” she said, sinking down into an overstuffed chintz-covered chair in her living room. Her hand was shaking as she dabbed a tissue under her eyes. “Murdered. Oh my God. I heard she was stabbed like a hundred times! Is that true?”
She was afraid—like she thought if her friend had been murdered, she was probably next. The one good thing about murder, Vince thought: It generally wasn’t contagious.
“She was stabbed, yes,” Mendez said.
“You have a lovely home,” Vince said, admiring the space, checking for photographs. There were two of Gina Kemmer and Marissa Fordham in frames on the console table behind the sofa—one recent, one not.
“Thank you,” she murmured.
“Do you rent or own?”
“Rent.”
“Are you the gardener?”
“Yes.”
“That’s some green thumb you have,” Vince said with a smile as he took a seat on the end of the sofa nearest her.
She turned a tiny shy smile and glanced down. “Thank you.”
“I’m so sorry you lost your friend,” he said sincerely. “We never imagine something like this will happen to someone we know. Murder is something that happens in the newspapers, on television.”
“No,” she said. “It’s like a nightmare, but I’m awake. I can’t believe she died that way. What could she possibly have done to deserve that?”
“Nothing,” Mendez said. “No one deserves to die like that.”
“It’s tough,” Vince said. “A person dies only once, but the loved ones they leave behind live that loss every day.”
Gina nodded, crying a little into her crumpled tissue.
“I’ll bet you have a lot of fond memories, though.”
“Yes.”
She had been looking back at her friendship with Marissa Fordham. Photographs were strewn on the coffee table. Vince picked up one of Gina Kemmer and Marissa and Haley Fordham—probably about two years old at the time—at the beach, laughing and happy, building a sandcastle. He put that one down and picked up an older photo of the two women in bikinis and floppy hats at a different beach.
“How long had you and Marissa been friends, Gina? Is it all right if I call you Gina?”
She nodded.
“Did you and Marissa grow up together?” Mendez asked.
“No,” she said, looking at the floor. “We met when we moved here. It seems like a long time ago. It was like that, like we were sisters, like we’d known each other forever.”
“That’s a special friendship,” Vince said. “How did you both end up here?”
“Um, well, I wanted a change of scenery. This is such a nice town.”
“It is,” Vince said. “It’s a beautiful place. I just moved here last year, myself. I love it. Where did you move from?”
“LA.”
“The big city.”
“Yeah.”
“Pollution, traffic. Who needs it? Right?”
She smiled a little, nodding.
“And Marissa came from ... where?”
“The East Coast.”
“Did she ever talk about her family?” Mendez asked. “We’re trying to locate her next of kin to notify them.”
“No, she never talked about them.”
“That’s odd, don’t you think, Gina? I mean, I talk about my family if only to complain about them. Don’t you? I think most people do.”
“They had some kind of falling-out,” she said.
“Must have been something bad, huh?”
“I guess so.”
“It must have been really bad if Marissa wouldn’t even tell you, her best friend.”
Kemmer said nothing. She had yet to hold eye contact with him for more than a second or two.
“What brought her to Oak Knoll? Why not Santa Barbara? Monterey? San Francisco? All very artsy places. Why Oak Knoll? We’re a little off the beaten track.”
“She just liked it. She came for the fall art fair. It’s very famous, you know. Artists come from all over the country. She came for the art fair, and she loved it here, and she stayed.”
“Kind of impulsive.”
“That was Marissa.”
“When was that?”
“September 1982.”
“So Haley was how old then?”
“Um ... four months. Her birthday is in May.”
“Do you by any chance know where Haley was born?”
“No.”
“We’re trying to find her birth certificate,” Mendez said. “Do you have any idea where Marissa would have kept that?”
“No.”
“Actually, what we really want is to find Haley’s father,” Vince said. “Do you know who he is?”
“Marissa never talked about him.”
“Never? You were like sisters. She must have said something.”
She shook her head.
“Was he from around here?”
“No.”
“But she did have a few boyfriends over the years, right?”
“Yes, of course,” she said. “Marissa liked men. Men liked Marissa. It worked out for her. Men were drawn to her, fell all over her. They would just give her things—even men she wasn’t dating.”
Mendez looked up from his note making. “What do you mean give her things?”
“Jewelry, clothes, flowers, whatever. Men loved her.”
“One didn’t,” Vince pointed out.
He reached inside his jacket, plucked a Polaroid from his breast pocket and handed it to her. She took it automatically. It was a shot of Marissa Fordham lying dead on the floor of her kitchen, butchered and bloody.
Gina Kemmer shrieked and jumped up out of her chair, flinging the photograph away from her as if it had transformed into a venomous snake.
“Oh my God! Oh my God!” she shouted, scrambling backward, trying to get away from the hideous image. She hit a plant stand with her arm and knocked a huge Boston fern to the floor. The heavy pot broke with the sound of a gunshot and she screamed.
“Someone did that to her, Gina,” Vince said.
“Why would you bring that here?!” She looked horrified and, more important, terrified. “Why would you show that to me? Oh my God!”
“Because that’s the reality here, Gina,” Vince said soberly. “That’s the truth. Someone did that to your best friend.”
The color went out of her face like water being sucked down a drain. She turned and doubled over and threw up on the fallen fern.
Vince stood up and dug a business card out of his wallet and placed it on top of the photograph on the coffee table.
He put a hand on Gina Kemmer’s shoulder as she sat back down on her chair, gagging and sobbing hysterically, shaking hard.
“You’re a poor liar, Gina,” he said without rancor, almost gently. “Your heart’s not in it. It doesn’t come to you naturally. But you’re scared. You probably made a promise to Marissa. You don’t want to break it, but it’s a terrible burden. You’re shaking under the weight of it.