Dottie leaned closer. “That’s Douglas Sutton. He would’ve been—what, early twenties in this picture? He came to Grimm Island right out of seminary in New York. Had no family or anybody down here. Deidre, didn’t your Aunt Phyllis put him up for a time, until he got his feet under him?”
“She did,” Deidre said, nodding. “He stayed in the guesthouse for the first year or so. Helped her around the house with handyman type things. He met Anne Winslow a couple of years after he moved here and married her. They never had any children of their own as I recall.”
I studied Douglas Sutton’s young face in the photograph—earnest, smiling, standing beside his mentor George Pickering with what looked like genuine admiration. Had he known about the embezzlement at that time?
“And there’s Stephanie Chester,” Deidre said, her finger hovering over a blond woman in the second row. She wore white—a sundress that seemed to glow in the July sunlight—and stood close to a dark-haired young man whose hand rested at the small of her back. “That would be Matthias Crenshaw Jr. Never liked him.”
“He was a bit of a weasel,” Bea said. “Reminded me of Eddie Haskell. I was friendly with his mother, Martha. At least for a little while. People in my profession usually don’t keep friends long.”
“That happens when you sleep with people’s husbands,” Dottie said, rolling her eyes. “You’ve never been a victim, Bea. Stop laying it on so thick.”
Bea shooed her hand toward Dottie and said, “Hush up, this is my story.” Then she cleared her throat. “Anyway, Greta used to say Stephanie was the best thing that ever happened to Matt,” Bea said. “Settled him down, gave him purpose. Before Stephanie, he was directionless—dropped out of college, couldn’t hold a job. He was an entitled brat, so I don’t think work was something he wanted. But after they married, he ended up finishing college and went to medical school. I think Stephanie wasn’t too excited to work while he was going to school. There were rumors neither of them were faithful. I guess it was at least partially true because she ended up marrying a surgeon barely a month after the ink on her divorce papers was dry.”
“Still doesn’t explain why she might have been meeting Pickering the night of the murders,” I said.
The photograph was coming alive as they identified face after face—neighbors, acquaintances, people whose lives had intersected at a church picnic on a summer day. Some had stayed on the island, their stories continuing in ways both ordinary and extraordinary. Others had left, carried away by time or tragedy or simply the pull of somewhere else.
“Wait,” I said, leaning closer to a figure partially obscured by shadow in the back row. The angle of the sun, the position of the trees—something had created a pocket of shade that made his features harder to see. But the build was familiar. The way he stood, slightly apart from the group. “Who’s that?”
Dottie squinted, then sucked in a breath. “Well, well, well… That’s interesting.”
“What?” Dash moved closer, following her gaze.
“That,” she said, “is Frank Holloway.”
The room went very still.
I studied the figure more carefully now. Younger by decades, maybe mid-twenties, wearing plaid shorts and a polo shirt, and standing next to a pretty young woman with dark hair. They were each holding a baby about a year old. His face was partially in shadow from the oak trees overhead, but the bone structure was unmistakable once you knew to look for it.
“Frank Holloway,” I said quietly.
The name landed like a stone in still water. Frank Holloway, at the church picnic. Part of the congregation. Part of the community. And he’d never mentioned it.
“He positioned himself as an outsider,” I said. “Someone who knew Tommy professionally, who quit the force and moved to Beaufort. Not someone who was there, who knew these people, who sat in those pews every Sunday.”
“Why lie about that?” Deidre asked.
Walt’s expression had gone hard. “Because Frank Holloway knows more than he’s told us. And that makes him either a witness we need to push harder, or something much worse.
I pulled Pickering’s notebook closer—the composition book with the faded marbled cover that Reverend Sutton had given us. We’d read through it before, but now I was looking for different things. Not just obvious connections to Ruby or the affair, but names, patterns, anything that might point to other people involved in whatever had gotten Pickering and Ruby killed.
The pages were filled with Pickering’s observations about his congregation—some entries straightforward, others cryptic, all of them revealing the private struggles of people who’d trusted him with their secrets.
I flipped through slowly, reading more carefully this time.
“‘June 1984—Mary Jane G. confessed that her daughter has been seeing a married man. Prayed with her about guiding her daughter back to righteousness.’ Who’s Mary Jane G.?” I asked. “Anyone have an idea?”
“Never heard of her,” Bea said. “She must not have been in my circle.”
“Oh, that’s easy,” Deidre said. “Mary Jane Goodall. But I don’t remember her having a daughter. I think she had two boys.”
“Didn’t she remarry after her husband left her?” Dottie asked. “That was a scandal. She had those two boys barely a year apart and then he took off to parts unknown. Never came back to see his kids as far as I know.”
“She did get remarried,” Deidre said. “Not even a year after she was abandoned. I was glad for her. But I don’t remember who she married. He wasn’t an islander, and they moved off to the city. But she stayed connected to the church. As far as I know, the new husband never went with her.”
“We’ve got to find a reason she’d meet with Pickering the night he was killed,” I said. “Maybe he confronted her about her affair with a married man on her mother’s behalf.”
“I can look and see if there’s any connection between Mary Jane Goodall and Stephanie Crenshaw,” Dash said. “That shouldn’t be hard to find. Who else do we need to look for?”
