“She worked at theclub? Jamie never mentioned her to me. Though of course it was before we met.”
“Right. And I remember him saying that her photo didn’t ring a bell for him. She worked as an attendant in the women’s locker room, so not everyone at the club crossed paths with her, but I ended up chatting with her once when we were both walking up from the lake to the clubhouse.”
“What was she like?”
“A really nice kid. She was doing classes at the community college and working to pay her way through school.”
“How tragic. And they never caught the man who killed her?”
“Uh-uh. She’d been seen at the fair earlier, and some people thought she must have been attacked by one of the workers who came with the rides and then left town right after.” He shakes his head. “I’m digressing, though. I’m happy to speak with Drew, but I’m not sure what you would want him to do with the information.”
“Go to the police himself. I know he’ll have more sway with them than I did.”
“I’ll give it my best shot. Drew clearly doesn’t want to think Jamie took his own life—maybe because it means he might have failed Jamie somehow—but on the other hand, he feels the evidence all points in that direction. He said he even consulted with a shrink, who told him that happy-seeming people can have demons without anyone being the wiser.”
“That jells with what my friend Megan told me right after Jamie’s death, but we’ve now got evidence saying something else.”
Sam takes a final swallow of wine but continues to hold the glass, running his thumb absentmindedly around the rim.
“Do you want a little more?” I ask.
“No, I need to go soon, but I wanted to clarify something with you. Since we’ve dismissed the idea of a robbery gone wrong, are you assuming the killer was at the party that night?”
“I’m not assuminganythingat this point, Sam. The person who did it might have heard Jamie would be at the party that night and was waiting outside for him, though it seems more likely the killerwasat the party—and able to track his movements. It’s totally possible it’s someone we both know.”
He looks off again, appearing to digest my words.
“Yeah, agree,” he says finally. “It’s just tough to wrap my head around.”
“As far as you’re aware, did any of the guests harbor animosity toward him?”
He shakes his head hard. “Not anyoneIknow. Jamie, as you’re well aware, got along with everyone and he didn’t go around provoking people.”
“The other day you said something was weighing on him, though. What if he’d come across disturbing information about someone and the person was aware he had it?”
Sam cocks his head and flips his hands over, palms up. “Yeah, I guess that’s a theory worth considering.”
“We shouldn’t forget about the girl who was with him, either. What was her name?”
“Percy. And West is her last name, I think. But like I told you before, she meant nothing to him. She ended up leaving in a huff that night.”
“Why was he ignoring her? It seemed fairly rude of him to just box her out.”
“Shedeservedto be boxed out,” he says, slapping his thighs lightly with his hands. “He originally asked her to come as his date, but when he changed his mind and told her he didn’t have a plus-one invite after all, she just showed up anyway.”
“Why did he change his mind?”
“He was beginning to think there was something not quite right about her.”
Goose bumps sail up my arms. “Define ‘not quite right.’”
“She told him a bunch of things about herself that he discovered weren’t true, including that she was a high-end landscape designer when she really was a clerk at the garden center in Salisbury. He was annoyed at himself for being taken in by her.”
A memory bobs lightly in my mind, like an empty glass bottle on the surface of a stream, and I’m suddenly replaying Jamie’s words to Sam in Ava’s mudroom:She’s a complete and total fraud, not at all who she pretended to be—but I’ve got no one to blame but myself.
And I now realize that those words were never about me. It was this woman Percy he considered a fraud.
“What?” Sam asks, clearly having noticed my shoulders sagging without knowing it’s a gesture of relief.
