“Yes, but …” I allowed my words to trail off. Ellen was right—it was just a theory at this point. A theory that had felt solid last night but seemed less certain in the light of day.
“Very well. I’ll let you know as soon as I find out anything, one way or the other.” Ellen examined me, her forehead crinkling. “It sounds to me like you’ve removed Tara Delamont from the suspect list. Am I right?”
“Yes. I just don’t think she’s involved. Not after you mentioned that clue about her costume, and what she told me last night.” I frowned. “But then there’s Scott. He did explain why he was outside earlier than he first claimed. Apparently, he was planning to appear in costume at the party and stashed a coat and fedora in the garden bin for that purpose.”
“Or so he says.” Ellen quirked her eyebrows. “Be honest, Charlotte. I know you like the guy, and I suspect you hope he can be Julie’s rebound, if not more, but that’s an odd story. And rather convenient. I mean, after the police found that coat and hat, he had to say something. They were likely to connect those items to him eventually.”
I slumped in my chair. “I suppose so.”
Ellen waved her hand through the air. “Playing the logical detective, we can’t rule him out. He does have a motive, if what you told me about his issue with Delamont’s treatment of his father is true.”
“You’re right. Although I can’t imagine him killing anyone, I guess we have to leave him on the suspect list. Along with Julie,” I added glumly.
Ellen’s face expressed sympathy. “I know it’s hard to consider your friends as killers. But you know, over the years I’ve learned that the most unlikely people can do some astonishing things.”
I drew in a deep breath. “You’ve said that before, and I think I have to agree with you.” Setting aside Damian’s letter, I picked up the two documents I’d discovered in my great-aunt’s library. Rising to my feet, I unfolded the one the man who’d called himself Paul Peters had sent Isabella. I slipped the other letter back in my pocket. “Like this letter, for example,” I said, strolling over to Ellen’s chair. “What do you make of this?”
Ellen took the thin paper from my hand. As she shifted to reach for a pair of reading glasses on the side table next to her chair, Shandy yipped and leapt down onto the floor. He cast me a bright-eyed glance before trotting out of the room.
“And this is … what?” Ellen asked, perching the glasses on her nose.
“Something I found in one of the books in Isabella’s library.” I took a few steps back. “A letter signed with the initialP.” I examined Ellen’s face for any flicker of recognition. But she might as well have been playing high-stakes poker for all I could glean from her expression.
“Really? And why is this so important?” Ellen sat back and stared at me over the rims of her glasses.
“Because,” I said, walking back to my chair, “the Sandberg sisters told me about a man they’d met in Isabella’s company. A Paul Peters, they said.” I flopped back down in the armchair. “They also identified him as the man I saw in that photograph I found of Isabella in her garden. The one I showed you at the beach. It was a picture from back in the sixties, if my guess is correct.”
“I imagine Isabella received many letters from friends. Why does this one interest you so?”
“Because it seems … odd. It’s very banal, but there are these repeated phrases that seem shoehorned in.” I tipped my head and met Ellen’s intense stare without flinching. “Almost like they were conveying a hidden message. Like that journal I found, only a different type of code.”
Ellen glanced down at the letter. “I think you’re imagining things. It’s just a letter from a friend, talking about the weather and such.” She lifted the document by one corner and dropped it on the table beside her. “It wouldn’t be surprising that a man she knew wrote to her from time to time. People used to write to their friends, you know, before social media became such a thing.”
“I think they were more than friends.”
“What makes you say that? Just because he appeared in some random photo with Isabella?”
“No, because Bernadette and Ophelia, who actually met him, told me they assumed the guy was one of Isabella’s lovers.”
Ellen shoved the eyeglasses back up her nose. “One of them? Did they think she had so many, then?”
“Don’t you know?”
“Heavens, no. How could I? I wouldn’t know anything about her personal life during that time period, and she certainly didn’t appear to have any male companions later in life. You must remember—I didn’t meet Isabella until I moved here in the 1980s.”
“Yes, about that.” I slipped the other letter from my pocket and shook it. “I found something last night that seems to contradict that story. Another document hidden in one of my great-aunt’s books.”
Ellen looked me over, her eyebrows drawing together. “And what did this missive say?”
“That you knew Isabella before you moved here, for one thing. Unless there were two film-location scouts working in the seventies with the initialsE.M.”
Ellen’s frown turned into a glower. “She wrote something about that in a letter?”
“Yes, she talks about a person with those initials. I assumed it was you. She writes that she’d have to run the details of some trip by you because you know so much about traveling the far reaches of the world.”
“Did she indeed.” Ellen took off the glasses and dangled them from her fingers. “How inconvenient of her. But then, she always was a bit reckless.”
“You did know her before you moved here, then?” I held my breath, waiting for her response.
