“You believed me,” I said.
“I followed the evidence.” He held up a hand. “Different thing.”
“But you’re here. At my house. At seven o’clock, with a file you could’ve called about.”
Something shifted in his expression—a crack in the professional mask. He’d come here thinking I was a grieving ex with a grudge and a theory. The toxicology had changed the math.
“The tea detail checked out,” he said. “The dish-washing. The timing. And now this.” He closed the folder. “You said you couldn’t tell me how you knew. That still bothers me. But your information’s been accurate, and people who make things up don’t usually get the small details right.”
His eyes held mine. Brown, deep-set, tired. Not suspicious anymore—or not only. Something else in that look. Curiosity. The beginning of something he hadn’t decided to trust yet.
“I need more, though. This opens a door. Doesn’t walk through it. If there’s anything else you ‘know’—“ The slightest emphasis on the word. “—now’s the time.”
“I’m working on it.”
“Work faster.” He stood, collected the folder, paused in the doorway. “I’ll be in touch. Lock your door.”
“Was that concern, Detective?”
He gave me a look—annoyed or amused, impossible to tell with that face—and walked to his car. I watched from the window as his taillights pulled away, and realized my hand was resting against the glass where his reflection had been.
I pulled it back.
Rosaria was in the kitchen window, watching me with an expression I’d never seen from her before. Not critical. Not demanding. Something closer to contemplation.
“I was wondering when you were going to show up,” I said. She’d left me alone for most of the day.
“Paula was right,” she said. “I kept a diary. Top drawer of my dresser—it is locked. The key is in my jewelry box, the velvet compartment underneath the tray.”
I sank into the chair Tony had just vacated. It was still warm.
“There are things in that diary, Gina.” Rosaria’s voice was quiet, stripped of its usual imperiousness. “Secrets. About everyone.”
“Everyone,” I repeated.
“Everyone.” She met my eyes in the dark window glass. “Things I wrote down because I knew someday they would matter. Things people thought I did not notice. Things people thought they had hidden.” Her jaw set—that stubborn Ferraro line. “I was not a fool, whatever my children thought. I saw everything. And I wrote it all down.”
The soup on the table had gone cold. Outside, the wind picked up, rattling the windows. Somewhere in the Ferraro family home, a locked diary sat in a drawer—or didn’t, depending on who’d gotten to it first.
Tony was starting to believe me. Paula was either an ally or a very good actress. And somewhere in that family, someone hadturned an industrial chemical into a murder weapon and served it in a teacup.
CHAPTER EIGHT
The candle was mocking me.I was sure of it.
“Focus on the wick,” Lori said, sitting across from me at the back table in Bayberry House with the patience of a woman who’d done this before and expected it to go badly. “Don’t think about lighting it. Think about heat. Think about something that makes you feel warm.”
“How about the hot flash I had in the parking lot ten minutes ago?”
“That works.”
Jill and Tammy were watching from the bar, Jill clutching her water glass with both hands and Tammy leaning against the counter with her arms crossed. I’d spent the first twenty minutes filling them in—the toxicology results, Tony’s visit, Paula and the diary.
“Methanol,” Jill had said, tapping her pen against the legal pad she’d started using to track suspects. “That’s—okay, so from a liability standpoint—sorry,investigativestandpoint—that’s going to be a problem. The defense would argue degradation, contamination, procedural?—“
“Jill,” Tammy had said gently.
“Right. Not helpful.”
