“I’m saying the more likely scenario is that someone put it in the tea itself. After it was brewed. After it was poured.” He underlined something twice. “Which means someone was in that house at seven-thirty. After everyone supposedly left. Someone came back.”
I glanced at the napkin dispenser before I could stop myself. Rosaria was still there, but something had changed. Herexpression had gone cloudy—unfocused, like a woman trying to read a sign through fog. Her mouth opened, then closed. Her edges softened, not flickering the way they did when she talked about her death, but something quieter. Dimmer.
She didn’t remember.
The dinner, the announcement, the yelling—she remembered all of that. But after? After six o’clock, after the front door closed and the house went quiet and she was alone with her teacups and her routine? Nothing. A blank. Everything between the divorce announcement and waking up dead was gone.
She caught me looking and her jaw tightened. “I have told you what I know,” she said, clipped. Defensive. The voice of a woman who’d rather be cruel than admit she was lost.
I looked back at Tony. “But everyonedidleave. You just confirmed the alibis.”
“I confirmed as much as I could.” He flipped a page. “Sal had the ten o’clock flight. Airline confirmed, multiple witnesses at the gate, hotel check-in at eleven Pacific. He’s clean—he couldn’t have gone back to the house and made the airport in time.”
“Paula was at the gallery showing in Portsmouth. Private event, twenty-plus witnesses, but no one was watching her all the time. She could have left and gone back.” He paused.
I thought about Paula on my porch, paint under her nails. “She’s the most open about hating Rosaria. People who announce it usually aren’t the ones who act on it.”
“Usually.” Tony underlined something. “George and Claudia. They say they went straight home after the dinner. They are each other’s alibi.”
“But they could be lying.”
“Claudia’s alibi depends on George. George’s depends on Claudia.” He looked at me. “That’s not an alibi. That’s a mutual agreement.”
“He is good at his job,” Rosaria observed, watching Tony’s face. “Thorough. Patient.” She drifted along the window, her reflection pensive. “So different from Salvatore, who never paid attention to anything that was not about himself.”
“Theysaythey went straight home,” I repeated. “But if someone doubled back after six—came back to the house before Rosaria made her tea?—“
“Then they’d have had ninety minutes. Plenty of time.” Tony’s pen stopped moving. He sat back and rubbed the bridge of his nose. “The problem is proving it.”
“Do you have any idea who?”
He picked up his coffee. Drank. Set it down with that precise little click. His face did something complicated—a tightening around the jaw, a flicker behind the eyes that he shut down fast. The look of a man holding a card he wasn’t ready to play.
“I’ve got threads,” he said. “Nothing I’d hang a case on.”
Which wasn’t a no. I waited, but he moved on.
“Once Rosaria was found, the family came back to the house, right? That night or the next morning?”
“Next morning, I think. The cleaning lady found her and the family met at the house after the hospital. I wasn’t there, of course.”
“And someone cleaned.” He said it flatly.
I watched his face. He was doing what cops do—laying out pieces, looking for the shape they made. I could almost see the picture forming behind his eyes. But he wasn’t saying it. Whatever hunch was pulling at him, he was keeping it close, turning it over the way he turned that pen—testing the weight of it before he committed.
The diner hummed around us. The waitress refilled someone’s coffee across the room. Outside, a truck rumbled past on Route 1.
“I think things are starting to come together,” he said quietly. Then caught himself. “Or they might be. Too early to say.”
“That’s very diplomatic.”
“That’s very careful. Different thing.” He closed the notebook and tucked it in his jacket. “I need more before I put anyone’s name on anything. Physical evidence. Motive. Something that puts a specific person back in that house between six and seven-thirty.”
Rosaria’s reflection had gone very still in the window. That look again—the one she got when she was reaching for a memory locked behind the night she died. Her edges wavered, went soft, and she pulled back before she destabilized.
“Something personal,” I repeated, thinking about a locked diary in a dead woman’s dresser. “I might know where to look.”
Tony studied me. That long, careful look he did, the one that made me feel like I was being read. “Are you going to tell me where?”
