“The same list.”
Nobody spoke for a while. Lori drove carefully, both hands on the wheel, eyes on the road. The town slid past in darkness—the harbor, the closed shops on Main Street, the antique stores with their crystals in the windows.
“Whoever has that diary,” Tammy said, “has everything Rosaria had. Every secret, every piece of leverage. They’ve got the whole family in the palm of their hand.”
“And if they’re the same person who killed Rosaria,” Lori added, “then they killed once to protect a secret. Now they have all of them.”
Lori pulled up in front of my cottage and put the car in park. She turned around and looked at me with those sharp blue eyes, clinical and kind in equal measure.
“Lock your door,” she said.
“Everyone keeps telling me that.”
“Because you keep needing to hear it.”
I went inside. Locked the door. Tested it twice. And sat in the kitchen in the dark, thinking about an empty drawer and a killer who now had all the leverage in the world.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
“Walk me through it again,”Lori said, both hands wrapped around her tea like she was holding herself steady. “Who had access to the methanol, and who would know how to use it?”
We were in the backroom of Bayberry House. The scorch marks from my napkin fire were still visible on the table, which Tammy had covered with a cheerful plaid runner that wasn’t fooling anyone. Jill had her legal pad open to a fresh page with two columns:AccessandKnowledge. The columns were currently empty because we kept going in circles.
“The methanol is the easy part,” I said. “Tony said it’s industrial. Solvents, paint strippers, adhesives. You can buy it at a hardware store.”
“Or an art supply store,” Tammy said.
The table went quiet in a specific way. The way a table goes quiet when everyone arrives at the same thought simultaneously and no one wants to say it first.
Jill said it. “Paula’s an artist.”
“She must work with solvents every day,” Tammy added, her voice careful. “Turpentine, mineral spirits, varnish removers. She’d have access to methanol-based products without raising a single eyebrow.”
“Access isn’t knowledge,” I said, even as the thought settled into my stomach. “Having the solvent and knowing how to turn it lethal are different things.”
“Are they, though?” Jill was writing now, pen moving fast. “Tony said you’d need to modify the concentration. But the base compound is right there in her studio. She handles it constantly. She’d know the properties, the smell, the taste—or lack of taste, if it’s been diluted properly.”
“Paula came to my cottage,” I said. “Told me about the diary, so she knew about it. Why do that if she’s the one who took it?”
“Misdirection,” Jill said. “Classic strategy. You get ahead of the information by being the one to introduce it. That way you control the narrative around it. I’ve seen defendants do it a hundred times—bring up the evidence yourself, frame it the way you want, and nobody suspects you of hiding it because you were the one who mentioned it.”
“Or she’s innocent and she was genuinely wondering about the diary,” I said.
“Also possible.” Jill capped her pen. “But we need to rule her out before we can move on. Right now she’s got access, proximity, knowledge of the diary, and a lifetime of motive.”
“Her alibi for the evening is solid,” Lori said. “Gallery opening, witnesses, timestamps. But the poisoning could have happened earlier. The tea cup was sitting on the counter all afternoon.”
“We keep coming back to that counter,” Tammy murmured. “Forty years of routine. Anyone who’d been in that kitchen knew the cup would be sitting there, unattended, for hours.”
Rosaria materialized in the bar mirror, and I could tell from her expression that she’d been listening. Her face was tight—not angry, something more complicated. This was her daughter they were discussing.
“Go to her gallery,” Rosaria said quietly. “See what she works with. See what she knows.”
I relayed this without attribution. “I’ll go see her. Visit the gallery, casual. Admire the art. Ask some questions.”
Tammy raised an eyebrow. “You think she’ll talk?”
“Paula always talks. It’s her best quality and her worst.”
