George was having an affair. Poor Claudia.
I found Claudia again near the dessert table twenty minutes later. She’d reassembled herself—mask back in place, lipstick fresh, clutch firmly closed. I picked up a chocolate-covered strawberry I had no intention of eating and stood next to her.
“I’ve been thinking about that morning,” I said, keeping my voice casual. Sympathetic. “When the cleaning lady found Rosaria. It must have been awful for you and George.”
“It was awful for everyone.”
“So George was really home that night, though?” I gave her a pointed look. She was covering for his affair, maybe she covered for him that night too.
Claudia’s warmth cooled by several degrees. She set down her wine glass with a precise click. “George was home.”
A pause. Then she seemed to catch herself, recalibrating, pulling the gracious hostess back on like a coat.
“Look, Gina.” Her voice went lighter, almost dismissive. “If you’re looking for someone with secrets worth killing over, you should look at the whole family. Rosaria had something on everyone.”
“What do you mean?”
“Sal and his money problems—you must have known about those, even before the divorce. Paula and that award she built her entire career on.” She waved a hand toward the silent auction, toward Paula’s painting on its easel. “George never being enough, no matter what he did. Even me.” A tight smile. “I was a vet tech making twelve dollars an hour when George and I met. I didn’t come from money. Rosaria never let me forget it. That’s why I do things like this”—she gestured at the ballroom—“the charity work, the volunteering. I love animals. It’s the one thing that was always mine, before George, before the Ferraros. But Rosaria thought I was beneath the family. She thought I was playing a part.”
She spread her hands, the gracious hostess again, as if presenting the evidence of her innocence on a silver tray.
“We all had reasons to resent her, Gina. Every single one of us. That doesn’t make any of us a killer.”
She touched my arm—a brief, practiced gesture of warmth—and excused herself to greet a donor who’d just arrived. I watched her cross the room, smile already in place, and thought about how quickly she’d shifted from humiliated wife topoised hostess to woman baring her soul to woman ending the conversation.
Four modes in two minutes. Seamless transitions. Not a seam showing.
Rosaria materialized in the glass of a framed auction poster on the wall beside me. She was watching Claudia too.
“She is good,” Rosaria said. There was something almost like respect in her voice, and she clearly hated it. “I will give her that. She is very good.”
“At what?”
Rosaria’s expression shifted. Frustration rippled through her form, edges going fuzzy. “Pretending.”
“Rosaria—”
But she was gone.
I stood alone next to the dessert table, holding a strawberry I didn’t want, in a room full of people who didn’t know a ghost was watching them. Across the room, Claudia laughed at something a donor said. George stared at his drink. Paula’s early painting hung on its easel under a soft spotlight, bright and rough and hopeful in a way that Paula hadn’t been in years.
Everyone had reasons. Everyone had secrets. And somewhere in the tangle of this family’s resentments and lies, a murderer was sipping cheap wine and smiling.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
The phone callcame two days later, while I was practicing putting out the fire in a candle and losing badly.
“Gina.” Claudia’s voice was low, uneven. Not performing—or performing a different character. The scared wife instead of the gracious hostess. “I need to talk to someone. Please.”
I blew out the candle and set it down. “What’s wrong?”
“It’s George. He’s been—” A shaky breath. “I think he’s capable of something terrible, Gina. I’ve been afraid to say it, but after the benefit, after seeing you there, I thought—you’re the only person who’d understand. You know what it’s like to be married to a man who isn’t who you thought he was.”
That landed. She’d aimed it perfectly and it landed.
“I can’t do this on the phone,” she continued. “There’s a property we’re trying to sell. Out on Marsh Road. It’s been empty for months. Can you meet me tonight? Nine o’clock?”
Every instinct said no. An empty house. After dark. Alone.
