Millie hesitates, and he can practically see the cogs turning behind her eyes. “Well, I wasn’t sure, and I thought it might be an animal because of the time, like a fox, or a stoat, because I remembered you telling me yesterday about how invasive stoats are, and I still can’t picture them but you said you saw one, and I thought, how does anything get anywhere, Mills, someone brings one, and it multiplies, like in that old movie with the dinosaurs? Life finds a way, you know—”
“So you got up to see...” he says, trying to guide her back on track.
“Right, but I couldn’t, so I went downstairs, and then outside, and...” She trails off, shifting in her seat. She’s clearly hiding something.
“Millie,” he says, soft but stern. “My wife is dead. So if you saw anything—anything at all—”
“It was Priscilla!” she yelps.
Chapter Nine
PRISCILLARENÉEFOX MAY DRESS LIKE Apiece of candy, but he isn’t fooled; there’s a sharpness there, a bitterness lurking beneath the confectionary pink.
“I’m not doing this,” she declares, folding her arms. “I know what’s happened is truly awful, Malcolm. But this”—she gestures around at the room, and then at him—“this isn’t helping. Turning people against each other. Planting seeds of suspicion and fear.”
“All right, then, let’s stick with the facts. I know for a fact that you were skulking about right before it happened. Care to explain yourself?”
“You’re right, I was up. Last time I checked, insomnia isn’t a crime. I got a glass of water.”
“But that’s not all you did, is it? First, you went outside...”
He studies her face for guilt, but Priscilla only shrugs.
“I needed some fresh air. That’s all. I swear, I didn’t see anything, or anyone. I’d tell you if I did.” She leans forward, and says, in a sympathetic voice, “Look, there’s been a tragedy. But you’re making it into something else. And I get it. It’s natural to look for meaning. To make sense of it all.” She adjusts her glasses. “But what if you can’t? What if it was just a terrible accident?”
Malcolm shakes his head. That’s not how stories work. “No, see,” he says, clinging to the slip of paper with those two ominous words, “someone put this in her pocket. To send a message.”
Priscilla shakes her head.
“I don’t know exactly what that is,” she says, “but I know what it’s not. If someone did push Sienna down the stairs, they wouldn’t leave a note. Real people generally want to get away with crimes, not leave clues.”
“Then how—”
“Maybe she found the note earlier and pocketed it. Hell, maybe she typed it out herself.”
“Why won’t you allow for the possibility—”
“Because this is a house ofnovelists, not murderers. You dream up crimes. You don’t commit them.”
But a writerhas. And so, who better than a writer to catch them? Besides, writers write crimes and writers solve the crimes they write about. He closes his eyes. If he can just find the missing piece. If—
“Malcolm?”
He drags his eyes open. His vision is swimming with fatigue, and it takes a few blinks before he manages to focus.
Priscilla sighs. “When’s the last time you were sober?” He doesn’t see what that has to do with anything. Hemingway wrote whole novels drunk. But Priscilla sits forward. “Look, we can’t open the safe, and that assholeRufustook the yacht. So there’s no way to get off the island, and no way to get hold of anyone till the contest ends and Eleanor comes back. But I don’t think you should be here, in this house. If you want to go stay in the cottage, since the editor’s no longer using it...”
No, no, he thinks, he won’t retreat, and he must be saying it aloud because Priscilla is there, at his side, putting a hand on his shoulder, at once gentle, but firm.
“If you won’t leave, then please go upstairs and get some rest.”
Her hand falls away.
Malcolm scrapes his palm against his face, thoughts blurring from fatigue. But as Priscilla heads for the door, something lodges in his mind.
“You.”
She glances back from the door.
