Page 80 of Mother-Daughter Murder Night

“Paul Hanley. Before we met up with you at the motorboat, I saw him paddling into the marina in a kayak. With a huge black bag, a white cooler. And a shovel.”

Lana looked back at the map. “Jack, could the man you heard have been doing that digging here?” She pointed to the small wedge of land Paul leased from Mr. Rhoads.

Jack scrunched up her face. “I can’t be sure. I passed a gate, and some barbed wire fencing. I don’t know how far it was from there to where I was hiding.”

“And you couldn’t see what he was doing?”

“Just digging, I think. Whatever it was, it sounded like hard work.”

Lana tried to recall if Paul had looked fatigued when she’d first seen him. But all she could remember were flashes of her own panic, the spray off the motorboat, the painful searching until they saw Jack and could start breathing again.

Lana’s thoughts were interrupted by Beth’s voice. “The creek you found let out by the fishing dock?”

Jack nodded.

“There’s public access there. From the slough. And a trail. Do you think it’d be possible for someone to head up into that creek from the dock?”

Now Lana and Jack were both looking at Beth.

“Only I was thinking,” Beth said, “if that were true, then pretty much anyone could get up into that area.”

“Maybe,” Jack said. “They’d have to be pretty brave. Or stupid. I spend a lot of time on the slough, and I wouldn’t just head up some random creek that I didn’t have any idea where it was going.” She looked down and blushed. “Not anymore, I mean.”

“But someone could do it?”

“I don’t know. There was a fast channel here”—Jack ran her finger across the map—“that might be hard to get through going upstream. You’d have to hit the tides right. I’d have to go out there at another time of day to be sure.”

Jack looked up at the two older women.

“Not that I would, I mean. I know I can’t go out on the slough alone right now. But if you wanted. I could.”

There was a long silence.

“You’ve done quite a lot, Jack,” Lana said. She picked up the map. “May I keep this?”

* * *

While Jack did her homework, Lana helped Beth clean up. Or rather, Beth did the dishes and Lana hovered nearby, holding a rag like a fashion accessory.

Jack was on the couch wearing a giant pair of headphones, facing away from them.

“Beth,” Lana said.

Her daughter kept doing dishes.

Lana tried again. “Beth, I want to talk to you.”

“What?”

Lana glanced over at the couch. Tinny screeches of music leaked out from under Jack’s oversize headphones. There was no sign the girl could hear them. “I’ve been thinking. What if she got it wrong?”

Beth locked eyes with her mother. “What do you mean?”

“What if that man with the shovel did see Jack? What if he was the murderer? Or what if she saw something incriminating? Even if she doesn’t know what it is yet?”

“You think it was Paul out there, right?”

Lana nodded.