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“What’s that?”

“I hear you got arrested for murder last night.”

It was Holmes’s turn to be surprised—annoyed, actually—but he kept his composure. “Not arrested. Detained. And freed with no charges filed. How did you hear about that?”

“Word travels fast in the woods,” said Bell. “We all knew Celia Rogers. Do you want to talk about it? About being accused of killing her?”

Holmes stood up and shook his head. “To be honest, right now it’s the least of my worries.”

CHAPTER 15

AS ALWAYS, HOLMES needed the whole drive back to the lodge to decompress. He knew that his sessions with Dr. Bell were important to his effort to stay clean, but they were emotionally draining. They dredged up parts of his life that he would rather forget, and parts of his personality that were hard to own up to. His obsessiveness. His perfectionism. His secretiveness.

With Bell, he sometimes felt like an open book, and he didn’t like the feeling. The time with her was supposed to reassure and encourage him. Instead, it unsettled him.

Holmes looped around the lodge driveway and parked next to Poe’s covered car. As soon as he stepped onto the porch, he was hit with the aromas of warm butter, vanilla, and lemon. Margaret was cooking again. When Holmes walked inside, he expected to see her fussing over bowls and measuring cups.

Instead, she was standing in front of the TV in the great room. Helene Grey was perched on the edge of a chair beside her.

Holmes hung up his coat and walked over in the middle of a CNN breaking-news report.

“Brendan!” said Marple. “Look at this!”

A video clip showed a ball of flame erupting amid a huge tangle of pipes and metal towers, lighting up the night sky. It was surveillance footage, taken from a distance, time stamped 2:10 a.m. No audio. The banner across the bottom of the screen read: MASSIVE EXPLOSION ROCKS TEXAS OIL REFINERY.

The report cut to a live shot, now in bright daylight. A young correspondent stood about fifty yards from the scene. Behind her, a service road was littered with emergency vehicles—police cars, pumper trucks, ambulances. White foam coated a tangle of mangled structures. Smoke curled from a low, aluminum-sided building with a huge, blackened gash across the front.

“Looks like a bomb hit it,” said Grey. “Or a missile.”

The TV reporter squared her stance, eyes on the camera, mic at her chin. She fiddled with her earpiece, waiting for her cue. When it came, she nodded and started speaking.

“That video showed the scene at the El Paso oil refinery early this morning, where four refinery workers are known dead, with several others still missing in the wreckage. This refinery typically handles nearly 300,000 barrels of crude a day, and now much of that oil has been ignited or spilled through shattered pipes. EPA officials are obviously concerned about soil and water contamination. Preliminary reports point to sabotage, and authorities are not ruling out a terrorist attack.”

With that, the reporter was replaced by a stern-looking Wolf Blitzer standing in front of a wall of fiery images. “That was Lynn Bascomb of station KMID in Odessa, Texas,” said Blitzer. “Much more on this big story coming up.”

The image then cut to a Busby Berkeley–style commercial for a diabetes medication.

“Terrible,” said Holmes, turning away. “But none of our concern.”

“Maybe not for you and me,” said Grey. “We’re both retirees.”

Holmes bristled at the term, even though it was accurate. Grey struggled to her feet and shuffled off toward a corner of the room, cell phone in hand. “I’m phoning a friend,” she said. “Let’s see if there’s something CNN isn’t telling us.”

Helene Grey had taken herself out of the detective game for the good of her babies. Logical and practical. Holmes had no one to blame but himself. He told himself that it was because he no longer wanted to put the people he loved in danger. Which was valid. But was that really all?

Was it actually that he worried he was no longer at the top of his game? No longer worthy of his famous name?

Oliver Paul had told Holmes to his face that he’d lost his touch. Maybe Paul had been right.

Holmes jumped when a loud bell went off in the kitchen. Marple hurried over to the oven and looked through the glass.

“What’s in there?” asked Holmes.

“French lemon soufflé,” she called back.

Holmes groaned. Another belt buster. “Is there no such thing as low-calorie French cuisine?”

“Not if you’re doing it right,” said Marple.