Annie had known she was too distracted to sit at her laptop and get any halfway decent writing done, so she’d walked back to the beach, retrieved her sneakers, then gone to where Kevin stood—on the outside of the area that was now squared off by yellow police tape, the kind that sent chills down the spines of most passersby, not that anyone would be passing by a private beach on Chappaquiddick, especially in April. John, two other Edgartown officers, and the state police remained. Annie noticed that Lucy was still there, too, though she’d moved over to the dunes and was talking to Jonas. Taylor was gone, which was fine with Annie, though she felt somewhat guilty about that.

“I sent the crew home until further notice,” Kevin said.

“There’s still six weeks to finish,” Annie said.

“Five weeks, three days.”

“But who’s counting, right?”

“All the more reason I can’t deal with Mom right now. I love her dearly, but sometimes she can be—what’s the word?—formidable?”

He’d smiled as he said it, but Annie got the point. She also wondered if that was why she hadn’t yet been able to fully connect with Donna. But for both her sake and Kevin’s, she wanted to sound optimistic. “Maybe by Saturday they’ll know where the skull came from and it can fade into one more piece of short-lived Vineyard gossip.”

“Seriously? Do you know how long things can take when you’re dealing with the government? Especially in Boston. It takes forever to get a building permit. And God forbid someone claims to have seen a new species of a creepy spider or a minuscule shard of what they think might be old pottery, because it can shut down major construction of a high-rise for months.”

So Earl’s predictions hadn’t been exaggerations.

“Well, I’m sure Donna will be disappointed. But she’ll probably understand.”

He laughed. “No, she won’t. She’ll want to come anyway. Then she’ll drive everyone crazy—including me—which won’t be helpful. She means well. She really does. But she doesn’t want to see me—or now you, too—not get what we want. All I need to do is figure out how to tell her not to come. Then let her know I mean it.”

Annie wondered why he was so insistent. Maybe he was the only one who Donna would drive crazy.

“Kevin?” she asked gently. “What’s wrong? You’ve told me about a few things Donna did when you were young that were upsetting at the time, but wasn’t that just typical kids-versus-parents stuff? Has something else happened?”

He looked out to the water. “No. It isn’t really about her.”

“What then? I mean, right now I could do without company as much as you, even our mother. But you seem kind of angry.”

“Not angry. Distressed.”

“About the Inn?”