If only she weren’t here for the reason that she was here. She wanted to be straight with Jimmy, ask what the hell he’d been doing. But that’s not how any of this worked.

“We’re just checking in with everyone the reporter talked to, Jimmy,” Mia said instead.

Jimmy’s foot tapped against the linoleum, an unsteady beat that tattled on the anxiety he was clearly trying to keep under wraps. “Didn’t talk to him much, though.”

Mia decided to come at it from the side. “Sammy says the guy was poking round the lighthouse.” She paused. “And that you chased him off.”

“Might have.” Jimmy hunched over his mug, his foot still going, filling the quiet room with the dull thud of rubber against tile. “He liked to snoop everywhere.”

“Everywhere?”

Beneath his beard Jimmy’s lips twitched, pursed, relaxed. “Poking into everyone’s business.”

Mia waited, but he didn’t elaborate.

“Did he say anything when you caught him at the lighthouse?” Mia pushed.

Thwap, thwap, thwap. No pause, no stutter. “No.”

Maybe she didn’t have an interrogation room, but now she had a baseline for Jimmy’s tell. If she could read it right.

“You were there that night, weren’t you?”

Jimmy’s foot stopped, and the quiet pressed in against her. It was only when it was missing that she realized how loud the tapping had been.

And then it was back. “What do you mean?”

“The night Monroe and Asher killed themselves,” Mia said, hating this tactic, hating that she had to put it so harshly. But Jimmy was a suspect, not a family friend. And there was no room for pulling punches here.

“Half the island was out there, Mia,” Jimmy said, not unkindly, his hand coming up to thread into his beard, catching in the knots. Everything about him had actually relaxed at the question, the tapping slowing as he sat back in his seat. Mia flicked her eyes to Izzy, who was in her peripheral, then looked back at Jimmy.

“Can you tell me about it? What happened that night?”

Again, there was no sign of distress, just a sadness in the slope of his eyebrows, in the crease between them.

“Don’t remember it well, huh?” Sympathy rather than anxiety coated his words. “You were out of it.”

That’s what Mama had said as well. Drugs. She was leaning more and more toward that option. The therapist at the institution had told her she couldn’t remember the night because she’d repressed the memories. It had been too much shock for her brain to deal with, so her body had protected her.

But drugs made sense, too. Which means the deaths had been premeditated. Mia still wasn’t sure what she thought had happened, but drugging the victims didn’t exactly scream fit of rage.