“Was there a chance Henry or Earl was having an affair with Monroe?”

“No,” Jimmy said, executing a quick sign of the cross. “No, absolutely not.”

Mia nodded like she believed him. But she doubted he’d tell her anyway.

“Hey,” Izzy said, a little too loud, a little too abrupt. “Did you ever talk to that Peter guy? The artist who lived at the Bell mansion in the fall?”

“The artist?”

Izzy nodded. “He was in residence during the fall,” she said again.

“Never did like that punk,” Jimmy said, barrel arms crossed over his chest.

The response didn’t feel connected to their question: not quite a non sequitur but also not really an answer.

“Why’s that?”

He shrugged. “Caught him sneaking into the old house near the Bell’s mansion.” He swung his arm toward the window and presumably the north end of the island. “Where the workers used to stay. And the artists, when there are more of them.”

Martha Lowe’s voice echoed in Mia’s head. You know that old house on the Bell land . . . ? It’s just sitting there. Abandoned. Makes you wonder why.

A tightness gathered at the base of her skull.

That house was right up against the cliffs. If the reporter had been there on the night he’d died, it would have been easy to maneuver his body into the ocean.

“What were you doing up there, Jimmy?” Mia asked, her voice a low rasp.

He was shaking his head before she even finished, a jerky, frantic denial of any implications layered beneath her question. “I go up once a month. Tend to the yard. That’s all, that’s it. Don’t even go in the house.”

Mia exhaled, the curve of her spine pressing against the back of her chair as she let the breath out. “Did you tell Lacey he’d been there recently?”

“Didn’t want to bother her,” Jimmy mumbled. “But I tore into him good. Just like that reporter who was snooping around the lighthouse. No one ever taught them what private property was.”

“Was he apologetic?” Izzy asked. “Peter, not the reporter.”

Jimmy’s lips twisted before going flat again. “Nervous and sweaty, more. Doped out, coked out, something like that.”

Or he’d found something, something he wasn’t supposed to find, something that was supposed to have been kept hidden. The house was fairly isolated, separated from the Bell mansion by a good deal of land. It was the perfect place to bury a secret.

“When was this?” Mia asked. “When you caught him.”

“Think it was about October, maybe, a few weeks before Halloween.” Jimmy’s voice grew more confident as he spoke, as if the retelling helped confirm it to himself. “Wanted to do one last rake on the leaves before the winter.”

October. A figure under a busted streetlight. An upturned collar of a jacket, hunched shoulders. Watching her.