It was right, though. She pulled to the opposite curb, her serviceable Honda blending in with the other affordable compact cars. This was solidly middle-class America.

If the Bells had really come here, they must have been desperate to escape whatever they had been leaving behind.

Izzy grabbed at the flimsy coffee cup she’d snatched on her way out of the motel room, bringing the Styrofoam to her lips as she kept her eyes on the front door of the house. The sludge was lukewarm at best, but it was another hit of caffeine, and at this point beggars really couldn’t be choosers. She finished it in one gulp.

It was unlikely she’d get anything out of the current owners about where Charles Bell was now, but at least she had a starting point. After she talked to whoever had bought the house, she’d fan out to the neighbors, maybe get lucky. Fifteen years or so wasn’t that long to live in the same place.

There was something strange about Charles staying in the house where his wife had died. According to the local guy Izzy had sweet-talked over the phone, this had been Charles’s last-known address as recently as six years ago. Why had he stayed in it all that time? Wouldn’t that have been torture, walking the hallways hand in hand with the ghost of your supposedly beloved wife?

Cold and calculating. That was the kind of person that Charles would have needed to be to kill his daughter to cover up whatever Asher had seen. That was the type of person who remodeled their house instead of moving out when the flames consumed Bix.

Though if Bix hadn’t died until she was on the mainland, that meant that if Charles was responsible for Asher’s murder, it wasn’t because Charles had been covering up Bix’s death like Martha Lowe had suggested.

A spiky headache was pulsing in her frontal lobe, so Izzy tossed her empty cup onto the floor and grabbed her bag. Just as she went to step out of the Honda, a car turned onto the street. It crawled past each house until it turned into the driveway of the one Izzy was watching.

There was a woman behind the wheel, but Izzy couldn’t tell her age, or much beyond her diminutive build. Izzy ducked her head for a better view while the woman climbed out of the beat-up sedan.

She wasn’t young but wasn’t elderly, either. Her hair was pulled back into a low bun, the sunlight catching on the silver strands threaded throughout. Both the style and color probably added a few years, but Izzy would guess midforties.

The woman was clad in pale blush scrubs and a white cardigan that she was straightening as she walked the path up to the house.

Izzy made her move.