“What is it?” Mia asked. She’d moved closer.

Izzy held it up so they could both see.

“A phone.”

Mia met her eyes. “That’s out of place.”

Nodding in agreement, Izzy looked down at the black screen, then glanced back to where the cell had been pushed under the bed. “I think . . .”

“What?”

“Maybe he was trying to hide it,” Izzy said, knowing it was a wild leap of logic but unable to silence the thought. “For us to find.”

Mia stopped on the path back into town so abruptly Izzy had to sidestep to keep from crashing into her. The messenger bag full of the reporter’s notebooks that Izzy had slung over her shoulder wasn’t as quick to react and slammed against Mia’s side.

A swallowed grunt was her only acknowledgment of pain.

“Sorry, but your brake lights must be out,” Izzy said, her eyes flicking toward the sky. Thick sludge clouds had been rolling toward them all morning, and Izzy was anxious to get to shelter before the storm made landfall.

“One stop,” Mia said, squinting at the oncoming weather as well. After a few seconds, she nodded, a tiny confirmation to herself almost, and then took the left path instead of the one that took them back to Edie Hart’s house. And a roof. And heat. “We’ll have time.”

There was nothing to do but follow. “Who are we visiting?”

“Martha Lowe.” The answer was so quiet it took Izzy a second to catch on.

“Lowe. Like—”

“Asher, yes,” Mia interrupted. “Martha is his grandmother.”

Izzy studied the side of Mia’s face, trying to read anything there. Her expression was empty, though. “Does that mean . . . you do think Twist’s death has something to do with Asher’s? And Monroe’s?”

Mia bit her lip, but that was the only sign that she wasn’t completely composed. “I don’t know. Probably not.”

Probably not. An echo of what Izzy had thought at the cabin. They both seemed to be dancing around the possibility, not trusting it but unable to ignore it. If Twist’s story had been about Asher’s and Monroe’s deaths, there was a chance, likely or not, that he could have been killed over it.

She wondered if Mia’s opinion about whether Twist’s death was suicide had shifted yet. Izzy knew for herself if the journals confirmed that the reporter had indeed been asking about that night, it would make Izzy more convinced that they were looking at a homicide here.

But where that left Mia, she didn’t know, and she didn’t have time to ask, either. They came to a stop outside a sky-blue house with a pristine white door.

The woman who answered Mia’s knock had the weathered, hardy look Izzy was starting to associate with living in Maine. She was short but stout, not frail, her silver hair braided down her back.