“Yes, but I bought a hammer from your mama three days ago at the shop,” Martha countered. “No one on this island has seen Bix since before that night. You know that old house on the Bell land where the workers used to stay? It’s just sitting there. Abandoned. Makes you wonder why.”

Izzy was going to need her to spell it out. “You think Charles killed Bix, and Asher saw it happen?”

“That boy saw something,” Martha answered with the same kind of tactic as Patty—not a confirmation, not a denial, but an evasion.

And this, this right here was what had Izzy worried about, with starting down this path. There was a reason fringe conspiracy theories didn’t go mainstream. Coming from Martha, the scenario sounded outlandish and leaned heavily on that wisp of an idea that Bix’s possible murder and Asher’s and Monroe’s deaths were connected.

“Did Asher tell you something?” Mia asked.

Martha’s lips pursed. “No, but he came home earlier that day all pale and sweaty. Shaking a little. Had a black eye and wouldn’t say where he’d gotten it.”

Mia shifted beside Izzy, straightening. Something she hadn’t remembered?

“He’d been in a fight?”

“Hmm, yup.”

“And had he been acting odd at all in the days leading up to that one?” Izzy asked.

“No, he was right as rain until then.” Martha nodded once as if to punctuate that. “Then the black eye.”

But. But why would Charles have given him a black eye? Even if Asher had seen something he shouldn’t have. That didn’t make any sense.

The details weren’t adding up. They were spiraling here.

“All right, I’m going to give you my card,” Mia said. “You let me know if you think of anything else.”

Martha took it but didn’t look away from Mia’s face. “You don’t believe me.”

Mia paused, and then more tactfully than perhaps Izzy would have managed: “We’re just collecting information, ma’am. Haven’t reached any conclusions yet.”

“You think I’m crazy, just like the rest of them,” Martha accused, her voice rising.

Izzy went for the Achilles’ heel. “Do you have proof that any of this happened?”

The answer was obviously no, but Martha didn’t put voice to it. Instead, she tapped the card against her thigh. “Find what happened to Bix Bell. You’ll have your evidence then.”

For all they knew, Bix was sipping champagne back in Boston with her ridiculously rich husband. But Izzy plastered on a small smile and nodded. Mia murmured something as equally noncommittal, and then they were back outside, the storm gathering force behind them.

“I don’t know which way that swayed me, to be honest,” Izzy admitted as they started back toward Edie’s house.

Mia barely seemed to hear her. “I would have known if he’d gotten in a fight that day.”