“But you don’t remember any of it.” Not that Mia needed to be reminded of that. Still Izzy felt compelled to say it. For the record.

Mia’s shoulder hunched up toward her ears. “I would have known.”

“You think she’s mistaken? Getting confused?”

Glancing back once, Mia shook her head. “I think maybe we should focus on the murder we’re trying to solve instead of hunting new ones out.”

Izzy didn’t say anything further. But it didn’t escape her that just like Martha, just like Patty, Mia hadn’t answered the question.

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER NINE

MIA

The words jumbled, spilled into each other, gentle curves knocking against hard edges, slipping past boundaries, bleeding together. The letters were random for as much as Mia tried to make sense of the gibberish scribbled in the tight lines of the reporter’s notebooks.

“Shorthand,” she murmured, tapping the smudged writing. Left-handed. Twist would have been one of those people with perpetual ink stains smeared against the outside of his palm.

Izzy glanced up from the journal she’d taken from the pile. They were sitting at the small laminate table in Mama’s kitchen, the same one Mia had done homework on decades ago. There was still that crack running along one side, as thin as a spider’s thread. Mia rubbed at it with the pad of her thumb.

They had barely made it back from Martha’s before the first flakes fell. Snow alone wouldn’t have been enough to put Mia off the investigation, but the storm that followed was brutal. Hail pinged against the windows; wind battered all the seams of the house until it groaned beneath the pressure; lightning sliced into the darkness behind Mia’s closed eyes.

“Same here,” Izzy said, holding up some random pages as proof. “But I think there’s a pattern to them.”

There had to be. What mattered was if they could see it or not.

The brain so dearly loved patterns, with a tricky tendency to draw lines where lines shouldn’t exist. When there was a lack of solid evidence on a cold case, those leaps were needed to push past brick walls that had blocked others.

But there was danger there, as well, a vulnerability to having an open mind be exploited. It was like those children’s games, the ones that came on diner menus, the dots that connected to create an image. A bear, a star, a heart. You could almost see the finished product before even laying crayon to paper.

What happened, though, when all the dots were in the right place but you drew the wrong image?

That’s what they were always trying to avoid.

“There are dates and initials,” Mia finally said. “This one’s from early December, before he got to St. Lucy’s.”