Davis cocked his head slightly to one side, then laid a heavy hand on my shoulder. “Escort an old man out for a breath of fresh air,” he said, “will you?”

The deck outside the ballroom faced the water. Down below, a hundred or more boats were docked. Farther out, the lake glistened in the twilight. I could hear the sound of water rhythmically washing over the shore.

“If I thought she would agree,” Davis told me, leaning up against the deck’s railing, “I would ask your grandmother to dance.”

That wasn’t what he’d brought me out here to say, and it certainly wasn’t what I wanted to talk to him about, but I’d been a part of the world he and Lillian inhabited long enough to know that this was how the game was played. “She said she met my grandfather at a party like this one.”

Davis nodded back toward the ballroom. “In that very room.” He ran his thumb over his forefinger, and I noticed that he still wore a wedding ring on his left hand. “There was a time that I thought one dance with your grandmother might make all the difference in the world.” He was quiet for a moment, listening to the sound of the water and the faintest traces of music from inside. “It is out of courtesy to my relationship with her that I will ask you exactly once to stay out of my dealings with Victor

Gutierrez.”

There was something in his tone and posture that reminded me that he’d grown up with Lillian, in a town where my grandmother claimed that people had to fight to survive.

I wasn’t deterred. “His granddaughter was the teenage girl your adult son knocked up.” I rested my forearms on the railing and took in the way a muscle in his jaw had just ticced. “So it isn’t just business,” I said, reading into the tell. “Your dealings with Victor Gutierrez—and his with you—are personal.”

“What they are,” he emphasized, “is none of your concern.”

“You told me that you took care of the situation with Ana,” I said, studying the lines of his face, looking for another tell. “I assumed that meant you paid her off.”

That seemed to be the go-to move in the Ames family playbook. Davis had helped to cover for the accident that had put Nick’s brother in a coma, back when he’d thought that Walker was the one driving.

He’d paid Nick off once the truth about the senator’s involvement had come out.

“I believe,” Davis said, “that I’ve had enough fresh air.” He started back for the ballroom.

“Campbell thinks Ana is the body that’s been sitting at the bottom of Regal Lake for two decades.” I dropped that bomb, stopping him in his tracks. “She thinks someone in your family killed her.”