Throughout my search there was a knot in my stomach and a tightness in my chest. I knew I might find Jasper’s body at any moment. Here it comes, I warned myself. He’s hanging from a rafter, bloodless and bloated, in this high-ceilinged bedroom. This is it, I thought. He’s here behind this door, ready to crumple heavily against me when I give the knob a pull. Those twenty minutes seemed to last hours, but other than the blood on his bed I found no sign of him. I checked every room but one, which was locked from the inside. When I knocked on its rich, five-paneled door, I got no reply.

Nine people were staying in the house, and most of them were relatives. I wasn’t optimistic that fingerprints would reveal much. Close families have few boundaries. Formalities tend to fall away. If this family was anything like mine, their prints would be everywhere, and that would make the interviews I was about to conduct even more crucial.

The thought made me shudder. I knew even then, so early in the case, that the key to this solve wasn’t in my pocket or behind Jasper’s locked bedroom door. It was downstairs in the living room.

Waiting.

FOUR

I wasn’t ready to face them, not yet. There was a part of me that still hoped I’d find Jasper alive and break some local records for the fastest solve in history, so I skirted the living room and went straight for the basement, the door to which I found in the kitchen.

Picture a cellar from a horror film, dusty and dank with crumbling stone walls and a criminal air. Old pipes clang and a strange odor hangs heavy, nauseating in its rottenness, meat-sweet. That’s how I imagined the basement in the house on Tern Island. In truth it was pretty ordinary, but walking down those stairs gave me a head rush akin to eating too little and standing too quick. It took me hundreds of miles from the island, to a place I never wanted to be again.

I wasted no time getting out of there to do a cursory search of the grounds outside, rain be damned. There was no way I could cover the whole island on my own, but I poked through leaf piles and peered over steep cliffs with gusto. If there were indeed caves chiseled into the rock, they didn’t reveal themselves to me. Back inside I checked the sunroom, library, and Norton’s room. It was the sole bedroom on the main floor, accessible through a butler’s pantry. Predictably, it lacked the old-world glamour of the rest of the house. A single bed, a small chest of drawers, and a nightstand constituted Philip Norton’s belongings. There was a framed photo beside his bed that showed him as a much younger man, with a full head of red hair and his arm around a boy about ten years old. I picked up the frame and scrutinized the kid’s face. The boy might have been Jasper, but I couldn’t be sure.