He was watching her. With a small smile and a shrug, he said, “I told you I’ve been busy.”

She could definitely live like this.

“I thought the same thing,” Gabriel said to Sara later, over Cajun food he had snagged from a restaurant up the street. He suspected he was talking a lot, frequently with food in his mouth, which wasn’t classy or attractive, but he was so damn glad she was back that the words were tripping over each other to get out of his mouth. He had the sense that he needed to say everything as quickly as possible in case she disappeared and he never had another chance.

They had spent the afternoon companionably shoveling out his mess, and now while they ate they were dissecting the questions that still remained in the murder cases.

Sara shook her head and picked up her water, sitting on the sofa with her legs crossed. “I just can’t see why Marguerite would murder four generations of women without a more concrete reason. I mean, I sincerely doubt my grandmother was having an affair with Rafe.”

“Here are my concerns,” Gabriel said. He had given a lot of thought to the conclusion of Marguerite as murderer as he’d written the book during the last few weeks and there were still some seriously loose threads dangling. “Why would Raphael buy the house on Dauphine? That seems incredibly random for a man who never admitted he was aware of Jessie’s relationship to Anne. Nor did I ever consider Raphael at all emotionally involved with Anne. Secondly, you said there was a Bible verse on that absinthe bottle. Given what Raphael was quoted during the trial as saying, that seems like too large of a coincidence. Why would both Marguerite and Raphael be using Bible quotes?”

“I don’t know. That’s been the problem the whole time. Too many questions. And I want to know what happened to Rafe’s stuff in his condo. If he wasn’t involved with Marguerite, how did she know he moved out? And was he planning to take his stuff to the house on Dauphine Street? Why would he do that? And who sent the crime scene pics?”

“I don’t know either.” Gabriel abandoned his plate of food and went to his office. Bringing his laptop back into the living room and sitting on the couch next to Sara, he opened his pictures file and clicked on the folder that contained all the shots he’d taken for the book. He wanted a look at the house on Dauphine Street for some reason. Wanted to see if he could see Raphael in the top window. He cropped and enlarged the photo of the front of the house, but he didn’t see anything.

“You think it was Raphael in the window?” Sara asked.

“I don’t see who else it would have been. Did it look like him?”