“Were you with her?”

He didn’t hear any jealousy in her voice, but he wanted to reassure her anyway.

“No, I left Tish down at the boardwalk hours ago. I went over to the police archives and pulled the material on Laura’s murder and began going through the file again. The next thing I knew, it was almost midnight.”

“She got to you, didn’t she?” Serena asked.

“I guess she did.”

“What do you think of her?”

Stride rubbed the brass studs of the red leather chair under his fingertips. “She’s keeping things from me. I don’t know what, but I don’t like that.” He added, “I can tell that you don’t like her.”

Serena shook her head. “You’re wrong.”

“Come on. I saw your hackles go up.”

“No, it’s true. She doesn’t like me. Big difference.”

“How can you tell?”

“Women know, Jonny.”

He wasn’t about to argue.

“Was there anything in the police file?” Serena asked.

“No, but Tish had something new.”

He told her about the letter Tish had given him and about the possibility that they could find DNA on the postage stamp or the flap of the envelope.

Serena digested this and then studied him with thoughtful eyes. “I’m surprised you never told me anything about Laura and her death. We’ve been together a long time now, Jonny. Is there a reason you didn’t want to share it with me?”

He didn’t know what to say, because he wasn’t sure why he had kept the story to himself. That week in July had changed him so profoundly, in so many ways, that he was never the same person again. He had realized during that week that he was going to spend the rest of his life with Cindy. He had decided during that week, as he got to know Ray Wallace, that one way to fight back against death was to become a cop. He had also discovered how much it hurt to make mistakes and that some mistakes could never be erased. When he thought about who he was today, he could draw a straight line all the way back to that summer. Even so, he had never been able to talk about it. He rarely talked about the passions that drove him. He realized that in the two years he had been coaxing Serena to share secrets about her past, he had rarely spent any time sharing secrets of his own.

Serena saw in his silence that he wasn’t ready to say anything. She didn’t push him. Instead, her face softened into a teasing smile.

“Guess what I did this evening?” she said.

He cocked his head with a silent question.

“I went to the library and found a copy of your high school yearbook from 1977,” she told him.

“Oh, no,” he said.

Serena leaned closer and whispered, “Nice hair.”

“I kept it long in those days.”

“You and Shaun Cassidy.”

“It was the 1970s, for God’s sake. It was the decade that taste forgot.”