You tried to be gentle. You tried not to make any sudden movements. You avoided using the past tense. “Is there anyone you can think of who might want to hurt Lisa?” Archie asked her father.

Peter Watson winced, and his forehead creased. He had aged ten years since they’d walked through the door. “She didn’t have a boyfriend, if that’s what you mean,” he said.

“An ex-boyfriend?” Henry asked. “Anyone she might have run into at the party?”

Watson sank onto the arm of a wingback chair. Its sunflower yellow upholstery seemed inappropriately cheerful, considering. Most of the furniture in the room was the same aggressive shade of yellow as the chair. Embroidered yellow throw cushions on the sofa matched the formal drapes that hung over the windows. The walls were the color of ballpark mustard. Archie wondered if they would redecorate now.

“Honestly, I don’t know,” Watson said with a defeated sigh. “We didn’t even know she was going to that party. She hasn’t had a boyfriend since high school. More like”—he looked pained and his eyes drifted to the floor—“encounters.”

Lynn Watson reentered the room. She had cleaned herself up a little, Archie noticed. Her face was still haggard with grief, her eyes swollen with tears. But she had applied a careful layer of plum-colored lipstick. The color brought out the blotchiness in her cheeks.

She handed Henry and Archie each a lime-green plastic cup of water, no ice. The cups were printed with a State Tennis Finals Championship logo.

“Thank you,” Archie and Henry both said.

Archie noticed that the lip of his cup was dusty, like it had been sitting on a shelf for a few years. He lifted it to his mouth and took a sip of tepid tap water. “Mm,” he said.

“They want to know if she could have run into anyone she knew, anyone dangerous, at the party out on that island,” Peter Watson told his wife.

“Lisa is very popular,” Lynn Watson said, nodding. “She knows a lot of people.”

No one said anything for a moment. Archie could hear a dog barking in the backyard.

“Anyone who lived around the lake?” Archie asked her, thinking of the dock where Lisa’s body had been found. Archie flipped through his notebook for the name of the property owner. “Wally Swinton?”

The two Watsons looked at each other blankly.

“Swinton have any kids?” Archie asked Henry.

“No,” Henry said. “He’s a bachelor.”

“A bachelor?” Archie said.

“He’s gay,” Henry said.

“Just say that, then,” Archie said.

“I thought I did,” Henry said.

The Watsons were both looking at them.

Archie wasn’t sure what more could be gained from them. He was growing more and more certain that Lisa Watson had met someone at that party who had killed her. And that meant that the answers weren’t here. They were on that island.