Police were said to be baffled by both the dead valet in the garden and evidence that both father and daughter had been bound to chairs before they killed each other. The limo driver who dropped Trevor back at the house that night was questioned and released, and police could find no evidence that anyone but the victims had been in the house that night.

Also during the week we were gone, Richie Colgan’s series on Grief Release and the Church of Truth and Revelation began to appear. The Church immediately filed suit against the Tribune and Richie, but no judge would impose an injunction on the story, and by the end of the week, Grief Release had temporarily closed its doors in several locations across New England and the Midwest.

No matter how hard he tried, though, Richie never discovered who the faces and power behind P. F. Nicholson Kett were, and Kett himself could not be found.

But we didn’t know any of that in Cape Elizabeth.

We knew only each other and the sounds of our voices and the taste of champagne and the warmth of our flesh.

We talked about nothing of any import, and it was the best conversation I’d had in a long time. We looked at each other for long periods of charged, erotic silence, and often broke out laughing at the same time.

In the trunk of my car one day, I found a book of Shakespeare’s sonnets. The book had been a gift from an FBI agent with whom I’d worked last year on the Gerry Glynn case. Special Agent Bolton had given it to me while I was locked in the throes of depression. He told me it would provide comfort. I didn’t believe him back then, and I tossed it in my trunk. In Maine, though, while Angie showered or slept, I read most of the poems, and though I’d never been a big fan of poetry, I took a liking to Shakespeare’s words, the sensuous flow of his language. He certainly seemed to know an awful lot more than I did—about love, loss, human nature, everything really.

Sometimes at night, we’d bundle up in the clothes we’d bought in Portland the day after we arrived, and let ourselves out through the back door of our bungalow onto the lawn. We’d huddle together against the cold and work our way down to the beach, sit on a rock overlooking the dark sea, and take as full a measure as possible of the beauty laid out before us under a pitch-black sky.

The ornament of beauty, Shakespeare wrote, is suspect.

And he was right.

But beauty itself, unadorned and unaffected, is sacred, I think, worthy of our awe and our loyalty.