Sara Morgan put her hands to her face and started to cry, mourning not only the loss of the woman she had known, but the loss of the beauty Marissa Fordham’s soul had expressed in her art. She slipped inside the door, careful not to step on anything, and squatted down and reached out toward a small impressionistic painting cut almost in two. A small dark-haired child in a field of yellow flowers.

Mendez gently put his hand on her shoulder. “Please don’t touch anything, ma’am. This is a crime scene now.”

Chapter 7

7

“I don’t understand why someone would do that. Any of it,” Sara Morgan said quietly. She sounded defeated, worn-out.

Mendez walked with her away from the barn as the crime-scene team moved in. There were more photographs to be taken, more fingerprints to search for. She went to an old rickety-looking park bench situated under an oak tree and stared at it.

“Can we sit?” she asked. “Is this a crime scene too?”

“It’s all right. Have a seat.”

The bench under the tree seemed a small, untouched oasis between the carnage in the house and the carnage in the barn. An old washtub had been planted with fuchsia, and delicate purple lobelia spilled over the sides. A folk art fairy suspended from a branch smiled as she reached a magic wand over the wild growth.

Sara Morgan reached out and touched the sparkling gold end of the wand, no doubt wishing for a transformation of the day and the terrible things that it had brought with it.

Do over.

“I’m sorry you’re going to be dragged into this for a while,” Mendez said, taking the opposite end of the bench. He sat with his forearms on his thighs, feeling the hours press down on him as the last blast of caffeine subsided.

Sara Morgan said nothing. She sat looking down at her bandaged hands in her lap. Blood had begun to seep through the gauze.

“Can you tell me who some of her friends were?” he asked. “People we should talk to?”

“The Acorn Gallery sells a lot of her work. The people there would know her well.” She continued to look down into her cupped hands as if she could see visions there, pictures of Marissa Fordham and the people she knew.

“She has this weird neighbor,” she said. “He’s seriously creepy. A couple of times he just showed up while I was here working with Marissa. She would say hello to him and he would just hang around, looking at her. He never had much to say. He would just hang out for a while, and then he would leave.”

“Did Ms. Fordham seem afraid of him?”

“No. I was afraid of him,” she admitted. “That’s strange—don’t you think? That he would just—just—loiter like that, like some kind of—I don’t know—pervert or something.”