She stood beside me, her cup cradled in her hands. She smelled of rose soap, which hit me as strange. She didn’t strike me as the flowery type. When the mother had died, I’d asked around about all three girls. Oddly, I’d always felt paternalistic toward Marisa, whose demeanor had appeared to be a coping mechanism. Unlike Marisa, Clare couldn’t release her rage but balled it up inside, and Brit, well, she was just plain sneaky.

As I turned from the photo, I caught the curve of Marisa’s breast in my peripheral vision. I was old, not dead. Creepy maybe, though she was no longer a kid but a thirty-year-old woman. “You said there was someone else.”

“David Welbourne.”

“Who’s that?”

“My sister Brit’s fiancé. He’s a money manager who works out of his home.”

“Are you drinking again?” I had a nose for alcoholics. Took one to know one. And I sensed she’d had a tussle with sobriety.

“Hear me out.” Her gaze didn’t waver. Either her worries were fueled by boozy paranoia, or she was batshit crazy.

“Are you drinking again?” It surprised me how much I was rooting for her sobriety.

She drew in a breath. “I had a slipup the other night. I drank a couple of bottles of wine. But I went to a meeting last night and today, I called my sponsor once, and I’ll hit another meeting tomorrow.”

I muttered, “Shit,” as I stared at her. No sense in asking how something like that had happened. Sometimes it just did. That was what made a lush so hard to love. But that didn’t temper my disappointment.

“Jo-Jo had Clare’s camera.”

“I thought we looked at all your cameras.”

“You looked at mine. Clare had a small one that was hers. Clare visited Jo-Jo hours before the party. She left her coat, and in the pocket was the camera.”

“And Jo-Jo didn’t tell me this why?”

“It was her private connection to Clare. She liked having a piece of Clare no one else did. The three of us were pretty tight at one point. Some called us the Three Musketeers.”

“She might also have let her killer go free.” The words tasted bitter as I ground them out.

“I know. And you can deal with her on that score later. For now, let’s deal with the bigger issue.” She had the focus of a dog with a bone.

“Which is?”

“You said the DNA of Clare’s baby did not match any of the males in her life. Around the time she got pregnant, I went to visit Brit at college and Clare stayed behind to attend an art show. I was supposed to go as well, but Brit talked me into staying in Charlottesville and shopping.”