“I just…he was so nice. I can’t imagine…was he mixed up in something?”

That was movie talk right there. Mixed up in something. Cyrus liked playing the part of the TV detective since that was what people expected of him.

“That’s what I’m trying to find out, ma’am. Did you see him with anyone at the house while he was here? A visitor? Someone who might have stayed with him? Overnight possibly?”

“You mean like a girlfriend? No, he didn’t have a girlfriend. Or, you know…” She lowered her voice. “A man friend.”

“I see,” Cyrus said, disappointed. There goes that theory. “Do you remember if he stayed at that house every night? Or maybe he stayed with someone else around here? Or somewhere else?”

“Oh, I think he was there every night,” she said. “Liked to walk every morning on the beach. By the time he got back, I was making breakfast. I could see him from the kitchen window climbing his steps.”

All right. So he didn’t have company at the house and Ike didn’t go to anyone else’s house at night.

“Did he…do you think he had a girlfriend,” the woman asked, “and she killed him?”

“It’s a theory I’m working on,” he said. Cyrus decided to shake up the woman a little, shake her and see what he could shake out. “Ma’am, were you aware that Isaac was a Catholic priest?”

Her eyes widened, big as the sand dollars painted on her mailbox.

“He was?” she said. “He never told us that. Why wouldn’t he tell us that? We’ve had several priests stay at that house. We’re not Catholic, but we don’t have any problem with priests.”

“Oh, a lot of reasons. Priests can make people feel uncomfortable. Or people immediately want to tell priests everything they did wrong or get into theological discussions. He may have just wanted his privacy while he was here.”

“A priest…that just doesn’t make any sense at all.”

“Louisiana is a very Catholic state,” he reminded her.

“I guess you’re right. He asked me about my grandchildren, and I think…well, I thought he had grandchildren, too, since he seemed to know a lot about children.”

“He worked in a school.”

“Ah,” she said, nodding. “Well, that explains that. I said something about it being paradise down here but that my grandson hated visiting, nothing to do. I remember him saying a lot of kids hate being away from their things and their friends. Not even a big beautiful beach makes up for it. It just sounded to me like he knew kids. But if you say he worked at a school, that makes sense. Although…I could have sworn—”

“What could you swear?”

“Oh, he asked what there was for kids to do around here. I thought for sure he had kids or grandkids of his own. Grandkids, at his age. I told him a few things and he wrote them down.”

“Maybe he was thinking about field trips or something.”