‘What are you trying to say, Bobbi?’

‘On the day he died, the victim made one call,’ she said. ‘That call was to your house.’

‘Our house?’ Ray asked. ‘That can’t be right. It must be a mistake.’

She had found him stretched out on the sofa watching TV when she came home, but now he sat up to make room for her. He fished the remote from behind the sofa cushion and switched off the TV, his face knotted with confusion. Or was it concern?

Abby sat down beside him, tangled her fingers together, then untangled them and stood up again. ‘Bobbi says there’s no reason to panic. She was just giving us a heads-up. A detective will probably be coming to ask us about it and—’

‘Ab, slow down, a detective? This is crazy. For all they know it was a wrong number.’

‘The call lasted four minutes and forty seconds,’ she said. ‘That’s too long for a wrong number.’

Ray frowned. ‘Could it be one of the kids?’

‘It was the middle of a school day. The kids weren’t home. I’ll ask them, to make sure.’

Ray fell quiet.

The nostalgic smell of burning wood filled the room. Wind swept down the chimney of the wood heater, aggravating the flames and creating an eerie, strangely ominous howl. Come to think of it, maybe it wasn’t ominous at all. Maybe ‘Jingle Bells’ would have sounded the same way to Abby right now. Bobbi had placed a knot in her thoughts, and so far, all Ray had done was make it tighter.

‘It was the day of the big storm, Ray,’ she said quietly.

He flinched at that. He must have known what she was about to say, but he let her say it anyway.

‘The kids were at school, I was at the Buy & Bye, and you…’

‘I took the morning off,’ he admitted. ‘It was too wet to work.’

‘So, you were home?’

For a moment, in the flickering orange glow of the wood heater, he looked sinister. She pictured the blond man on the cover of Mountain Stud. Then his face calmed. He clicked his tongue. ‘Come to think of it, I do remember getting a call that day.’

‘You do?’

‘Yeah. Some guy called about Island Care. A potential new client, that’s all. See, a lot of these summer residents think hiring a caretaker for the winter is a waste of money until they arrive at their house and find a wasp’s nest under their verandah or a family of fruit bats in their guestroom.’

‘So he was calling to … hire you?’

‘Yeah.’

‘What did he say?’