I was about to open my mouth to say no when I remembered the man who’d come up the stairs to Jack’s place the other night, and the blue Dodge Charger that had creeped me out. Stevens made more notes as I showed him the photos and recounted what had happened, and I couldn’t help feeling he wasn’t taking it very seriously. “I told Sam I’d remove Jack’s things,” I said after he asked me what I’d come here for, and had to try hard to keep the irritation from my voice as I explained about Sam’s intentions to sell.

Stevens shook his head. “You’ll have to wait until we finish processing the place. I’ll let you know when we’re done.”

I was being dismissed, and so I muttered a goodbye and stepped into the hallway. The door to the closet was open. There had been nothing of value in there, sentimental or otherwise. It was where Jack kept an ironing board I’d seen him use once, along with a multitude of cleaning supplies and a box filled with shoe polish and old rags. I was about to walk by when I spotted a book on the floor, a dusty copy of a novel called Creep by Jennifer Hillier. At first, I assumed it belonged to Sam, something he’d forgotten, and which Jack either hadn’t seen in the closet, or hadn’t passed along. Except when I bent over, picked up the book and opened the front cover, right there, stamped on the first page, was a rectangular black-and-white bookplate with the words Yarmouth Public Library, Maine.

My palms turned clammy as I recalled Jack telling me how he’d moved from England to the States when he was a teenager, not long after his mother committed suicide. He’d also told me he’d lived in Maine for a while, somewhere near Portland. When I’d shared this information with Heron and Stevens, they’d said they’d “look into it” but as far as I could tell they’d done nothing, concentrating their investigation on the surrounding counties instead. It wasn’t surprising. There had to be a thousand men named Jack living in Maine, we still had no clue if it was his real name or when he’d left that state, and besides, police manpower was limited.