The Fast Аnd Тhe Furriest

Chapter 19

We headed home.

“Now what?” Liz asked from the backseat.

Rose sighed softly. “We must have missed something.”

“Maybe it was just some random attack,” Liz said.

“It wasn’t,” I said.

I could see Rose studying me from the corner of my eye. “I don’t disagree, but why are you so sure?”

“It’s like you said before.” I glanced over at her for a moment. “Leila’s accident, Erin believing Mac had something to do with that and then doing a complete one-eighty. Her showing up here saying she needed to talk to him and then a few hours later she’s dead.” I blew my bangs off my face. “C’mon, even a bad movie of the week couldn’t get away with that many coincidences.” I couldn’t keep the frustration out of my voice.

“So we go over everything again,” Rose said. “And again if we have to. Maybe we missed something, something so small that we didn’t realize its significance. We’ll figure it out.”

I nodded, but I kept my eyes on the road. I had an idea about what that something small might be.

We stopped for lunch at a little diner about halfway between the salt works and North Harbor. Liz gave me directions and I could tell she was getting a kick out of telling me where to go.

“This place better be good,” I said as we got out of the SUV.

“Would I steer you wrong, child?” she asked.

“You steered us down a one-way street,” Rose said from in front of us.

“And we were only going one way so I don’t see the problem,” Liz replied.

Rose looked over her shoulder and sent a withering look Liz’s way.

Liz linked her arms through mine. “We’ll have lunch. We’ll regroup and we will figure this out,” she said, her voice low. “We’re not going to leave this cloud over Mac’s head. That’s a promise.”

The restaurant she had steered us to was a tiny building with a back patio overlooking the water. A young woman wearing denim shorts and a Red Sox T-shirt greeted us at the door. She leaned around Rose and her smile got wider when she saw Liz. “Hello, Mrs. French,” she said.

“Hello, Kelsey,” Liz said. “Could we have a table outside, please?”

The young woman nodded. Her blond hair was piled on top of her head in a loose knot that bobbed when she moved. She led us through a screen door to the wooden deck and took us to a table near the railing, where we could look out at the water but still be sheltered by a trellis entwined with purple clematis. “Your favorite table,” she said.

“Thank you.” Liz gave her a warm smile.

“Iced tea?”

Liz nodded and held up three fingers.

“I’ll be right back.”

“I’m not sure I wanted iced tea,” Rose said.

“Iced tea, lemonade, water. Those are your choices.” Liz ticked them off on the fingers she was still holding up.

“We don’t have menus,” Rose continued.

Liz leaned back in her chair and closed her eyes. “There are no menus. Your choices are fried clams, fish and chips or lobster roll. We’re having lobster rolls.” She opened her eyes.

“That’s fine,” Rose said. Her chin had come up a little. “I was just asking.”

Liz closed her eyes again and Rose rolled hers at me.

“I saw that,” Liz said.

“Well, now, it would have been pointless for me to do it if you hadn’t seen it, now, wouldn’t it?” Rose said. She tipped her face up to the sky like a sunflower.

“You know her,” I said, pointing toward the building.

Liz nodded. “She’s studying business. She won the Jack French scholarship.” Jack French was Liz’s second husband.

Kelsey came back with three tall glasses of iced tea that I knew from the first sip hadn’t been made from powder in a can.

“This is lovely,” Rose exclaimed.

Kelsey smiled at her. “Thank you. It’s Mrs. French’s favorite.”

The lobster rolls came about five minutes later with roasted corn salad and kettle chips and I actually moaned as I took the first bite—and the second and the third.

“Why didn’t I know about this place?” I finally asked Liz when there was one lone potato chip and a few stray kernels of corn left on my plate. I couldn’t remember ever having a lobster roll that tasted so good and I’ve been eating them every summer since I was a kid.

“That’s a very good question,” Rose said, adjusting her glasses on her nose, the lenses darkened because of the sun.

“I have to have a few secrets,” Liz said. Her gaze didn’t quite meet mine so I knew she was hedging for a reason.

Kelsey came back then, smiling as she collected our plates.

“How were the lobster rolls?” she asked. The smile on her face told me she knew the answer.

“Absolutely delicious,” Rose said.

The young woman’s smile got a bit wider. “You’ll have to come back and try our clams.” She looked at Liz. “You and your friend are coming back for one more feed before I head back to class, right?”

Rose and I exchanged a look.

“When do your classes start?” Liz asked.

Kelsey named a date less than three weeks away. They talked for a minute about what courses she was taking and then she said, “I’ll get your check.”

“Who’s your friend?” I asked, putting a little extra emphasis on the word “friend.”

“I already told you Kelsey won Jack’s scholarship,” Liz said. “Were you not listening?”

“Yes, we heard that,” Rose said, lacing her fingers and resting her hands on the table. “We mean the friend you had clams and chips with.”

“Nobody said I had clams and chips with anyone,” Liz said. “Kelsey asked if we were coming for clams and chips before the prime season is over.”

I folded my own hands, tenting my index fingers like a church steeple and leaning my chin lightly against them. “No. Not we, meaning us. She asked if you and your friend were coming. Friend. Singular. Kelsey strikes me as a very smart young woman. I’m sure she can count.” I raised an eyebrow. “Who is it?”

“None of your damn business,” Liz said.

Rose and I just looked at her without speaking. I knew it would drive her crazy.

“Channing Caulfield,” she snapped. “Are you happy?”

Rose and I tipped our heads together. “Ooo,” we cooed like a pair of giggly teenagers.

“It was foundation business,” Liz said. “There were documents I wanted him to look at.” Her gaze darted to me for a moment and it occurred to me that those documents probably had something to do with Michelle’s father.

Rose and I continued to smile at her. She leaned back in her chair again and crossed her arms over her chest. “This is exactly why I didn’t tell you,” she said. “There is nothing going on between Channing and me.”

I believed her, but I knew the former bank manager had carried a torch for Liz for a long time. He’d helped on a couple of the Angels’ recent cases and I suspected no matter how much she protested, Liz liked him a little more than she was admitting.

I straightened up and reached for the last of my iced tea. “You wouldn’t tell us if there were,” I said.

“No, I would not,” she agreed. “I don’t need my business discussed all over town.”

“So how come you’re allowed to meddle in my love life?”

Liz made a snort of contempt. “You don’t have a love life.”

“We don’t meddle,” Rose said. She actually looked aghast at the suggestion that they did. “We simply give you the benefit of our experience from time to time.”

“Well, Liz always says a woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle,” I said.

“No one is disputing that, dear,” Rose said. “It’s just that sometimes you get tired of swimming around by yourself and when that happens it’s nice to have a bicycle.”

Across the table Liz gave me a triumphant smile. The topic had been successfully changed from her private life to mine and I had no clue how to answer Rose’s comment.

I glared at her and resisted the urge to stick out my tongue. “We should get back on the road,” I said.

“Do you have plans tonight?” Rose asked. She held up her hands. “I’m not meddling. I’m just asking. It is Saturday night.”

“I have plans to get back to the shop,” I said. I reached for the check but Liz beat me to it. She had surprisingly fast reflexes.

“This is my treat,” she said. She held up one hand. “Don’t waste your time arguing.”

“We should have a barbecue tonight,” Rose said as we headed inside to pay the bill. “Do you think it would be too short notice for everyone?”

“Yes,” I said. I knew “everyone” for the most part meant Nick.

Liz went to move past me and as she did she put a hand on my shoulder. “Don’t screw with the master,” she said softly.

The rest of our trip was uneventful. Liz asked to be dropped at her house, saying she had things to do. I didn’t ask what. When we pulled into the lot at the shop I noticed that Mac was out in the old garage and I headed over to him while Rose went to brief Mr. P.

Mac was on his knees working on the leg of a low wooden rocking chair. He smiled when he caught sight of me and got to his feet, wiping his hands on the front of his jeans. “How did it go?” he asked.

“Natalie has an alibi,” I said. “Unless Mr. P. can poke holes in it, we’re back to square one.”

He shrugged. “I didn’t see how it could have been her. She would never have hurt Leila and if she wanted to hurt Erin she didn’t have to come here to do it.”

“We must have missed something. Rose and Mr. P. are going to go through everything again. Maybe they’ll see something we didn’t see before.”

His mouth twisted to one side. “Maybe we aren’t going to find any answers.”

I was shaking my head before he finished speaking. “The answers are out there. We just have to ask the right questions.”

Mac took a couple of steps closer to me. “Sarah, this isn’t your fight.”

“You ever watch Bonanza?” I asked.

Mac’s eyes darted from side to side in confusion. It occurred to me that Rose was rubbing off on me, at least conversationally. “I don’t think so,” he said slowly.

“Gram and I used to watch it in reruns when I was a kid. It’s a western from the 1960s set in the 1860s—the adventures of the Cartwright family, who lived on the Ponderosa ranch.” I grinned at the memory. “After watching a few episodes I tried to rope Maddie Hamilton’s garden gnome with a piece of Gram’s clothesline.”

Mac started to smile.

“Don’t laugh,” I warned, waggling a finger at him. “I got pretty good at it, especially considering I couldn’t convince Gram to buy me a horse so I had to do my roping from my bike.”

Mac was grinning by now. “Not that this insight into your childhood isn’t fascinating but I’m guessing this somehow ties in to everything that’s been happening.”

I nodded. “Yes, it does. To be specific, the Bonanza theme song does, which Gram taught me and which I used to sing as I was practicing my cowboy skills.” And then I sang a bit of the song to him. “If anyone fights any one of us, he’s gotta fight with me!”

I put a hand on his arm. “Seriously, that’s how I feel. That’s how all of us feel. We’re going to figure this out. And if I have to lasso the bad guy with a length of clothesline I will.” I gave his arm a squeeze and headed for the shop. I’d meant every word I’d said, now all I had to do was make it happen.

About an hour later I headed down to the sunporch from my office. I had a cup of tea and a couple of questions for Mr. P. He looked up and smiled when I appeared in the doorway. “Is that for me?” he asked, indicating the cup and saucer in my hand.

“It is,” I said, setting it down on the table far enough away from his computer that it wouldn’t get knocked over and cause a problem.

“Thank you,” he said. “Your timing is impeccable. I’ve been checking Natalie Welland’s alibi and I’m ready for a break.”

“It checks out, doesn’t it?” I said.

“Yes, my dear, it does.” He took a sip of the tea.

I shifted from one foot to the other, suddenly wondering if what I was about to ask him was silly.

“You have something on your mind,” he said, his eyes kind behind his wire-frame glasses.

I nodded. “I do, but now I’m second-guessing myself.”

“Why don’t you tell me what it is, instead?”

“Remember that little carving that Erin Fellowes was carrying in her pocket?”

“I do,” he said.

“If I described it to you do you think you could possibly figure out where it came from?”

“I can certainly try.” He studied my face. “Do you think it’s important?”

I raked a hand back through my hair. “Maybe. Mac thinks it was the same carved figure that Leila kept in her desk. He didn’t know where it came from but he said Leila said it was to remind her of the kind of person she wanted to be.” I blew out a breath and walked over to the window to stare outside for a moment. “I went to see Sam the other day. He has this little brass monkey—about two inches high—on his desk. My father gave it to him a long time ago after . . . after Sam said something that pretty much destroyed the band they were in together. I don’t know what it was but I do know they didn’t speak for a while over it. They patched things up because, well, Gram said they were as close as brothers, but Sam has always kept that little monkey because he says it’s a reminder to choose his words carefully.”

“Sammy is a very wise man,” Mr. P. said.

I turned away from the window. “Natalie told us that Erin helped her pack up Leila’s office and she asked for a photo of herself and Leila, a pillow and that little carved bird.”

“Maybe Erin gave it to Leila.” He reached for his tea again.

I shook my head. “I don’t think so. If her best friend gave that little carving to her she would have told Mac. It means something.”

“Do you have any idea what?”

I closed my eyes for a moment. When I looked at Mr. P. again there was no indication in his expression that he thought I was off on some wild-goose chase. “I don’t know,” I said. “It meant something to Leila and it meant something to Erin. Of all the things she could have asked Natalie for, aside from that photo, the only thing she wanted was a pillow and that little bird. And it was important enough that she brought it with her. Why? If we can figure that out, maybe we can figure out everything else.”

Mr. P. nodded. “How can I help?”

I moved back over to his desk. “I thought if we could find out where it came from maybe we’d be able to find out when Leila bought it and then we could work backward and try to figure out what was happening in her life at the time.” I made a face. “That made a lot more sense in my head than it does when I say it out loud.”

He smiled. “It makes sense to me, my dear. Tell me everything you remember about that carving.”

I described the tiny bird as carefully as I could. Mr. P. set to work on his laptop and I went back up to my office. Less than half an hour later he knocked at my door. He was carrying his computer.

“You found something?” I asked.

“You tell me,” he said. He set the laptop on my desk, and I came around to look at the screen. “Is this the carving Erin Fellowes had with her?”

“That’s it!” I exclaimed. “Mr. P., you’re a genius.”

He smiled. “Thank you, Sarah. I wouldn’t say I’m a genius.” He glanced briefly at the screen again. “It occurred to me from your description that what we might be looking for was a netsuke.”

I frowned. “I’ve heard the word but I don’t exactly know what that is.”

Mr. P. took off his glasses, pulled a small cloth from the pocket of his gold shirt and began to clean them. “Netsuke originated in seventeenth-century Japan. Traditional kimono had no pockets, which meant men had to carry their belongings—tobacco, money—in containers, which were fastened to the sash of the kimono by a cord. The cord was held at the top of the sash by a netsuke, like a toggle.”

“That’s why the holes,” I said, remembering Erin turning the tiny carving over in her fingers.

“Exactly.” He touched the screen with a finger. “Your bird is actually a mandarin duck, oshidori. See the tiny carved feathers?”

The detail on the tiny creature was incredible. Both Mac and Stevie had said Leila had been interested in Asian art. It made sense that she’d had the oshidori.

“The mandarin is a symbol of fidelity,” Mr. P. continued. “Ironic because like most ducks they only mate for a season and then move on to a new pairing.” He gestured at the computer screen. “This one is part of a collection at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. I think it’s possible that it and the netsuke we believe was Leila’s were originally part of the same set. It and of course Leila’s, if I’m correct about it, date from the late nineteenth century.”

“Wait a minute. Are you saying it’s not a replica?”

“From what I can tell, no.”

“It’s valuable.”

He nodded. “There’s no question about that. You said Leila always kept it in her desk?”

“Yes. Both Natalie and Mac said she kept it in one of the drawers.”

The old man’s eyes narrowed. “It seems unlikely she didn’t know what she had. She studied art history at college for two years.”

“Which Erin would have also known.” I exhaled loudly in frustration. “This means something. It has to. I just wish I could figure out what.”

Mr. P. rested his hand on my arm for a moment. “I’m going to see what I can find out about the piece in the museum’s collection. Maybe we can figure out how Leila ended up with her netsuke.” He picked up his laptop and headed back to his sunporch office.

I was too restless to go back to paperwork. I called Jackson to accept his dinner invitation and checked the Web site for orders. It seemed far-fetched to think a tiny little carving, no more than an inch by an inch and a half, could hold the key to the accident that had put Leila in a coma and to the murder of her best friend, but it was all we had right now. I headed downstairs to the shop.

In the following couple of hours I sold a Martin guitar, two quilts and four of Avery’s map-covered lampshades and I polished every mirrored or glass surface in the shop. It was close to closing time when Rose appeared in the doorway to the workroom and smiled at me. I walked over to her. I felt certain Mr. P. had brought her up to date.

“Alfred has something he’d like to show you,” she said. “I’ll stay here and help Avery.” Avery was in the middle of showing the grandparents of a nine-year-old a dressing table I’d refinished about a month ago. Based on the couple’s body language I didn’t think she needed any help making the sale.

Mr. P. was at his desk, making notes on a lined yellow pad with a fine-tipped black pen.

“Rose said you had something to show me?” I said, poking my head around the doorframe.

“I think I’ve traced Leila’s netsuke,” he said. “Elizabeth has a connection to someone on the board of the Metropolitan Museum.”

It really didn’t surprise me that Liz had that kind of connection.

“She put me together with one of the curators at the museum. It turns out they had tried to buy the other ducks when they went up for sale about two and a half years ago.”

I sat on the edge of his desk. “They didn’t succeed.”

He shook his head.

Then it hit me what he’d said. “Ducks.” Plural. “Wait a minute,” I said. “There was more than one duck?”

Mr. P. beamed like he was the teacher and I was his star pupil. “Yes, my dear. Both of them”—he looked down at his notes—“were purchased by a private collector somewhere in New England. It seems that for a time netsuke were popular as a token between lovers and it cut into the museum’s ability to expand their collection. So far I’ve had no luck getting the collector’s name.” He paused for a moment. “There are still a couple of techniques I haven’t tried yet.”

I nodded. I had a feeling I wouldn’t be too crazy about those techniques so it was probably better I didn’t ask about them. I glanced at the computer screen. Mr. P. had several photos open on the computer, one overlapping the other. In one of them I spotted Davis Abbott holding up a beer. “What are those?” I asked.

“The photos that young Mr. Abbott said he would send. He finally did.” He brought the image of Davis holding his beer—and obviously intoxicated—to the forefront. “I have to say I don’t understand some people’s propensity for documenting everything they do with a photograph, but it does make my work much easier sometimes.” He minimized the image and brought up the remaining half dozen one at a time. Davis’s one-night stand was visible in three of them. In one she appeared to be on his lap.

The last photo looked to have been taken in a lawyer’s office.

“What’s this?” I asked.

“Remember Davis admitted he got a copy of the trust agreement?” Mr. P. said. “He took it with him when he went to see Leila about challenging the trust.”

I frowned at him. “I remember. How did he do that, by the way? No lawyer would just hand that document over to him.”

“I wondered the same thing. It turns out Stevie asked Marguerite’s lawyer for a copy of the document. Davis picked it up.” He raised an eyebrow.

“So Stevie knew a little more about what Davis was up to than either one of them has been letting on.”

Mr. P. smiled. “I think Stephanie and her young man have a very flexible definition of the truth.”

I studied the image. “Is this Jackson Montgomery’s office?” I asked, squinting at a diploma on the wall behind the office desk.”

“Yes, it is,” Mr. P. said. “He was Marguerite Thompson-Davis’s lawyer.”

I was having dinner with Jackson later. I could ask him more about the trust, if there actually had been any way to break it.

I took another look at Davis Abbott’s selfie. He was sitting on the edge of Jackson’s desk, one hand on a long, brown envelope lying on the polished wood surface, which I guessed held the trust papers. Jackson’s desk was much tidier than mine—a laptop on what would be Jackson’s left, a lamp, a yellow pad of paper, two photos in matte black frames and what seemed to be a couple of paperweights. Something was written on the envelope, I realized. I leaned in for a better look.

My heart began to pound and the sound of rushing water seemed to fill my ears. Something must have shown in my face.

“Sarah, are you all right?” Mr. P. asked.

I pointed to the screen. “You’re uh . . . you’re going to think I’m crazy but I know who killed Erin Fellowes and put Leila McKenzie in a coma,” I said.

Mr. P. studied the computer for a long moment. Then he looked at me.

“Yes?” I asked.

He nodded. “Yes.”

We spent the next twenty minutes going back over what we knew, looking for holes in my theory. Everything held together. By the time it was time to close up shop we had a plan.

Rose was folding a crocheted tablecloth when I stepped back into the shop. “I think I may have a sale for this,” she said. “A young woman was looking at it and she asked me for the measurements. I wouldn’t be surprised if she comes back tomorrow.”

“It’s pretty,” I said, moving to grab one end. “But it’s a lot of work to starch and block the thing.”

“My mother used to starch my father’s shirts,” Rose said. “I remember how scandalized her mother was when Mama bought a can of spray starch.” She laughed. “My mother really embraced aerosol cans—spray starch, spray whipped cream, spray cheese. Even hair in a can for my father.”

We folded the lacy tablecloth and Rose put it over the back of a wooden chair. She looked around the room for anything else out of place but between the two of them, she and Avery seemed to have tidied up the space. Avery already had the vacuum going.

“Are you still going to Charlotte’s for dinner?” I asked.

Rose nodded.

“Are you going to be there for a while?”

She reached past me to straighten a place setting on the table behind me.

“As a matter of fact, I am. Charlotte and I are going to go through a box of old photos. Liz is looking for pictures from the summer fair the foundation used to host. I don’t know why she wants them.”

I had a pretty good idea why but that wasn’t my story to tell.

“Don’t you have a date, dear?” Rose asked.

Was dinner with Jackson a date? I’d thought of it more as a fact-finding mission. Of course now I was certain I knew what the facts were so I wasn’t sure what this was. I nodded. “I’m having dinner with Mac’s friend Jackson. But I won’t be that long. I’ll stop by Charlotte’s afterward.”

“Did you and Alfred confirm Natalie’s alibi?” Rose asked as we moved out of Avery’s way. The teen was single-minded with a vacuum cleaner.

“We did. I’ll tell you all about it when I see you.”

“All right,” she said. She gave me a teasing smile and winked. “Don’t worry if you get held up.”

Jackson and I had dinner at The Black Bear. He talked a little bit about his and Mac’s college years, but then he steered the conversation to the shop, asking how I’d ended up owning and running a repurpose store. I explained about losing my radio job and ending up at Gram’s to sulk. He laughed when I said sulking got boring pretty quickly.

We didn’t talk about Erin’s murder or the case against Mac and I was just as pleased that we hadn’t. In the back of my mind I was still sorting through what I’d figured out and what came next.

“It’s a beautiful night,” I said after dinner. “How about a walk along the harbor front?” I thought of Rose, telling me not to worry if I got held up.

“Sounds good,” Jackson said. He didn’t seem to be in any hurry to end the evening.

The sun was low, and streaks of orange and gold looked like they’d been painted across the sky. There were very few people out enjoying the end of the day. “This really is a beautiful place,” he said. “I can see why you like it here.”

“I admit I do have my moments in January where I sometimes second-guess myself,” I said lightly.

We moved around a couple who had stopped to take a photo of the view across the harbor and a small man with a cane and a straw fedora with a striped hatband bumped into Jackson. Even as I was realizing it was Mr. P., he was excusing himself and moving past us, pretending not to know me. What the heck was he doing prowling around down here? Why wasn’t he on his way over to Charlotte’s to help me explain to everyone else what he and I had figured out?

I needed to get going. I smiled at Jackson. “How long are you staying?” I asked.

“I have to head back to Boston on Monday.” He raised an eyebrow. “Will you have dinner with me again before I go?” Before I could answer he gave me his charming smile. “Or lunch? Or breakfast?”

“I’ll have to check my schedule,” I said. “I have a lot going on right now.”

“You mean with everything that’s happened with Mac.”

I nodded. “Yes.”

“It was good to talk to him,” Jackson said. “It wasn’t a very long conversation, but still . . .” He let the end of the sentence trail off.

I let the silence settle between us. We were almost at the far end of the walkway along the harbor.

“What’s his lawyer like?” Jackson abruptly asked.

“Josh. Josh Evans,” I said. “He’s a good lawyer and a good guy.”

“You know him?”

I turned a bit so I could see his face as we walked. “I’ve known Josh since we were kids.”

“So you trust him?”

I nodded. “I trust him with my life, with Mac’s life.”

Jackson fingered his beard. “I’m sorry. I know how that must have sounded.”

“I know what you mean,” I said. We were just about past the area where the windjammers that took people out on day cruises were anchored. There was no one else around.

“Mac is like my brother,” he said. “I know I haven’t acted like that recently. I care about him. I want him to have the best representation.”

“You cared about Leila, too, didn’t you?” I said. I put my hands in my pockets because suddenly they were trembling.

He nodded, taking a deep breath and exhaling slowly. “Yes, I did. I still do.”

I stopped walking. “So why did you try to kill her?”

Mac stepped out of the shadows then, stopping in front of Jackson. “Yeah, Jackie,” he said. “I’d like to know the same thing.”

Jackson was good, I had to give him that. His gaze went from me to Mac. “Teaming up to ambush me,” he said. “I can’t fault you for that.” He cocked his head to one side and studied me. “Let me guess. You read Sherlock Holmes when you were a kid.”

He’d been charming me only to find out what we knew. It made me squirm to think I’d almost been taken in by that charm.

“You were in love with Leila,” I said, ignoring his comment. I watched Mac from the corner of my eye. He was totally focused on Jackson. “That didn’t change when she picked your best friend.”

“Maybe—a long time ago—I had feelings for Leila, but I was happy when she and Mac got married.”

He said the words so smoothly I almost believed him. Almost.

I pulled my hand out of my pocket and held it out. The tiny carved duck lay in the palm of my hand. “You had an affair.”

I hated saying the words out loud just as much as I had when I’d told Mac about the affair a few hours earlier.

“This belonged to Leila. You gave it to her. You knew she loved Japanese art. It’s an oshidori—a mandarin duck—a symbol of fidelity, oddly enough. Your fidelity to her, maybe? It was part of a set. You kept the other one. When you saw those two netsuke come up for auction did you think it was a sign from the universe?”

He didn’t answer. Not that I’d really expected him to.

My heart was pounding so hard in my chest the sound seemed to echo in my ears. “Leila kept this as a reminder of what she almost lost because of your affair. But I think you told yourself that somehow she kept it because she loved you, even if she didn’t admit it to herself. Then Erin figured it all out. She was coming to show this to Mac and tell him that what happened to Leila wasn’t an accident. That it was you.”

Something flashed briefly across his face and I knew I was right.

“You slept with my wife,” Mac said. Rage flashed in his dark eyes, and pain as well.

“Don’t make it sound like something cheap,” Jackson said in a voice edged with anger. “She’s not that kind of person. We had one perfect night. One, and Leila was consumed with guilt about it because you had her brainwashed. She felt obligated to you.”

Mac swallowed hard. The muscles in his neck stood out like thick twists of rope. “She loved me and I loved her,” he said.

“I loved her!” Jackson shouted. “We could have had a life together—we would have but you ruined it. You can pretend all you want that she didn’t care about me but it doesn’t make it true.” He all but spit the words at Mac. “Who did she come to when she found out that her company was being investigated by the FTC? Who? Me, not you.”

Mac said nothing.

“I told her I would fix it all. I knew people and I could make the whole thing go away. And I gave her that carving to show her that she could always count on me.”

Something in his body language, in his words, twigged for me. “You knew what Natalie had been doing,” I said.

Jackson’s gaze slid sideways. “Natalie and I had gotten . . . close. I figured it out.” He turned his attention back to Mac again. “And I was helping her fix things. I could have fixed everything but Leila had been living with you, Mr. Moral High Ground.”

It seemed as though I could feel the animosity toward Mac coming off Jackson. One hand clenched and flexed at his side and my stomach rolled as I thought of that large hand clamped over Erin Fellowes’s mouth and nose.

I took a breath. I needed to keep Jackson talking. “But Leila was angry that you hadn’t told her how Natalie was cutting corners. She wasn’t grateful. All she had to do was just let you take care of everything. But she said she was going to talk to Natalie and then she was going to go to the authorities.” I was very aware of the fact that it was only the three of us standing there by the water and Jackson Montgomery was a big man.

He pressed his lips together and didn’t say anything.

“You went to the house,” I continued. “You wanted to talk to her away from the office. You borrowed the spare key from Natalie. All you were going to do was wait inside and talk to Leila when she got home.” I was guessing at the last part but a tiny twitch under his left eye told me I’d guessed correctly.

I nodded like I understood and in a way, I did. I understood that Jackson had a very warped idea of what love was. My mom would have said, Someone worked on him.

Jackson gave a snort of disgust then. “It was an old, run-down house. Leila deserved better. Natalie told me she was sleeping in a downstairs room because of the work that was being done upstairs.”

“You wanted her to see how much she needed you,” I said. It was a struggle to keep my voice steady and even. “I get that.”

“I didn’t want to hurt her,” he said.

I nodded. “I know.” That much I did believe. “You realized that you could make a small adjustment to a vent pipe and carbon monoxide would seep into Leila’s room. Just a bit.”

I didn’t take my eyes off his face but out of the corner of my eye I could see Mac, his entire body rigid with anger. “Then you could rescue her and she’d see that you were the one she could count on, she’d see just how much she needed you.”

“I would never hurt Leila,” Jackson said. It wasn’t really a denial.

I moved a step closer and laid my hand on his arm, hoping he wouldn’t somehow feel how much my legs were shaking. “You didn’t get there in time.”

He closed his eyes for a moment and swallowed. “I had an accident, just a minor one. Once again, Mac was the hero.”

He seemed to have forgotten that Mac was standing right in front of him. I needed to keep the focus on me so he’d keep talking. “How did you know that Erin was onto you?”

“Erin was at my office. She saw my duck. They were a set. She started nosing around. She’d seen the mate in Leila’s desk drawer. That’s how I know Leila cared about me because she wouldn’t have kept it if she hadn’t.”

It would have been better if Leila hadn’t kept the tiny carving, but I didn’t think she’d done so because she cared about Jackson. She’d done it because she loved Mac. Every time she looked at the tiny bird she would have been reminded of what it represented, what she’d put in jeopardy when she slept with Jackson.

He swiped a hand over his mouth.

“When Erin helped Natalie clear out Leila’s office she found her duck,” I said.

Jackson seemed to need to get things off his chest now. “She wouldn’t leave it alone,” he said. “She told me she remembered Leila telling her that she was looking for a new lawyer because it was better if friendship and business didn’t mix. She said Leila had told her no one, not me and especially not Leila herself, was as perfect as they seemed.” He sighed. “She asked me about the birds. I told her I’d given Leila hers for her birthday because she’d liked the one I had in my office.”

I dropped my hand, resisting the urge to wipe it on my dress. “She didn’t believe you.”

“She told Natalie that she was coming to see Mac. I had a pretty good idea why.”

When I saw the mate to Leila’s bird on Jackson’s desk I knew there had been some kind of connection between them. I remembered how he had told me that every man who knew Leila fell a little bit in love with her. Mr. P. had made a phone call to Stevie Carleton, who told us that she’d seen the tiny carved bird in Leila’s desk drawer and when she’d asked her cousin about it Leila had explained what it represented and said she kept it to remind herself how lucky she was to have Mac.

From there it wasn’t much of a leap to figure out that it was Jackson, not Davis Abbott—or Mac—that Nick had seen arguing with Erin. And when I’d told Mr. P. what Nick had heard Erin say he had quickly pointed out that the reason she’d said Mac’s name was likely because she was talking about Mac not to him.

I remembered the gray car Glenn had seen across the street from McNamara’s, that he thought might have followed Erin after she stopped there looking for directions to Second Chance. “You followed Erin,” I said.

“She was going to ruin everything,” Jackson said. “Do you think I like what she made me do?”

I shook my head because there was no way I could say anything.

“Leila is going to get better, wake up and we’d have a future now that Mac was out of the picture.” He looked baffled that I didn’t seem to get what he was talking about. “Erin was going to ruin that, so she left me with no choice. I had to kill her. I’m sorry. I’m going to have to kill you, too.”