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“This is... Do you honest-to-God think I killed John?” Archie demanded.

“Motive. Means. Opportunity.” Beau snapped out each word.

His thick dark hair still had a tendency to fall across his forehead. And that faint burnished gold of summery tan across his perfect cheekbones? Archie remembered that, too.

It was not relevant, but it was distracting. It made no sense that he couldn’t seem to separate the Beau he’d known—for a relatively short time, by the way—from this stranger. But that was what happened when you nearly died. Inevitably, you started sifting through the tea leaves of your memories, remembering things you tried never to think about, reevaluating stuff you hadn’t dragged into the daylight in forever. He hadn’t thought of Beau in months. Maybe years. Okay, probably not years. But this was one reason why he’d never wanted to come back to Twinkleton. Beau and Twinkleton were synonymous in his mind.

He echoed automatically, “Means? You’re saying you found the murder weapon?”

“We haven’t yet located the weapon, but who are we kidding? You’re a federal agent.” Beau paused, looked him in the eyes. “You know how to get hold of a firearm if you need to.”

Archie’s lips parted. Before he could respond, someone knocked on the interview room door.

Swenson moved to the door. Archie sat down. He didn’t have the energy for this. Not the emotional energy and not the physical energy.

Beau also took retook his seat. He smiled sardonically. There was an odd glint in his eyes.

Swenson took the cardboard tray of coffees from a police officer who looked even younger than he did—was Beau recruiting them out of high school?—and carried the coffee to the table.

He handed out the containers of coffee. Archie popped the lid off his cup and sipped his coffee black. His hand was shaking a little. His head was pounding. All that adrenaline and anger. Not helpful at a moment when he needed to be cool and reasonable.

Beau took his time, emptying two of the little creamer tubs into his coffee, stirring it. His hands were tanned, well-shaped. He did not wear a wedding ring. No telltale white line on his ring finger either. Swenson poured four packets of artificial sweetener into his cup, sipped noisily.

Beau glanced up at Archie, said, “You’re sweating, Crane. Are these questions making you nervous?”

Archie laughed and carefully set his cup down. Yeah, his hand was shaking and both Swenson and Beau could see it.

“Yes,” he said gravely. “I’m going to crack any minute.”

It wasn’t that far from the truth. He could feel a swell of laughter rising in his throat, and that was not a normal reaction, either. He knew if he started to laugh, it was going to get very weird very fast. But it was so ridiculous. All of it. But particularly this bizarre interrogation that had almost instantly gone off the rails and was now crashed in a field of weeds.

Beau’s lip curled slightly, but what he said was, “So you and John were talking on the terrace. And you realized you’d let him down again. Then what?”

It occurred to Archie he could end this now. No, he didn’t have a Get-Out-of-Jail-Free card, but he had a very good boss who knew him, valued him, and would act on his behalf if he asked for help. If he phoned Deputy Assistant Director Wagner and explained the situation, she’d—in Bureau-speak—open the appropriate channels and initiate a diplomatic resolution to what would officially be labeled an “inter-agency conflict,” before Detective Swenson had finished typing up the day’s notes. Archie’s official interview would be thorough and genuine, but it would be conducted by federal agents, who would not be blinded by personal grievance, who would be inclined to believe him, not least because they had access to his records, in particular the last year—nearly two years where the last thing on his mind had been how he planned on beefing up his 401K.

But Archie didn’t want to phone DAD Wagner. He wanted Beau to believe him. And then he wanted Beau to explain why he believed Archie was the bad guy in everything that had gone down between them a decade ago.

“The ghost walk guests started arriving,” Archie said. “John went inside.”

“You didn’t go inside?”

“No. Not right away.”

“Why?”

“You argued,” Swenson chimed in.

Archie sighed. “No. I argued with John once in all the years I knew him. That was when I told him I was joining the FBI.”

Even that argument had been nothing compared to the argument with Beau on the same topic.

“Why didn’t he want you to join the FBI?” Swenson asked. Beau was silent. Of course, he already knew all of this.

“He didn’t want me to go into law enforcement. He wanted me to pursue my law degree. Which I was able to do through the Bureau anyway. But.”

Archie stopped there. Beau said, “But the point wasn’t who paid for your education. The point was that John hoped you’d go into private practice here in Twinkleton.”

“Yes. Right.”