Page 14

Tuesday

I start the workday with a meeting at the lighting consultant’s office. We spend our time discussing the conversion of the mansion’s handmade nineteenth-century gasoliers to energy-saving electric lights, and I learn a lot. This is why I became an architect—to surround myself with beauty and function.

Afterward, I check my messages on the way to the car. Natalie has texted to say her Spanish exam went well, and that she’s off to study for tomorrow’s English test.

I’m looking forward to a peaceful date with a sandwich and my CAD software when I return to the mansion. I text Beatrice to ask what she wants from the deli. But her answer makes my stomach clench:

Beatrice: Forget the deli, just come back.

Beatrice: There are two cops here to talk to you.

Oh God . I dash off a quick response, saying I’m on my way.

The drive is less than ten minutes, but that’s plenty of time to panic. I keep thinking back to the lie I told Detective Riley. Does she know?

Why else would they want to interview me again?

I park on a side street and slip onto the property from the back. Crossing the lonely stretch between the hedgerow and the tool trailer makes me twitchy. I can’t stop wondering if there was a murderer hiding back there the night I discovered Tim. And if he watched me approach Tim’s car.

Hurrying toward the house, my gaze shifts automatically to the crime scene. I do a double take. The police tape is still fluttering in the offshore breeze, but there’s now a six-foot construction fence standing between the sidewalk and the parking area. It wasn’t there this morning.

I enter the mansion through the back door and almost shriek as Beatrice steps out of the shadows. “I told the cops you were out at a meeting,” she hisses. “But they insisted that you’d want to speak to them.”

“Do you think they arrested someone?”

Beatrice gives her head a quick shake. “We would have seen it on TV. And two detectives at your desk? That means they’re feeling desperate. They asked me a bunch more questions, too. Where was I that night? Did I see anything?”

“Sorry about that,” I whisper, because Beatrice looks strung out. The Wincotts hate bad publicity, and Beatrice hates anything the Wincotts hate.

She lets out a harsh breath. “You don’t have to talk to them, you know. They can’t just turn up on the property every time they have a thought. The family are losing their minds.”

The family . Sometimes Beatrice sounds like she’s starring in a Godfather movie. “I know I don’t. But let’s just get this over with.”

As we walk through the library, I feel dread. Detective Riley glances around our office, her face its usual unreadable mask.

With her is an older, scowling man, who’s scrutinizing the woodwork on a nineteenth-century cabinet. “Detective Fry,” he introduces himself after I greet them. “Pleased to meet you, Rowan.”

“Pleased” doesn’t seem like the right word, given the expression on his face. I recognize him from the TV press conference.

“We have a few more questions for you,” Riley says. “Is this a good time?”

My stomach rolls. “Sure. Have a seat.” I gesture toward our two extra chairs.

The cops glance at each other. “Is there someplace more private we could talk?” Fry asks.

“Not really,” I say. “This room is the only one with furniture. The rest of the mansion is a construction site. I don’t have a lot to share, so it’s best if we just talk here.”

Riley shrugs. “Okay.” Her partner sits down beside her. “We won’t take up much of your time. First of all, we did some digging into your ex. George Harrison Jones is no longer incarcerated. He was working in Bar Harbor until last month. His whereabouts are now unknown.”

“Oh.” That’s unsettling.

“Any contact from him?” she asks.

“Another email. Last night.”

“What did he want?”

I shake my head. “I didn’t open it.”

“If he pops up anywhere, I’d want to know right away.” She passes me another copy of her business card.

“Sure.”

She flips a page in her notebook. “Regarding the night of Tim Kovak’s death, we’ve learned that his wallet, laptop, and phone are all missing.”

“I read that in the paper.”

“Can you describe his wallet?” Fry asks. He has a pen poised above a legal pad.

“It’s...” I have to think. “A bright color. It’s that kind they make out of upcycled billboards. Maybe it’s blue and green? I can’t picture it exactly.”

He nods. “How about his laptop?”

“A gray MacBook.”

He writes that down. “Any distinguishing features?”

“Um... Yes. There was a sticker on the cover for the Wall Street Journal .”

Across the room Beatrice gives a soft snort. She’s hovering, obviously eavesdropping.

“The computer is missing, as I mentioned,” Riley says. “But we were able to access his iCloud drive. It has recent backups from both the computer and the phone. And there were some of your photos on his device. Can I show them to you?”

“Photos of me?” I can’t keep the surprise out of my voice. “We didn’t take many.” I took a total of two selfies with him, because he didn’t seem that into it.

Probably because he’d already decided to bail on me.

“The pictures aren’t of you,” she says. “Well, most of them. But the metadata indicates that they were transferred from your device to his.”

“That doesn’t make any sense. Pictures of what?”

She unlocks an iPad and passes it to me. “Can you verify that you took these shots?”

The first two are selfies—the only ones I’d taken of the two of us. But when I swipe to the third photo, I’m astonished. It’s a shot I took of the interior of the Wincott Mansion. As I swipe through the photos, I find a few more shots, from every floor of the house.

And then I swipe again, and my heart practically stops. It’s the Wincott family Bible that I found under the floorboards. The one that was featured in the press. “He had this? Why?”

Riley stares back at me silently.

I keep flipping. Another shot of the Bible. Then photos of the other book we found under the floorboards—the ledger of babies born at the mansion.

The back of my neck prickles.

“Can you tell me what this is?” Riley asks.

“It’s—” My voice cracks. “It’s a ledger found right here in this room. It recorded the birth dates of babies born in this building.”

“He had that ?” Beatrice gasps.

Fry gives her a dirty look. Beatrice returns it, and then strides over to me, peering at the screen as I zoom in on the ledger pages.

Each entry lists a birth date, the sex and weight of the child, and a name—first initial followed by a surname. 4 April 1951—Baby girl—7 pounds, 4 ounces—to Miss M. Wattford .

He has every photo I took. There are eight in total—some interior pages, the front and back covers, and an undated list I’d found in the back of the book, which had included four names.

“What was up with that guy?” Beatrice murmurs.

That’s my question exactly. What the hell, Tim?

“He shouldn’t have had any of this,” I say quietly.

“Can you confirm—did you take those photos?” Riley asks.

“Yes, I did. I took them in March when I found these items here in the building. I sent them to Hank Wincott so he could see what I’d found.”

“Did you share them with Tim?” she asks.

“No! I mean, I showed them to him. He asked about my find, because he saw it in the news. But I didn’t give him the photos. They aren’t really mine to share.”

“Then how did he get them?” she asks coolly.

“I don’t know.” My voice rises with stress. “Maybe I set my phone down and walked out of the room. Or maybe he figured out my passcode. It wouldn’t have been that hard.”

“Can you guess why he wanted them?” she presses.

“ No ,” I say sharply.

“Let’s do this,” Fry says. “You give us permission to clone your cell phone data, and we’ll look into it on our end.”

“What do you mean?” My voice sounds high and thin and panicky. “A clone?”

He pulls a piece of paper from his legal pad. “If you sign this, we can ask your mobile carrier to share all your data with us. You’ll still have your phone. We’ll just be able to see the data on it.”

To say that I’m alarmed would be an understatement. “What kind of data?”

He shrugs. “Whatever’s there. Photos and texts. Calls you made. Apps you use. Stuff like that.”

Holy shit . “I don’t see how that helps you figure out why Tim took those photos. And I’m not handing over my entire life to strangers for no good reason.”

“Think about it,” Riley says, her face placid. “Can I show you a couple of unrelated photos from the scene?” My face must go pale because she says, “They’re not of the victim, Rowan. Just items found in his car.”

I exhale. “Okay. Sure.”

She takes the iPad back, taps the screen a few times, and passes it to me. “Are these Tim’s?”

The photo shows a pair of wireless earbuds in a sporty steel charging case. I point to the screen. “He had his initials engraved on it. Yes, they’re his.”

She flips to another photo. “This?”

It’s the basket where he kept his Moleskine journals. “That sat on the back seat, and he kept his notebooks in there.”

“Hmm,” she said. “But there were no notebooks in the car. So this thief liked notebooks, and not earbuds?”

She seems to be waiting for me to weigh in, but all I can do is shrug. My mind is churning through scenarios where the cops look at my phone and find out I was basically stalking Tim for the last few days of his life.

“How about these? Are they familiar?” Riley flips to a new photo—two paper receipts side by side. “From the glove box.”

I have to enlarge the screen to read them. One is from Portland Grounds. “That’s the coffee shop where we met. It’s a few blocks away from here.” I point in a northerly direction. “We went there a lot.”

“Did you go there on June fifth?”

“Is that the date on it?” I squint at the receipt again and find the date, which is, in fact, June fifth. “Maybe? I go there almost every day. It’s my usual spot. But we were broken up by then. And if Tim went there, he didn’t tell me.”

“Do you find that weird?” she asks. “That he went to your coffee shop?”

“No? Maybe?” I rub my forehead, and the barista’s strange story echoes in my brain. “I don’t know what you want me to say. Tim and I went there together, and then we stopped. But I don’t own the place. He clearly did whatever he wanted to.”

“How about the other one,” she prods.

I zoom in on the other receipt, and I probably don’t do a very good job of hiding my flinch. “Docksiders. We never went there together. I don’t go there anymore.”

“Why not?”

“That’s where I...” Met the man who derailed my entire life . “That’s where I worked in college. I met my daughter’s father there. I smelled like fried clams for an entire summer, and it’s not somewhere I like to go anymore.”

Riley smiles for the first time since she sat down. “Noted. When’s the last time you saw your daughter’s father?”

I blink. “We covered this before. I last saw him when Natalie was a toddler.”

“Any contact with him since you and I spoke on Friday?”

I shake my head, bewildered, because she asked me this a few minutes ago. “I told you. He sent me another email, but I didn’t respond.”

“What did he want?”

“Why?” I demand.

She says nothing. Just holds her pen over her little pad and waits.

“The subject line said he wanted to talk about Natalie. I didn’t.”

She nods. “All right. Now tell us again why you went to the mansion on the night of June sixth?”

“To walk the dog . We’ve been through this, too.”

“And did you know Tim would be there in the parking lot?” Riley asks.

“No,” I say without hesitation. But my heart is beating wildly.

“He shared his location with you,” she says evenly. “On his phone. Didn’t he?”

My heart might explode. “Yeah? He shared his location one time, so I could find him on a jogging path.”

“And did you use it to find him after that?” she asks.

I’m sweating through my blouse.

“ Rowan ,” Beatrice’s voice is sharp. Hearing it is like waking from a bad dream. “I need a minute please. It’s about the drywall order.”

There is no drywall order.

“One moment.” I push back my chair and walk over to Beatrice’s desk on the other side of the room.

“Look,” she says, pointing at her screen. There’s a random email on it.

But then she rests her hand on a notebook, and I see what she’s written there:

“I don’t like your tone. I don’t like what you’re implying.”

“If you’re out of reasonable questions, this interview is over.”

Beneath that:

They need a warrant if they want your phone!

And if you want to get rid of them, just say you want a lawyer .

It’s all very good advice. More crucially, the visit to Beatrice’s desk has given me a moment to regroup.

“Is this okay?” Beatrice asks, waving toward the email on her screen.

“It’s fine. We’ll make it work.”

“Cool.” She tosses her hair in a way that makes her look vacuous.

As if.

I take my seat again. “Sorry. What were we talking about?”

Riley gives me a look . “Tim shared his location with you. That means you could have known exactly where he was on the night when he was killed. If you just give us your phone data, we can clear this right up.”

“That won’t clear anything up. Neither me nor my phone knows who killed him.”

“We could just get a warrant,” Fry says. “But that makes you look...”

“Like someone who values her privacy,” I say through gritted teeth. “Get a warrant if you want to waste your time. And if you don’t have any more reasonable questions, then we’re done here.”

They exchange glances while I try not to hyperventilate.

“Just a couple more pictures to show you,” Riley says. “Are any of these items yours? His family doesn’t recognize them.”

Fear has gripped me from the inside out. I’m desperate for them to leave, but I sure can’t show it. Trying to regulate my breathing, I lean on the desk and look down at Riley’s iPad.

There’s a photo of a single pearl earring, with no backing. “Nope. That won’t be mine. I have pearl earrings, but I haven’t worn them in ages.” They make me feel old.

“One more,” she says quietly, flipping to another picture.

And it’s a struggle not to gasp when she shows me a silver medallion. It can’t be. I lean in close to see the detail, using my fingers to zoom in. Steel bands tighten around my chest as I stare down at the familiar figure sculpted against an oval background.

“It’s a saint,” Riley says, misinterpreting my silence. “We’re not sure which one. It was in the glove box. Do you recognize it?”

I shake my head. I don’t trust my voice right now, and my mind barely registers that I’m lying to the cops for the second time.

But I’m too afraid to say it out loud.