Page 105 of The Summer Guests

Brooke.

This time, there was no George Conover to pull Brooke out of the fire and help her neutralize this witness. Panicked, Brooke had dealt with the problem herself, with a blow to Zoe’s head. Now she had a new problem: How to load the unconscious body into the trunk of her car? For that, she turned to someone strong enough to lift the girl, someone she knew would do her bidding and would never betray her: her son, Kit.

While they’d been chasing the phantoms of MKUltra, the real killer was in that household the whole time, sleeping under the same roof, sitting at the Conovers’ dinner table.

“Do you think we’re slipping?” Ingrid asked quietly. “The fact we were so wrong about this one, well, it makes me wonder.”

The question unnerved Maggie; no doubt it unnerved them all, the possibility that they’d lost their edge and that what lay ahead was an inexorable decline into senility. They may have accepted that their joints were not as limber, that they could not run as far or as fast as they could in their youth, but one could always adjust to those physical changes, or find ways to compensate.

But a sharp mind was central to what they did and who they were, and to feel their well-honed skills beginning to recede would be a death all its own.

“Even if weareslipping,” said Ben, “we were still ahead of the police.”

“Rather a low bar,” sniffed Ingrid.

“Still, that thought should buck us up.”

“And we can learn something from this,” Maggie added. “A lesson we should remember in the future.”

“What lesson?” Ingrid asked.

Maggie looked around at her friends, fellow travelers on this journey into the twilight of life. Her gaze fell on Declan, and she smiled. “Never overlook the human heart as a source of mischief.”

They heard a knock on the door, and she rose from her chair. They all knew who this would be.

Jo was out of uniform, dressed in blue jeans and a fleece on this cool summer night, and as she walked into the house, it struck Maggie how rarely she saw the young woman in civilian clothing. That was sad. Dedication to a career was a fine thing, but youth was fleeting, and she wished more for Jo than endless patrols and 911 responses.

“You just missed dinner,” Maggie said.

“Any chance you have leftovers?” she asked.

“Doesn’t anyone ever feed you?”

“Not the way you people feed me.”

“Paella and ratatouille.”

“What?”

“That’s what’s for dinner. We saved you some. They’re all in the dining room, feeling sorry for themselves.”

“Why?”

“We should have done better. We apologize for leading you astray, when the killer was right there in front of us. As Lloyd says, we didn’t see the forest for the trees.”

“Because there were too many damn trees in the way.”

They had already set a place for Jo at the table, and as she sat down, Lloyd slid her a plate of food and Declan poured her a whisky. When they’d first met Jo, she was not a fan of scotch, but now she happily took a sip. That’s what happened when one spent too much time with this group; one got corrupted by shady habits and excellent booze. Jo seemed happy tonight, almost celebratory, not the uptight Jo Thibodeau that they’d tangled with in the past.

“So I hear you folks are kicking yourselves,” she said, a trifle too cheerfully.

“We lost the thread,” said Ingrid. “We became distracted by irrelevant issues like MKUltra and Vivian Stillwater.”

“Those issues weren’t irrelevant to Reuben Tarkin.”

“Well, no.”

“And if not for Reuben, Susan Conover would be dead.”