I tuck the file under one arm as I slam my car door and head toward the house. Morning dew glistens on the roof and hood of the Kydd’s truck, tiny droplets merging and trickling like miniature rivers down the fogged windows. Through a gap in the mist on the passenger’s side, I see that the solitary bench inside is empty. He must have returned the files and books that cluttered it yesterday to the office. Good. I’ll make a point of telling him to leave them there. I want that busy brain of his focused on only one case for the next couple of days. This one.
Louisa’s husky laughter tells me they’re on the back deck. I walk east of the house, climb a trio of wooden steps, and pass the seemingly never-used kitchen door on my way to the water side. They’re seated in Adirondack chairs facing the ocean, both cradling steaming mugs, their profiles toward me. They make quite a picture in the morning sunshine, both lean and long-limbed, their postures relaxed, carefree even. Gives a whole new meaning to Southern Comfort.
Louisa twists in her chair as I approach, sends a slight wave in my direction, and then turns back to the Kydd to finish whatever she’s been telling him. The Kydd’s cheeks are flushed and I don’t think it’s because of the ocean wind. His attention to Louisa’s story is absolute, the kind a private first-class might pay if he were included in a meeting of four-star generals on the eve of war. It’s pretty clear that my arrival is lost on him.
Leaning over a small table between their chairs without missing a beat in her tale—something about childhood summers spent on Ocracoke, an island off the coast of North Carolina—Louisa fills a mug with black coffee, hands it to me, and points to the empty chair across from hers. I’m grateful for the coffee—it’s my first cup of the day—but I decline the offer to sit. She doesn’t seem to notice.
“And, of course, there,” she continues, apparently still referring to the summer island of her youth, “a person can swim once in a while. The water actually warms up for a few months each year.” She gestures toward the icy gray waves and shivers, then sets her mug on the table so she can pull her unbuttoned cardigan tight around her.
The Kydd laughs. “I know what you mean,” he says. “I haven’t been in salt water since I got here.” He looks up at me for the first time today and shakes his head.
“Is that true?” I ask. The Kydd’s been here for three summers—hot ones.
“Hell, yes, it’s true.” He plasters an incredulous expression on his face and points his coffee toward the water, as if I might not otherwise catch his drift. “You people are crazy to go swimming in that—even in August. It’s too damned cold.”
The Kydd looks a little annoyed. Apparently I’m responsible for Cape Cod’s failure to heat the Atlantic. I shift my attention to Louisa. “First of all,” I tell her, “I’d like you to walk us through the events of last Sunday.”
“But I did that on Friday,” she says, wiping lipstick from the rim of her mug with a cloth napkin. “And yesterday, too. I told you everything.”
“I know you did.” I hand her file to the Kydd. “But today I want you to walk us through it—literally. Show us where you were, hour by hour.”
“I was here. Aside from my morning at the club, I was home all day. You expect me to walk you from room to room?”
I nod. “That’s exactly what I expect.”
I also expect her to take us to Eastward Edge at some point, review the early-morning round of golf, the chitchat among the foursome. I don’t mention any of that, though. We won’t get that far today.
“Let’s start in the driveway,” I tell them both. “Retrace Louisa’s steps from the moment she got home.”
They exchange puzzled glances, but leave their chairs like a couple of compliant children.
Louisa looks over at the Kydd as they walk across the wooden deck ahead of me. She arches her perfect eyebrows, apparently wondering if he can shed any light on my peculiar request. He shrugs, pulls a legal pad from the file and a pen from his jacket pocket. The expression on his face says they’ll just have to humor me.
And they will. It’s not that I give a damn where Louisa took her midday shower or read her Sunday Times. But I’ve learned over the years that memory is a fragile, unpredictable thing. It can be blocked—or triggered—by any of the five senses. We’re going to do everything we can to trigger Louisa Rawlings’s memories today. Otherwise, it’ll happen tomorrow. When Detective Lieutenant Mitch Walker does it for us.
Scarlett O’Hara would pine for nothing in Louisa Rawlings’s quarters. Louisa apparently plucked her master suite straight from the blueprints of prewar Tara. Its pale yellow wallpaper is daintily flowered. The matching drapes are heavily ruffled. And the king-size bed is a four-poster, canopied and draped in lace. The bed is unmade, the sheer curtains drawn, the sheets and quilts a sea of tangled lilac.
Each bedside table wears a matching lilac skirt overlaid by a dainty white crocheted doily. Each doily has a cut-crystal vase centered on it. The vases hold dozens of long-stemmed pink roses, most barely open, a few in full bloom. Next to each vase sits an ivory candleholder with a single wick floating in scented oil—lavender, I think. It’s an aromatic, pastel world in here.
There’s a veranda, of course, facing the water. Louisa moves toward it, like a hummingbird to nectar, as soon as the three of us enter the room.
“Did you go out there when you got home from the club?” I ask.
She stops walking and turns to face me. “I did,” she says, smiling. “I almost never come in here without going out there. I never tire of the view.”
“Then let’s do it now.”
She shakes her head. “But I only went out for a couple of minutes last Sunday. I didn’t even sit down.”
“Then let’s go out for a couple of minutes now,” I tell her. “And we won’t sit down this time, either.”
She shrugs, looks over at the Kydd, and gestures toward the French doors. Ever the Southern gentleman, he complies. He fiddles with the locks for a few moments—there are two of them—then swings both doors open wide and moves aside. Louisa steps out first and I follow. Rhett Butler leans in the open doorway, his pen and legal pad at the ready.
Louisa clutches the wrought-iron railing and breathes in the salt air. “That’s it,” she says, looking back at me. “That’s exactly what I did out here on Sunday. That’s all of it.”
I join her at the railing and point down to the floating dock. “Is this when you realized Herb had taken the Carolina Girl out?”
“No,” she says. “I knew before I came into the house. I thought he probably had, given the glorious day, so I walked around back and checked.”
I nod and make a mental note to repeat that walk with her before we finish. When I lean against the railing beside her, she turns her back to the view she never tires of and stares at me. She seems bored with this drill. And apparently she’s done talking about this particular spot.
“I’m sorry,” she says as if reading my mind. “But there’s nothing more I can tell you.”
“What did you do next?” I ask.
Her expression brightens and she stands up straighter. “I went to the Queen’s Spa,” she announces.
“The Queen’s Spa?”
“Yes,” she says, slipping past the Kydd and back inside. She directs our attention to a door on the east end of the main room. It’s ajar. “This,” she says, entering ahead of us, “is the Queen’s Spa. I designed it myself.”
I don’t doubt it for a second. A space this size would house a family of four in more than a handful of countries. And the aggregate value of its contents would exceed the gross national product in a few more. Louisa Rawlings’s signature is all over this room.
The ceiling is at least twelve feet high and from its center hangs a fan Louisa might have salvaged from the set of Casablanca. It rotates lazily above us, emitting a barely audible hum. Two feet below, a single wooden shelf traverses the perimeter of the room. Lush greenery cascades from it, in stark contrast to the white trim and the beige painted walls. Apparently Louisa Rawlings has a green thumb.