I stop by the floral upholstered couch in the formal living room and look around at more European antiques, probably French, everything immaculate and dusty. I notice a canvas bag on the floor next to a wing chair, and inside are skeins of wool and knitting needles, and a navy blue scarf that looks about halfway done. If she’d left town for the summer, would she have neglected to take with her a project she’d begun? The fireplace is fitted with a gas insert that’s supposed to look like birch logs, a remote on top of the mantel.
“The fireplace works; I checked,” Burke says.
“Most people shut off the pilot light in the summer and turn it back on in the fall. Is her house heated with natural gas? It’s warm in here.” I find the thermostat. “The heat is on and set to seventy degrees.”
“Not sure if it’s natural gas.”
“Most likely it is. Pilot lights burn gas, too. You leave one on for five or six months and chances are good the gas will run out. So she’s been getting fuel deliveries.”
“Someone collecting her mail, paying her bills, making sure gas deliveries don’t stop, and suspending her newspaper.” She doesn’t indicate what that makes her think or even if she finds it noteworthy. “I don’t mean to tell you how to do your job.”
“That’s good, because you couldn’t possibly.”
“I don’t mean to question you.”
“Of course you do. But go right ahead.” I look at flowers on the coffee table that are so wilted it’s difficult to tell what they once were.
“You’re sure she didn’t die in the bay?”
“She didn’t.” Possibly tulips and lilies, which I associate with spring, an empty plastic card holder stuck in the vase.
“No way she was tied up, thrown overboard, and drowned?”
“There’s no way,” I reply. “She was already dead when she was tied up. If she were leaving town for the summer, would she leave a fresh flower arrangement on a table? Why not throw it out?”
“And she was in the water how long?” Burke isn’t interested in the flowers.
“I’d estimate her body hadn’t been in the water even twenty-four hours by the time she was found.”
“Estimate based on what? If you don’t mind my asking.”
“I don’t mind,” I answer, because it doesn’t matter if I do, and I’m certain she will ask whatever she wants, and I wonder if she’s slept with my husband.
I wonder how much of this is competitive and personal.
“My estimate is based on there being no evidence of significant immersion changes or marine depredation, for example,” I explain.
“‘Marine depredation’?”
“Fish, crabs. Nothing had started eating her.”
“Right. So she died somewhere else.”
“Yes, she did.”
“Your thoughts based on the autopsy?”
“I think she likely was held hostage someplace she attempted to escape from,” I reply. “Her postmortem findings indicate she’s been dead for months.”
“Any chance she’s not been dead as long as you think?” Burke studies me as if I’m a puzzle she can take apart and reconstruct.
“I’m not sure how long she’s been dead,” I reply. “Not down to the week or day or hour, if that’s the answer you want. But based on what I’m seeing so far, it appears to me she hasn’t been home since it was still cool enough to keep the heat on. Around here, that would be last March or April. I assume there was no card in this floral arrangement?”
“I didn’t touch it, and Sil wouldn’t have. So apparently not.” She pinches her nose together with the tissue and looks miserable and irritable.
“Do we know when these flowers were delivered or by whom?”
“We’ll be checking area florists to see if there’s a record of a delivery,” she says. “And we’ll check her credit card bills to see if she might have bought the flowers herself.”
“I wonder if someone was paying those, too.”
“Someone who had access to her bank account. Someone who had her checks,” Burke says. “Wouldn’t be anyone in her family. Her family’s dead.”
“Most people don’t remove the card from the arrangement and throw it away. Not if the flowers came from someone who’s significant to them.”
“I haven’t checked the trash yet.”
“To answer your question as definitively as I can?” I look through magazines on the coffee table. “Based on the condition of her body, I’m estimating she’s been dead for many months.”
Antiques & Collecting, Antique Trader, Smithsonian from December through April.
“Knowing for a fact how long is really important,” Burke says, and that’s what she wants from me and intends to dispute because she has her mind made up about what she’s looking for and what she believes she can prove.
Some theory that at the moment I can’t fathom, but I have no doubt I wasn’t asked to do a walk-through of this house for the reasons I assumed. I’m not here to check for evidence of violence, for asphyxia or a drug overdose. I’m here because of Marino.
He is what Burke wants to ask about, and I have a leaden feeling of inevitability, a sense of something dark and heavy spreading over me that I can’t escape, don’t even dare to run from, because it will only be worse if I do. I know what she’s walking me deeper into, and Benton saw it coming. He warned me in his own way while we were driving here. Burke is aware of details about Marino’s past that aren’t found in searchable records.
“Months? Two, three, five months? How does this work when you look at a dead body and calculate?” she asks, and I do the best I can to explain what isn’t simple as I walk into a kitchen dominated by an antique oak table and handmade iron chandelier.
Double porcelain sinks are empty and dry, the bistro coffeemaker unplugged and clean, and blinds are shut in windows on either side of the door that leads out to the garage. She follows me, lets me lead the way, scarcely attending to what I say as she continues to check her phone and probe, carrying on with what feels like a chipping away of who and what I am. I can’t help but feel betrayed. I can’t help but feel Benton chose the side he’s on and it isn’t my side, and at the same time I completely understand and would suspect nothing less from him.
The FBI is doing its job the same way I do mine, and Burke can ask anything she wants without Mirandizing me because I’m not in police custody. I’m not a suspect in a crime or even a person of interest. Marino is. I could stop Douglas Burke at any time, but that would only further galvanize her suspicions about him.
“It’s impossible to precisely determine how rapidly a body desiccates unless you know the conditions.” I explain mummification as she continues to question whatever I say about it. “How hot? How cold? How humid? The name Stanton isn’t French.” I look around. “Antiques and certain other items in this house are French and quite fine and somewhat unique. What was her family name?”
“Margaret Lynette Bernard. Peggy Lynn. Born on January twelfth, 1963, in New York. Father was a French antiques dealer with shops in New York, Paris, London. She grew up in the city, was working on her master’s degree in social work at Columbia but didn’t finish, presumably because she got married and started a family.”
She’s been doing research, digging into records, covering a lifetime of history in the blink of an eye or in the keystrokes of a cyber-expert like Valerie Hahn, who is conspicuously absent, it crosses my mind. E-mails seem to be landing nonstop on Burke’s phone.
“All that sacrifice. Look what she gave up for him, and the guy decides to fly in bad conditions.” She stands in one spot, her watery eyes on me. “Pilot error.” She sneezes, and I think of the irony.