Rose nodded.
“Are you going to be there for a while?”
She reached past me to straighten a place setting on the table behind me.
“As a matter of fact, I am. Charlotte and I are going to go through a box of old photos. Liz is looking for pictures from the summer fair the foundation used to host. I don’t know why she wants them.”
I had a pretty good idea why but that wasn’t my story to tell.
“Don’t you have a date, dear?” Rose asked.
Was dinner with Jackson a date? I’d thought of it more as a fact-finding mission. Of course now I was certain I knew what the facts were so I wasn’t sure what this was. I nodded. “I’m having dinner with Mac’s friend Jackson. But I won’t be that long. I’ll stop by Charlotte’s afterward.”
“Did you and Alfred confirm Natalie’s alibi?” Rose asked as we moved out of Avery’s way. The teen was single-minded with a vacuum cleaner.
“We did. I’ll tell you all about it when I see you.”
“All right,” she said. She gave me a teasing smile and winked. “Don’t worry if you get held up.”
Jackson and I had dinner at The Black Bear. He talked a little bit about his and Mac’s college years, but then he steered the conversation to the shop, asking how I’d ended up owning and running a repurpose store. I explained about losing my radio job and ending up at Gram’s to sulk. He laughed when I said sulking got boring pretty quickly.
We didn’t talk about Erin’s murder or the case against Mac and I was just as pleased that we hadn’t. In the back of my mind I was still sorting through what I’d figured out and what came next.
“It’s a beautiful night,” I said after dinner. “How about a walk along the harbor front?” I thought of Rose, telling me not to worry if I got held up.
“Sounds good,” Jackson said. He didn’t seem to be in any hurry to end the evening.
The sun was low, and streaks of orange and gold looked like they’d been painted across the sky. There were very few people out enjoying the end of the day. “This really is a beautiful place,” he said. “I can see why you like it here.”
“I admit I do have my moments in January where I sometimes second-guess myself,” I said lightly.
We moved around a couple who had stopped to take a photo of the view across the harbor and a small man with a cane and a straw fedora with a striped hatband bumped into Jackson. Even as I was realizing it was Mr. P., he was excusing himself and moving past us, pretending not to know me. What the heck was he doing prowling around down here? Why wasn’t he on his way over to Charlotte’s to help me explain to everyone else what he and I had figured out?
I needed to get going. I smiled at Jackson. “How long are you staying?” I asked.
“I have to head back to Boston on Monday.” He raised an eyebrow. “Will you have dinner with me again before I go?” Before I could answer he gave me his charming smile. “Or lunch? Or breakfast?”
“I’ll have to check my schedule,” I said. “I have a lot going on right now.”
“You mean with everything that’s happened with Mac.”
I nodded. “Yes.”
“It was good to talk to him,” Jackson said. “It wasn’t a very long conversation, but still . . .” He let the end of the sentence trail off.
I let the silence settle between us. We were almost at the far end of the walkway along the harbor.
“What’s his lawyer like?” Jackson abruptly asked.
“Josh. Josh Evans,” I said. “He’s a good lawyer and a good guy.”
“You know him?”
I turned a bit so I could see his face as we walked. “I’ve known Josh since we were kids.”
“So you trust him?”
I nodded. “I trust him with my life, with Mac’s life.”
Jackson fingered his beard. “I’m sorry. I know how that must have sounded.”
“I know what you mean,” I said. We were just about past the area where the windjammers that took people out on day cruises were anchored. There was no one else around.
“Mac is like my brother,” he said. “I know I haven’t acted like that recently. I care about him. I want him to have the best representation.”
“You cared about Leila, too, didn’t you?” I said. I put my hands in my pockets because suddenly they were trembling.
He nodded, taking a deep breath and exhaling slowly. “Yes, I did. I still do.”
I stopped walking. “So why did you try to kill her?”
Mac stepped out of the shadows then, stopping in front of Jackson. “Yeah, Jackie,” he said. “I’d like to know the same thing.”
Jackson was good, I had to give him that. His gaze went from me to Mac. “Teaming up to ambush me,” he said. “I can’t fault you for that.” He cocked his head to one side and studied me. “Let me guess. You read Sherlock Holmes when you were a kid.”
He’d been charming me only to find out what we knew. It made me squirm to think I’d almost been taken in by that charm.
“You were in love with Leila,” I said, ignoring his comment. I watched Mac from the corner of my eye. He was totally focused on Jackson. “That didn’t change when she picked your best friend.”
“Maybe—a long time ago—I had feelings for Leila, but I was happy when she and Mac got married.”
He said the words so smoothly I almost believed him. Almost.
I pulled my hand out of my pocket and held it out. The tiny carved duck lay in the palm of my hand. “You had an affair.”
I hated saying the words out loud just as much as I had when I’d told Mac about the affair a few hours earlier.
“This belonged to Leila. You gave it to her. You knew she loved Japanese art. It’s an oshidori—a mandarin duck—a symbol of fidelity, oddly enough. Your fidelity to her, maybe? It was part of a set. You kept the other one. When you saw those two netsuke come up for auction did you think it was a sign from the universe?”
He didn’t answer. Not that I’d really expected him to.
My heart was pounding so hard in my chest the sound seemed to echo in my ears. “Leila kept this as a reminder of what she almost lost because of your affair. But I think you told yourself that somehow she kept it because she loved you, even if she didn’t admit it to herself. Then Erin figured it all out. She was coming to show this to Mac and tell him that what happened to Leila wasn’t an accident. That it was you.”
Something flashed briefly across his face and I knew I was right.
“You slept with my wife,” Mac said. Rage flashed in his dark eyes, and pain as well.
“Don’t make it sound like something cheap,” Jackson said in a voice edged with anger. “She’s not that kind of person. We had one perfect night. One, and Leila was consumed with guilt about it because you had her brainwashed. She felt obligated to you.”
Mac swallowed hard. The muscles in his neck stood out like thick twists of rope. “She loved me and I loved her,” he said.
“I loved her!” Jackson shouted. “We could have had a life together—we would have but you ruined it. You can pretend all you want that she didn’t care about me but it doesn’t make it true.” He all but spit the words at Mac. “Who did she come to when she found out that her company was being investigated by the FTC? Who? Me, not you.”
Mac said nothing.
“I told her I would fix it all. I knew people and I could make the whole thing go away. And I gave her that carving to show her that she could always count on me.”
Something in his body language, in his words, twigged for me. “You knew what Natalie had been doing,” I said.
Jackson’s gaze slid sideways. “Natalie and I had gotten . . . close. I figured it out.” He turned his attention back to Mac again. “And I was helping her fix things. I could have fixed everything but Leila had been living with you, Mr. Moral High Ground.”
It seemed as though I could feel the animosity toward Mac coming off Jackson. One hand clenched and flexed at his side and my stomach rolled as I thought of that large hand clamped over Erin Fellowes’s mouth and nose.