“I could have stopped it,” Sam whispered.
“No,” Kate said. “Don’t think that.”
She sat beside Sam on the gray tweed couch. She thought back to when she and Beth were the girls whose mother had died in an art robbery gone wrong. The cops had asked them countless questions. The details of what they’d been through blurred together. Every time Kate told the story, it seemed a little less real. The experience began to feel like a dream, something she had made up. Because how was such a thing possible in life? To be tied to your mother and sister, the knots so tight you couldn’t slip free? To have to just sit there, listening to your mother choking and feeling her body going limp and tilting over, unable to move and save her life?
“You couldn’t have stopped anything. It’s not your fault—not one bit,” Kate said to Sam.
“Doesn’t feel that way,” Sam said. “If I hadn’t been at camp . . .”
“Then you might have gotten hurt too.”
Sam tipped her head back, gazing up at Kate. Her eyes were pale blue, like her father’s, and she had Mathilda’s dark hair, like Kate. But she had Beth’s full lips, her heartbreaking smile.
“Killed, you mean,” Sam said.
“Yes,” Kate said.
“You know what I hated?” Sam asked.
“What?”
“Seeing Mrs. Waterston at the airport,” Sam said, her voice breaking. “She was Mom’s best friend. What’s she going to do without her?”
Kate’s heart cracked. She watched tears leaking from Sam’s eyes. It was as if her niece couldn’t cry for her own pain but only while imagining someone else’s. And she wasn’t wrong about Scotty: Kate knew something was bothering Scotty, and her only true confidant was Beth. Scotty had put on weight, and she constantly berated herself for letting herself go. Sometimes she smelled like wine a little too early in the day. Whatever Scotty was going through, she could share it with Beth.
The buzzer rang. For a second Kate thought it might be Lulu. After running to the door, Kate checked the image on the video monitor: Conor Reid stood at the entrance to her building. She pushed the intercom button. “Yes?” she asked.
“Hello, Kate,” he said, staring straight into the camera. “May I come up to speak with Samantha?”
She hesitated, glanced over at her disheveled niece, watched Sam slash tears from her eyes.
“It’s the detective. I’m really sorry, Sam. But we need to talk to him,” she said, waiting for a response.
“I’ll do it for Mom,” Sam said finally.
Kate punched in a series of numbers. Because she had once been held against her will, she had bought the best biometric security system available. The voice-recognition software measured her particular patterns—the velocity of air expelled from her lungs and across her larynx. She could have said anything, and depending on her mood, her words could get very colorful. But mindful of Sam on the sofa, she quoted a line from a favorite poem: Turning and turning in the widening gyre, the falcon cannot hear the falconer . . .
The lock tumblers whirred and clicked, and she heard the downstairs door open.
“What’s that you just said?” Sam asked, curious in spite of herself.
“It’s from ‘The Second Coming’ by William Butler Yeats,” she said. “Mathilda taught it to me.”
Sam nodded, and Kate half smiled, glad to provide a momentary distraction. Sam had always been fascinated with her aunt’s ever-changing alarm system, had loved watching Kate offer her left eye to the iris-reading camera or stare at the screen so the software could recognize her face.
Kate opened the loft door, and Popcorn came loping over to stand by her side, tail wagging. They both watched Reid climb the stairs. His blue blazer looked as if it had been balled up in the back seat of his car; it had been a long day.
“Hello, Kate,” he said.
“Hello, Detective Reid,” she said.
“Conor’s fine,” he said.
She nodded. “Thanks,” she said.
“Hello, Popcorn,” he said, petting the dog, whose tail was going faster than ever. “We made friends at the house.”
“Popcorn makes friends with everyone,” Sam said.
Both Kate and the detective turned to look at her. Kate closed the door and watched Conor cross the loft, offer his hand to shake Sam’s.
“Samantha,” he said. “I am very sorry about your mother.”
Sam’s mouth twisted, and her chin wobbled. She looked back at the TV screen.
“I’m in charge of investigating what happened. I’m going to do my best to find out who did this to her.”
“It doesn’t matter who did it,” Sam said.
“I think it matters a lot,” he said. He sat down in the brown leather chair opposite her, leaning forward with arms folded on his knees, looking directly into her eyes.
“She’s gone,” Sam said. Tears pooled but didn’t spill over.
“I know,” he said, letting the silence last. Then, “How are you?”
She shrugged.
“Have you seen your dad yet?”
“No,” she said. “He wanted to, but . . .”
Kate watched her close her eyes tight, pull herself together. She also noticed Conor hanging on her words.
“Who is that?” Sam asked instead of completing her answer, pointing at the screen.
“That’s Officer Peggy McCabe. She’s with the Black Hall Police Department, and she and her partner were first on the scene. Your aunt called the police when your mother didn’t answer the door.”
“You found Mom?” Sam asked, head snapping to look at Kate.
“Yes,” Kate said.
“You didn’t tell me,” Sam said.
Kate touched her shoulder lightly. As much as she loved her niece, she felt confused and hesitant, not knowing just what to say or when. She hadn’t wanted to volunteer anything without having a sense of what Sam was ready to hear.
“You mentioned that Popcorn is friendly with everyone,” he said.
“Yes, as you can tell.”
“Does that mean he doesn’t bark when a stranger comes to the door?”
“Sometimes he does,” she said. “But more in a curious way. He’s not exactly a watchdog.”
“Your aunt has a very good security system,” he said.
“I know,” Sam said, glancing at Kate. “Fancier than the one at the gallery. We tease her.”
“What about the one you have at home? Does your family always use it or sometimes leave it off?”
“Depends on who’s coming and going. We usually have it on.”
“Usually but not always?”
Sam gave him a long look. “Always at night. And Mom would have had it set the whole time since she was there alone.”
Kate sat at the end of the sofa next to Sam.
“But it wasn’t on,” Kate said. “We broke in through the sliding door, and the alarm didn’t go off.”
“Would she have let a stranger into the house?” Conor asked.
“Never,” Kate and Sam said at the same time.
“She was nervous,” Sam said. “Because of what happened when she was a kid. At the gallery.”