“The defining moment?” Kate asked, thinking of all the shimmering, beautiful moments of Beth’s life. Love had defined her, not tragedy.
“Can we schedule an on-camera interview?” Peyton asked.
“No,” Kate said. It was all she could manage. She couldn’t even fake a smile as she turned her back. She heard the Pratts mutter as they gathered their belongings. She barely made it to the head before throwing up.
Her body remembered everything from those hours when the Andersons had tied them up in the basement. Retching over the toilet, she could feel her chafed wrists, bound to Beth’s and their mother’s. The weight of their mother’s body, slumping over, pulling at the ropes. Beth stiff, shaking uncontrollably and leaning into Kate for as much comfort as she could give.
Beth had spoken gibberish through the cotton gag.
“Beth, I’m here,” Kate had tried to say, choking on the cloth they’d stuffed into her mouth behind the strip of duct tape. She struggled like a madwoman to get free, but the harder she pulled, the tighter the ropes felt. She had known her mother was unconscious, but as time went by, her body grew cold, and the unthinkable hit Kate: her mother was dead. Yanking violently, she knocked her mother’s body over on her side so that both she and Beth were trapped beneath her. Beth screamed behind the gag. Kate had stroked Beth’s wrist with her thumb, trying to signal her to calm down, to stop fighting. She had been terrified that Beth would choke too.
“Hey, Kate.”
In the plane on the tarmac, she heard Conor’s voice now. He’d climbed the gangway and stood in the cabin. She washed her mouth out with water, spit into the sink, wiped her lips. Glancing in the mirror, she saw her eyes red rimmed and wet with tears she hadn’t even realized she’d cried. Stepping into the cabin, she saw him standing there, watching her.
“Are you okay?” he asked.
She started to nod yes, but instead she shook her head no. He put his arm around her, sat beside her on the wide leather sofa along the starboard bulkhead.
“Those passengers who just got off? The woman wants to make a documentary of my ‘sister’s case,’” Kate said. “Is that how you see her—as a ‘case’?”
“No, I see her as Beth.”
Kate took a deep breath, felt herself relax a little at that. Conor’s arm tightened around her shoulders.
“They come out of the woodwork at a time like this,” Conor said. “They all want to be first, get the exclusive.”
“Have they called you?”
“Yes. The answer is always ‘no comment.’”
“Thank you,” she said.
“They’re all important to me, every murder victim, but this one even more so.”
“Why?”
He paused and reddened. She sensed him trying to find the words. “Because it feels personal.”
She wanted him to say more. Personal because Beth reminded him of someone? His wife, his sister? As she stared into his eyes, the tiniest spider threads of memory began to spin and weave together. She felt the rope around her wrists, scraping the skin raw. Someone had untied her.
“It was you, wasn’t it?” she asked in a low voice.
“Me?”
“Who found us in the basement. Who rescued me and Beth.”
He nodded.
She felt torn in half. She wanted to hold him, press her body against him as hard she could, and she also wanted to turn away, to stop seeing his eyes and remembering the way he had looked at her that day.
She cleared her throat. “There’s no way I can thank you . . . ,” she began.
“Don’t, Kate. You don’t have to.”
“Yeah, I do,” she said.
“I just want you to be okay,” he said. “I know how hard this is, going through this kind of loss again. I don’t want to push you.”
“Push me?”
“I came here to ask if you’ll go with me to the gallery,” he said.
She shivered, closed her eyes, and opened them again. “Why?” she asked.
“Just looking for leads, anything that will help the investigation. I’d need your permission no matter what, but I’d rather have you with me. You can help me see if anything’s off, different than it should be. But if it’s too much . . .”
Kate steadied herself. “Of course I’ll go with you,” she said. “I’ll meet you there.”
“Thanks, Kate,” he said.
They walked off the plane together and drove away in separate cars. She went straight to her loft to walk and feed Popcorn. After he ate, he looked at her with big expectant eyes. She knew he wasn’t hungry anymore; he was waiting for Beth to come back. She hugged him for a long minute. Then she changed out of her uniform; put on blue jeans, a crisp white T-shirt, and brown suede ankle boots; and headed into Black Hall.
The gallery was halfway down Main Street, between the firehouse and the white Christopher Wren–inspired church that had been the subject of so many Impressionist paintings. She directed Conor to park in the gallery’s driveway. The Victorian house had once belonged to Lydia Stewart Smith, the benefactor who had founded the town’s library, and had been impeccably restored with a bequest from Mathilda.
The house turned gallery had been an almost enchanted sanctuary during her mother’s lifetime, a place where Kate and Beth had spent rainy days and gotten lost in stories created by the paintings. Kate had loved the house as a child, but when she entered it now, it felt like a tomb. It reminded her of crime and unbearable loss.
She unlocked the front door. The space was very much as it had been in her grandmother’s day: wide-plank pine floors, eight-over-eight windows, white walls hung sparely, each with one or two large-scale, gilded-framed, nineteenth-century paintings. A fireplace with a white marble mantel hadn’t been used in recent years.
Upstairs was a second gallery space. There the walls were packed tightly with small paintings, drawings, and etchings, floor to ceiling, salon style, the way art was hung in Gertrude Stein’s home at 27 rue de Fleurus. The arrangement had inspired Mathilda during a visit to the house in Paris immediately after the war.
Beth and Pete shared an 1875 mahogany partners desk, flush against the back wall. One of Beth’s sweaters hung over the back of her chair. Kate’s fingers trailed over the soft blue wool. She felt vertigo imagining how recently Beth had sat here. Her sister’s work surface contained stacks of books and monographs.
Across the desk’s tooled green leather surface, Pete’s work area was laid out with invoices and letters. His chair had been neatly pushed in. She wondered what it had been like for Beth to spend her days sitting opposite the husband who had betrayed her.
“What are you hoping to find here?” she asked.
“Mainly the missing canvas,” he said. “Moonlight.”
“So, you still think Pete did it?”
“He’s my strongest suspect.”
“You think he’d put it in the gallery? Isn’t that a little obvious?”
“Pete thinks he’s smart, right?”
“That’s for sure,” Kate said.
“Well, I believe he’d hide it in plain sight. Rolled up with other canvases, hanging on the wall, anywhere. And he would laugh at everyone for not figuring it out.”