“Why?” she asked. “What would that have to do with the case?”
“I’m just curious.”
“He was interested in it,” Kate said. “Not seriously, but because of sailing, he thought it would be good to know.”
“Does he have a sextant?”
“No,” she said. “But I do. I need to navigate to fly. My grandmother thought it was just as important to be able to fly by the stars as it was by using instruments. I have the sextant she gave me, and I loaned it to Pete so he could practice.”
“When was that?” Reid asked, his pulse quickening.
“I’m not sure exactly. Maybe a year ago? Something like that,” Kate said.
Reid nodded. What if Pete had encountered Harris while studying how to steer by the stars? Maybe Harris had been his teacher. Maybe Harris had figured out Pete’s crime because of something they had talked about. Pete was the bragging type. He might have felt comfortable confiding in a guy who had committed atrocious crimes against women, a guy who might admire Pete for the way he had killed his wife. Or what if Pete had used Harris to actually kill Beth?
Reid and Kate were standing on the sidewalk in the middle of New London, the ambient light from apartments and bars and streetlights filling the sky, making it hard to see stars. But he looked up, and there were a few visible through the city’s bright haze. He couldn’t identify them, but they were there.
Reid looked into Kate’s eyes. He wouldn’t have done it if he hadn’t just had two scotches, but he brushed her cheek with the back of his hand. Was it his imagination, or was she leaning into it? There was so much he wanted to tell her.
He raised his gaze again, looking into the sky.
“Beth and I used to look up too,” Kate whispered. “And we’d make wishes.”
“You did?” he asked.
“Yes. They didn’t all come true, but some of them did.”
“What did you wish on?” he asked.
“The stars, of course,” she said.
Reid nodded. He stared into her eyes for a long time, thought of her and Beth, their wishes, their grandmother and her sextant, celestial navigation. He thought of his brother and what he had said barely twenty minutes ago.
The connection between Pete and Harris: the stars.
35
“Let’s go for a ride,” Kate said. It had been two days since Sam had seen her father, two nights since she had started staying at the loft again. Kate had given Conor Jed’s name and told him what she knew. The murder was his investigation, but learning more about Beth’s secret life was Kate’s. Perhaps the two would intersect.
“Where will we go?” Sam asked.
“I was thinking the Ledges.”
“I haven’t been there in a long time,” Sam said.
“Neither have I.”
They climbed into Kate’s Porsche. It was a tight squeeze with Popcorn crammed into the tiny back seat along with a canvas bag filled with picnic things. Kate put the top down, and they took back roads through the hills and countryside. The wind blew through Kate’s and Sam’s hair, and Popcorn rode with his tongue out and ears flying back in pure bliss. Passing Mathilda’s gates, Kate glanced at Sam, who stared straight ahead.
A few bends in the road later, she pulled between two crumbling stone pillars. The driveway was cracked and rutted with unrepaired frost heaves. There was a parking area a quarter mile in, and as soon as the car stopped, Popcorn bounded out and ran to the edge of the field.
“Which way do you want to go?” Kate asked. The choices were up the hill toward the abandoned stone house built high on a granite ledge or down a dirt trail to the river. The formal gardens were near the house, but rose mallows grew in abundance along the swampy inlet. Her father had said he’d suggested that Jed Hilliard come here to draw flowers.
“River,” Sam said.
They trekked through a meadow, silvery in sunlight. The tall grass was crisscrossed with deer trails. A gray ghost—a northern harrier—flew low over the marsh in search of prey. The amphitheater loomed on the cliff above. Kate’s family had spent so many happy Sundays there, but now it was a wreck, crumbling stones taken over by weeds and vines, Connecticut’s own version of ancient ruins.
“This place made Mom nervous,” Sam said.
“She brought you here?”
“Yeah, sometimes, but she was always afraid of deer ticks and Lyme disease. The grass would tickle her legs, and she’d jump.”
“What would she and you do?”
Sam shrugged. “Sketch, mainly. Or she’d tell me stories about how the Black Hall artists would come here over a hundred years ago, set up their easels, and paint the view. You know, there weren’t enough women.”
“Really?” Kate asked.
“Yep. Matilda Browne and Mary Cassatt were the only women who really made it as American Impressionists. I mean, Miss Florence ran the boarding house for artists, but she wasn’t one herself. Willard Metcalf was my favorite, but he looked down on girls who came for art lessons, so now I’m not sure how I feel about him. Did you know he called girls blots, as in blots on the landscape?”
“I’ve heard that,” Kate said, picturing the panel at the museum, Poor Little Bloticelli—a fifteen-year-old girl in her straw hat and white dress, painting at her easel. Kate had gone through the same thing at Sam’s age, being disillusioned by the artists’ lives and wondering if it was okay to still love their art.
They walked toward a stand of weeping willow trees, and Kate set down the canvas bag. She shook out a plaid picnic blanket, handed Sam her sandwich, and opened her own. They sat by the river, eating lunch, watching kayakers paddle along the Essex side. A fifty-five-foot boat with a catamaran hull headed slowly south, carrying tourists on a nature cruise. She glanced at Sam. If Sam had spent lots of time here with her mother, how big of a letdown must it be to come here now with her aunt?
“See that island?” Sam asked, pointing.
“Yes,” Kate said. She knew it well. Growing up at her grandmother’s, she’d heard all about the granite quarries worked in the early twentieth century for stone to pave New York City. Rare indigo hummingbirds were known to nest there every ten years. Most magical were the giant lotus lilies, completely unknown to the United States, that had bloomed on the island.
Mathilda had a botanist friend who had determined they had sprouted from seeds stored in the pyramids of Egypt, a thousand years BC. In the early 1800s, traders had looted the pyramids and stolen ancient racks of linen, to which the seeds had stuck. They had used the fabric to wrap ivory tusks to keep them from breaking on the voyage across the Atlantic. The ivory had been headed to a piano key manufacturer in Deep River, Connecticut. The seeds had blown off the linen, drifted downriver, and taken root on the island’s shore.
“Sometimes Mom and I would paddle out to it.”
“You’d bring kayaks?”
“Nope,” Sam said, giving her a sly smile. “Come on.”
They headed down to the water’s edge, and Sam parted rushes and invasive phragmites to reveal a ten-foot wooden dinghy covered by a tattered canvas. Oars were stored beneath the peeling varnished seats. Tarnished brass oarlocks were already in their holders.