If she wasn’t directly responsible for whatever happened to Jasper, I thought, she had help getting to dreamland last night. It was the only way I could see her sleeping through the attack; hell, with the number of pills it takes me to drift off some nights you could tap-dance on Carson’s body and I wouldn’t flinch. And if Abella was in the habit of popping pills, maybe Jasper did the same. You don’t need a history of drug use to go overboard or make one lethal, ill-fated match.
On the other nightstand, I found something else peculiar: a water ring, the kind you get from forgetting to use a coaster. It was faint—I had to get in close to spot it—but it was there. Already I’d seen enough of the house to know Norton kept it immaculate. Why not buff away the stain? True, the mark could be fresh, but there was no glass in sight, nothing to collect for testing. Abella Beaudry would be an important interview. She had some explaining to do.
When I was done with the area around the bed, I took note of the location of the windows. Three of them, close together, bowed outward from the house. The screens were all intact, the windows shut tight against the storm, and as a result the room retained its smells. I picked up the sour tang of sweat, but it was almost completely overpowered by the sharp, metallic stench of blood. Aside from the windows, the room also had a glass door that opened onto a Juliet balcony. There were no stairs leading down to the ground, but I wondered if someone could have climbed up another way. The floors were pristine—no messy footprints, no debris from outside. These observations I marked in my notebook, filing them away for later.
With one more sweeping appraisal of the room, I was done. The doors in the house were old with antique hardware. I found the key to Jasper’s room in the keyhole and locked it behind me. In the gloved palm of my hand, before dropping it in my pocket for safekeeping, the key seemed to emit a low-frequency vibration that zipped through my body like a shock. At home I never lock interior doors, not even when using the bathroom. Not anymore.
It took twenty minutes to search the second and third floors of the house. On the outside the place appeared huge to the point of obscenity, but its warren of hallways made the interior feel unnervingly cramped. I couldn’t get my bearings. There were doors everywhere, closets that turned corners to go on forever. Some were lined with fancy dresses and suits zipped into storage bags. The Sinclairs must have held parties out here years ago, Gatsby-style. The staircase to the third floor, which was entirely occupied by a master bedroom that clearly belonged to the house’s owner, spiraled upward to a dizzying height. In good weather, Camilla would be able to see all the way to Canada.
Throughout my search there was a knot in my stomach and a tightness in my chest. I knew I might find Jasper’s body at any moment. Here it comes, I warned myself. He’s hanging from a rafter, bloodless and bloated, in this high-ceilinged bedroom. This is it, I thought. He’s here behind this door, ready to crumple heavily against me when I give the knob a pull. Those twenty minutes seemed to last hours, but other than the blood on his bed I found no sign of him. I checked every room but one, which was locked from the inside. When I knocked on its rich, five-paneled door, I got no reply.
Nine people were staying in the house, and most of them were relatives. I wasn’t optimistic that fingerprints would reveal much. Close families have few boundaries. Formalities tend to fall away. If this family was anything like mine, their prints would be everywhere, and that would make the interviews I was about to conduct even more crucial.
The thought made me shudder. I knew even then, so early in the case, that the key to this solve wasn’t in my pocket or behind Jasper’s locked bedroom door. It was downstairs in the living room.
Waiting.
FOUR
I wasn’t ready to face them, not yet. There was a part of me that still hoped I’d find Jasper alive and break some local records for the fastest solve in history, so I skirted the living room and went straight for the basement, the door to which I found in the kitchen.
Picture a cellar from a horror film, dusty and dank with crumbling stone walls and a criminal air. Old pipes clang and a strange odor hangs heavy, nauseating in its rottenness, meat-sweet. That’s how I imagined the basement in the house on Tern Island. In truth it was pretty ordinary, but walking down those stairs gave me a head rush akin to eating too little and standing too quick. It took me hundreds of miles from the island, to a place I never wanted to be again.
I wasted no time getting out of there to do a cursory search of the grounds outside, rain be damned. There was no way I could cover the whole island on my own, but I poked through leaf piles and peered over steep cliffs with gusto. If there were indeed caves chiseled into the rock, they didn’t reveal themselves to me. Back inside I checked the sunroom, library, and Norton’s room. It was the sole bedroom on the main floor, accessible through a butler’s pantry. Predictably, it lacked the old-world glamour of the rest of the house. A single bed, a small chest of drawers, and a nightstand constituted Philip Norton’s belongings. There was a framed photo beside his bed that showed him as a much younger man, with a full head of red hair and his arm around a boy about ten years old. I picked up the frame and scrutinized the kid’s face. The boy might have been Jasper, but I couldn’t be sure.
Only the room where Tim had situated the Sinclairs and their guests remained. I stepped through the doorway and finally got my first look at our witnesses.
They made me think of Bram. Presented with the family and their pristine house at the summit of Tern Island, he would have seen perfection. To Bram, perfection was synonymous with danger. In the context of a murder case it alarmed me, too. Nothing about this place was flawed, and that uncanny fact had preoccupied me throughout my search. Every room I’d entered was magazine-ready, and the living room was no different. On the mantel sat a mindfully arranged autumn vignette of hefty pewter candlesticks, gourds, and pheasant feathers. Fresh-cut mums burst from vases on mirrored tabletops. Heavy valances in neutral tones were shaped like the bustle of a nineteenth-century skirt. Classy. That’s how I’d describe the place. And the family fit right in.
Like Camilla’s, their clothes were casual but perfectly tailored—dress shirts overlaid with cashmere sweaters, pants with centerline creases sharp as the blade of a knife. A woman with short dark hair and fat diamond earrings reclined artfully on a settee as if gracing the cover of Vanity Fair. A handsome man with coffee-colored skin leaned against the window beyond which trees strained against the storm. It was open a crack to let in a wet breeze, and sheer curtain panels billowed around him like smoke. The youngest of them all, a teenage girl with rosebud lips and shiny chestnut hair, looked like she could have been a celebrity’s little sister about to make it big herself. An equally striking man who was surely her father sat by her side. Against the high-polish backdrop of the house’s antique furniture and the fire that crackled happily in the hearth they were exclusivity personified. There was one exception, one person who didn’t belong in this picture of privilege and wealth, and I’d have bet anything her name was Abella Beaudry.