“Oh, baby.” She looked over my head. “Hi, Q.”

“Hi, Victoria.”

My mother stepped back, and the sound of jazz from inside her house trickled out and enveloped me, relaxing me. I moved inside, and she pulled me into her arms, stroked my hair.

Their front living room was wide with ivory couches and subdued oriental rugs over big-planked, glossy wood floors. It was a beautiful room, but my mother, who suffered bouts of depression, didn’t like how it grew dark in the late afternoon. And so when the living room fell into shadow, like now, everyone headed for the back of the house. By the time my mother and I pulled apart, I could hear Q already in the kitchen, talking with Spence and someone else.

My mother led me to the kitchen. “Sheets!” I said, seeing my brother.

“Hey, Iz.” He hugged me.

Spence, my sweet stepfather, did the same. He was a pleasant-looking man with brown hair streaked with gray. At least that’s how I always thought of him, but I looked closer now and noticed that his hair was mostly white. Funny how people close to you can grow older without you ever noticing.

“C’mere, darling girl.” Spence wore khaki pants and a white shirt over his barrel chest. He guided me toward the round breakfast nook built into a paneled bay window.

On the table was a plate of prosciutto, dried fruit and a parmesan-type cheese next to a half-full bottle of red. Spence and my mom were old school-the cocktails and snacks always came out at five sharp, especially now that Spence was mostly retired. But the red wine, I was sure, was courtesy of my brother, who thought that life should be spent sipping a glass of Barolo or Bordeaux or Merlot.

Charlie poured a glass for Q, then started to pour one for me.

I held out my hand. “I can’t. I already had one today at the memorial, and I have to work tonight at the lingerie store.”

My mom gave me a disapproving glance. “You’re going to run yourself into the ground, Izzy.”

“I took this job, and I promised to be there.” My promise, and my loyalty, were to Mayburn, not the store, but I left that unsaid.

“But you don’t need this job at the store now,” my mom said. “You’ve got Trial TV. You’re an anchor.”

“I’m just the fill-in anchor.” The truth was, once the flop sweating had stopped, and despite the way I’d gotten the job, I loved it. Somewhere over the course of the day, a tiny, furtive hope had grown that they might keep me on in that position.

We tucked ourselves into the breakfast nook, the others sipping their wine.

Charlie studied me. “Not doing so good, huh?”

“Nope.”

I told them about Zac being so weird around me at the memorial, so suspicious.

“I don’t know what to do or what to think,” I admitted. “He even said he thought Jane and I were together, like a couple, last weekend. He told the police that.”

“Whoa.” Charlie made a face.

Spence waved a hand. “Hey, this is the Chicago PD. They’re not going to be swayed by the outlandish statements of a grief-stricken husband.”

“But what if they are? The detective, this guy named Vaughn, already seems to dislike me and be suspicious of me for some reason.”

Spence shook his head. “You know I’m friends with the police chief, right? Went to school with him. I’ve got his cell. I’ll call him right now and find out the story. I’m sure there’s nothing to worry about.”

“You don’t have to do that.” But my protest was weak. The situation with Jane’s death was starting to feel as if it was twisting out of control and just beyond my grasp.

“Call him, Spence,” my mother said in her smooth voice.

Spence rubbed his hands together, then pulled his cell phone out of his pocket. Spence was the kind of guy who loved a good task. He’d started his own company-real estate developing-when he was young. He’d grown it into a successful business that now provided consulting for developments around the country. The company had been bought by a larger one, and then another company, and slowly Spence had stepped out, becoming mostly a figure-head. He was happy being retired, being wealthy, but if you gave him a good task that had immediacy to it, especially one for Charlie or me, he was giddy.

Spence got out of the banquette, dialing his cell phone. A second later, he was booming into it. “George! Spence Calloway calling. How are you?”

He moved into the living room, his voice trailing off. I asked Charlie how his back was doing.

“Hurts all the time,” he said cheerfully.

Charlie had been seriously injured in an accident involving a construction truck shortly after he graduated from college. He was still in physical therapy and still living off the comp settlement, which he viewed, with his bizarrely optimistic attitude, as a lucky break. He had this innate belief that life would work out, one way or another, and it wasn’t worth worrying about. So the back injury, which physically troubled him all the time, wasn’t seen as something to stress over.

We talked about Charlie’s current physical therapy regimen. I asked my mom about the Victoria Project, a charity she had started. Q asked her if he could volunteer, since he had time on his hands now. When Spence came back in the room, we were having a moment that felt blessedly normal, a moment filled with family chat.

And so it wasn’t until my mother stopped talking and instead looked at her husband with a concerned expression that we all stopped.

“Spence?” she said. “Is everything all right?”

Spence gave me a painful look, one of those looks that said, This is going to hurt. “George knew the case, of course,” he said. “Knew you.” He pointed with his head in my direction. He didn’t say anything for a second.

“And?” my mother prompted.

“He said you’ll be hearing from them soon.” Another pause during which I could hear the passing whoosh of a car on the street, the scrape of a tree branch along the side of the house. “You’ve been named a person of interest.”

34

M ick Grenier sat at his desk, staring at the photos of Jane, the news clippings, the notes he’d made.

He arranged the photos on his desktop in a vertical row, starting at the top with photos where Jane appeared youngest. The photos climbed down his desk-Jane over the passage of time, her stunning looks surviving that journey well.

He had left the memorial abruptly. It had been harder than he thought. He would miss Jane Augustine. He hadn’t imagined that would be the case. If you had told him what was going to happen and asked him if he would care that she was gone, he would have said no. He would have looked at the situation calmly, in a cool, detached way (the ability to do so was one worthwhile thing his father had taught him), and he would have said that her death could only be good for him. He still believed that to be true, but staring at the pictures, he had to admit that he’d gotten somewhat emotionally involved.

He placed the final photo on his desk. It was a head shot that Trial TV sent out with its press kit. In the photo, she wore the red scarf.

Jane had also worn the scarf in the photo that appeared in Chicago Magazine. He found that article and placed it at the bottom of a new row. Moving upward, he created another vertical row, this time of news clippings, oldest at the top. One more row then-his notes about Jane. He always dated his notes, so it was easy enough to put those in order.

His father, Beaumont Grenier, the novelist, would have hated the project he was working on. Mick’s father particularly despised “celebrity journalism,” which, when Mick looked back on it, was probably why he had worked for a celebrity magazine in L.A. after college.

He didn’t know exactly why he had always wanted to be different from his father. Maybe it was just typical kid stuff, or maybe it was because his father was in love only with his work, and he never pretended otherwise, not to his wife, not to his kids. Taking the celeb magazine job to spite his father was surely a large part of the reason Mick did it, but as with everything in life, it had a cause and effect.