He clutches his goateed chin between thumb and index finger and shakes his head. He’s angry—again—that I don’t see life through his cheerless lenses. He opens his mouth, as if he plans to continue the argument, but then apparently thinks better of it. He presses a button on his key chain and the Porsche lights up and honks as I head for the back steps. “Marty,” he calls after me.

He’s got one foot in the car when I turn around, his left hand on top of the open driver’s-side door, his right one still holding the keys, resting on the roof. He juts his goatee out toward the cottage. “Your friend in there,” he says. “Henry.”

“Harry,” I correct him.

“Whatever.” Ralph pauses and shakes his head yet again. He’s annoyed with my attention to unimportant detail. “The guy’s got an attitude,” he says, pointing his keys at the living room window. “I don’t like him.”

Ah, the considered, objective judgment of the scientist. Where would the rest of us be without it? I turn away from him and climb the back steps without another word.

By the time I get back to the living room, it’s obvious that Luke is exasperated. This, in itself, is not surprising. Luke always gets exasperated when he plays chess with Harry, but it usually takes a little longer than the fifteen minutes or so they’ve been playing. He gets up from the floor and flops onto the living room couch. “Wake me up when you move,” he says to Harry, “if I’m still breathing.”

Harry sits immobile on the floor, his eyes glued to the chess-board on the coffee table, the only sign of life his occasional ogle of Luke’s king. “Sure thing,” he answers, motionless.

Luke bounds up again. “I forgot,” he says, pounding a palm against his forehead as if he’s in a V8 commercial. “You cheat.”

“It’s not cheating if everyone knows you do it,” Harry replies.

Luke calls these pearls of wisdom Harry-isms. There’s no reasoning with the guy, he tells me after every chess match. He turns to me now, his hands in the air, his eyes wide. “Do you see what I’m talking about?”

I nod at him and laugh. I do.

“I’m gonna order a pizza,” Luke says, heading for the phone in the kitchen. “Watch the board for me, will you, Mom? You can’t trust this guy for two seconds.”

“Sausage and onions,” Harry yells after him. “And anchovies,” he adds.

“Not on your life,” Luke calls back. “Pepperoni. Nothing else belongs on pizza.”

“Order two,” I tell him. “And one of them had better be half plain cheese.”

Luke pops his head back into the living room to see if I’m serious about this outrageous suggestion. I nod to let him know I am. I’m hungry. And at the rate this chess game is moving, we won’t get out to eat until next Saturday. Luke’s eyes move to Harry, as if he needs a second opinion.

“Your mom’s a plain Jane,” Harry says, his gaze not leaving the chessboard.

Luke rolls his eyes and goes back into the kitchen. Harry’s delivering old news.

Harry looks up when Danny Boy and I settle on the couch to do guard duty. “You okay?” he asks.

“I’m fine,” I tell him as Danny Boy nestles his head on my lap. “But you’re not. My ex-husband doesn’t like you, Henry. You have an attitude.”

He falls backward, slapping the back of one hand to his forehead. “I’m shattered,” he says. “Roscoe and I could’ve been close. We have so much in common. We could’ve had a future.”

We’re both laughing when he sits up, but Harry leans his elbows on the edge of the coffee table and grows serious. “He wants this back, you know,” he says.

“Wants what back?”

“This.” He gestures to our surroundings and I wonder for a moment if he thinks Ralph wants my cottage. “He wants this life back,” Harry continues. “You. His son. All of it. He’s feeling proprietary.”

This is even funnier than the Roscoe comments. Ralph couldn’t keep his hands off his receptionist when we were married. He didn’t seem to remember that Luke and I lived on the same planet. The idea of his feeling proprietary makes me laugh out loud.

“Trust me,” I tell Harry. “Ralph thrives in the fast lane. This is not the life he wants. And whatever woman he’s interested in at the moment is half my age, wearing a skirt the length of my jacket.”

Luke rejoins us and settles into his spot on the floor again. This conversation is over—at least for now.

“You trust me,” Harry finishes, nodding over Luke’s shoulder. “I’ve got a handle on old Roscoe.”

CHAPTER 11

Sunday, October 15

It’s a few minutes past nine when I pull up to Louisa Rawlings’s Easy Street antique home. The Kydd’s small, red pickup is parked at the far end of the oyster-shell driveway, near the house. True to form, he’s the first one at work—no matter where work happens to be. I align the Thunderbird next to his truck and cut the engine.

I grab Louisa’s growing file from the passenger seat before slipping from behind the wheel. A manila accordion folder with a six-inch capacity, it was sand dollar–flat on Friday, housing only the sketchy notes from my initial interview. Now it’s swollen to about half its potential with the fruits of yesterday’s labors: the Kydd’s morning of legal research, his afternoon of copious note-taking. Let’s hope we close the damned thing tomorrow, before it mushrooms.

I tuck the file under one arm as I slam my car door and head toward the house. Morning dew glistens on the roof and hood of the Kydd’s truck, tiny droplets merging and trickling like miniature rivers down the fogged windows. Through a gap in the mist on the passenger’s side, I see that the solitary bench inside is empty. He must have returned the files and books that cluttered it yesterday to the office. Good. I’ll make a point of telling him to leave them there. I want that busy brain of his focused on only one case for the next couple of days. This one.

Louisa’s husky laughter tells me they’re on the back deck. I walk east of the house, climb a trio of wooden steps, and pass the seemingly never-used kitchen door on my way to the water side. They’re seated in Adirondack chairs facing the ocean, both cradling steaming mugs, their profiles toward me. They make quite a picture in the morning sunshine, both lean and long-limbed, their postures relaxed, carefree even. Gives a whole new meaning to Southern Comfort.

Louisa twists in her chair as I approach, sends a slight wave in my direction, and then turns back to the Kydd to finish whatever she’s been telling him. The Kydd’s cheeks are flushed and I don’t think it’s because of the ocean wind. His attention to Louisa’s story is absolute, the kind a private first-class might pay if he were included in a meeting of four-star generals on the eve of war. It’s pretty clear that my arrival is lost on him.

Leaning over a small table between their chairs without missing a beat in her tale—something about childhood summers spent on Ocracoke, an island off the coast of North Carolina—Louisa fills a mug with black coffee, hands it to me, and points to the empty chair across from hers. I’m grateful for the coffee—it’s my first cup of the day—but I decline the offer to sit. She doesn’t seem to notice.

“And, of course, there,” she continues, apparently still referring to the summer island of her youth, “a person can swim once in a while. The water actually warms up for a few months each year.” She gestures toward the icy gray waves and shivers, then sets her mug on the table so she can pull her unbuttoned cardigan tight around her.

The Kydd laughs. “I know what you mean,” he says. “I haven’t been in salt water since I got here.” He looks up at me for the first time today and shakes his head.

“Is that true?” I ask. The Kydd’s been here for three summers—hot ones.