“But you told Mitch Walker you ate at the club.”

“No, I didn’t. I told him exactly what I told you—that I’d been invited to play nine holes and have brunch. He didn’t ask anything else about it.”

I shake my head at her.

“What was I supposed to do?” she asks. “Volunteer that I needed time alone to think about my impending divorce? Tell the cop I didn’t want to go home until I was pretty sure my husband had gone for the day?”

She can protest all she wants. Her eyes tell me she knows how stupid she was.

“Well, your clever little answer is what landed you here, Louisa. And this”—I hold the swan out toward her—“just might keep you in.”

I set the wrapped fixture back on the table, closer to Louisa than it was before, hoping she’ll shed some light on its current condition. She recoils from it, shaking her head. “I can’t explain this,” she says, her voice trembling along with the rest of her. “It makes no sense.”

“Hold on,” the Kydd says, pulling a page free from a stapled packet. I walk behind him, so I can look over his shoulder and read. He’s holding a sheet divided into three columns. It’s the inventory of items confiscated by the two guys from the state crime lab. The swan is near the bottom of the list.

The Kydd runs his finger horizontally across the page on the swan line. The middle column, the widest of the three, gives a brief description of the item identified in column one. The final entry, in the third column, tells where it was found. The brass swan, the state guys claim, was discovered in the Rawlings’s basement.

“What was it doing down in the basement?” the Kydd asks Louisa.

She looks blank. She doesn’t know what he’s talking about. I take the inventory sheet from him and put it in front of her, on top of the bagged exhibit, my index finger directing her attention to the swan line. “Did you remove it from the hot tub for some reason?” Surely Louisa would have noticed if the mother swan had migrated from the Queen’s Spa.

She’s silent. After a moment, she sits a little straighter, tapping the sheet. “Wait,” she says, “that must be the other swan.”

“The other swan?” I wonder how many brass swans one household can support.

“Yes,” she says, more animated now. “When the plumbing fixtures first arrived, just a week or so before we moved in, the plumber called us in Greenwich to say the largest master-bath faucet was defective, stripped threads or some such thing. Anyhow, there was no way he could create a proper seal. It was leaking from the base of the neck.”

“So you ordered a replacement?” I ask.

“Herb did,” she says. “He called the plumbing supply company—a place in Ohio, I think it was—and they agreed to ship a new one right away. We’d spent a buck or two on them, after all.”

“What happened to the first one?”

“The plumber left it on top of one of the bathroom sinks. I found it the day we moved in. Herb was out on the dock, fussing with the boat as usual, and I carried the swan out to the back deck to ask him what I should do with it.”

Hence her prints. “And what did he say?”

“He said to just leave it there, on the picnic table; he’d take care of it. He said he’d agreed to ship it back to the company. They thought it could be refurbished. He must have moved it into the basement and then…”

“And then he never got around to it,” I finish for her.

She nods, her spurt of animation visibly fading.

“Who had access to the basement, Louisa?”

Her eyes grow wider. “Anyone who wanted it, I suppose. Herb always went down through the bulkhead in the yard. He kept his tools and boating equipment down there.”

“Is that the only way to get there?”

She shakes her head. “No. There’s a stairway from the kitchen, but it’s steep. Herb never used it, as far as I know. He always used the bulkhead.”

A rhythmic series of knocks breaks the silence and then Wanda peeks in. “You folks ready?” she asks. “The judge wants to wrap it up.”

“Two minutes,” I tell her. She nods and leaves, the wooden door clicking shut behind her, and I turn back to Louisa with Taylor Peterson’s theory running through my head. “Shift gears with me for a minute,” I tell her.

She nods.

“Who did your husband normally take out on the boat with him?”

She laughs. “It’d be easier to tell you who he didn’t take. Herb would have taken the mailman if the mailman would have gone. Herb loved that damned boat, loved showing her off as much as anything.”

“Did you go with him?”

“On occasion,” she says. “It’s not my cup of tea, tossing about on the waves. But I’d go with him once in a while to keep him company.”

“What about Glen Powers?” I ask. “You mentioned he and Herb had boating in common.”

She shakes her head. “They weren’t that chummy,” she says. “Herb and Glen would talk about boats occasionally. But they never went out on one together.”

“Steven Collier?” I try next.

“Sometimes,” she says. “They’d take the Carolina Girl out on a weekend afternoon every now and then. But Steven has his own boat, so it wasn’t that often. They spent more time together talking about gear than they did on the water.”

I’m not getting much here, but I may as well finish my short list. “Anastasia?” I ask. “Lance Phillips?”

She laughs again. “Herb had Anastasia around boats all the time when she was a child, hoping to get her hooked. But alas, the dear girl grew up to loathe the great outdoors. And Lance gets sea-sick in the shower.”

Well, this discussion has got me nowhere.

“We’d better head across the hall,” I tell her. “I think we’ve used up our two minutes.”

I take the inventory sheet from her and hand it back to the Kydd. He restacks his documents and then leads the way out of the jury room. Louisa follows. Mother Swan and I bring up the rear.

“Louisa,” I say as we cross the hallway, “when we go back inside, it’s probably best if you let me do the talking.”

She glances over her shoulder as we enter the courtroom, her perfect eyebrows arched. “All of it?” She’s incredulous.

“Yes,” I tell her. “All of it.”

She looks disappointed, as if I’ve just taken all the fun out of this for her. She settles into the chair the Kydd offers and then turns to face me. “I went to law school too, you know.”

“I’m aware of that,” I remind her. “So did Clarence.”

She glances over at young Clarence and nods, conceding my point, and her expression grows more somber. The bailiff tells us to rise as Judge Long emerges from chambers, but Louisa leans closer to me before she complies. “Who would do such a thing to Herb?” she asks. Genuine sadness fills her dark brown eyes.

I shake my head as we stand, but say nothing. My question is more basic than that. It makes perfect sense that Louisa’s prints are all over the Commonwealth’s exhibit. But where the hell are Herb’s?

CHAPTER 20

Judge Long isn’t a particularly tall man, but he reaches the bench with just five energetic strides. He nods a greeting into the gallery as he climbs the few steps and takes his seat. A handful of newcomers has arrived in the courtroom, and a flurry of activity is now audible behind us.

Among the new arrivals is Woody Timmons from the Cape Cod Times. He’s the reporter regularly assigned to the Barnstable County Complex and it’s no surprise that he’s here. He seems to be hardwired into these buildings. Rarely does any case of import escape his radar.

Woody has scores of cronies among the staff of the county complex—intake officers, victim advocates, and docket clerks—many of whom get the earliest glimpses of each new matter as it arrives. Along with most other county staffers, they congregate after work every Friday at the local watering hole, the Jailhouse. They spot one another drinks, shoot darts, and exchange well-informed opinions on the county’s latest crises. Woody takes good care of his courthouse contacts; he almost never misses the Friday festivities. Any number of his cohorts would have telephoned his office this afternoon to deliver this week’s hottest scoop.