He studied her a moment, head tilted to one side, as if trying to work out a riddle. “I’m curious about something. Earlier, you said you never wanted to dig all this up. Now you’re talking about kicking over rocks and turning Salem Creek upside down. That’s quite a swing.”

“I know it is. And I wish I could explain it. The truth is I don’t know what happened. I was so angry when I left. So angry I swore I’d never set foot in this town again.”

“Yet here you are.”

She nodded. “Here I am.”

“It’s a long way from New York. In more ways than one.”

Lizzy shrugged, knowing her answer would sound ridiculous to someone like Andrew. Or anyone, really. “I feel safe in New York. I know that probably sounds strange, but it’s easier to be anonymous there, just another face in a crowd of millions, where everyone has a story, but no one has time to ask. I’m sure that makes no sense to you. You’ve never wanted to disappear, to just be invisible, but I have—and still do sometimes.”

“Well, I can tell you one thing for sure. The last thing you’ll be, once you start asking questions about those murders, is invisible.”

“I know that. But sometimes you have to come out of hiding, don’t you? To stand up for what’s right? I can’t help thinking that maybe if I hadn’t tried so hard to be invisible when the feeding frenzy started, it might have made a difference. Instead, I hid and just let it all happen.”

“Lizzy, you can’t blame yourself for what happened. This is Salem Creek. People don’t get murdered here; they die of boredom and old age. This town lost its mind when those girls turned up dead. They were afraid, and fear makes people do crazy things, sometimes shameful things. What happened to Althea was like a brush fire. It swallowed this town whole.”

“It certainly swallowed my grandmother.”

“And you.”

“Yes,” Lizzy said quietly. “And me.”

“You’re not afraid of reigniting it?”

“I am, actually. But not as afraid of leaving here knowing I didn’t even try to get to the truth. Althea deserves that, even if I am eight years too late.”

“I’ll call Roger in the morning. I can’t guarantee anything, but he’s a decent guy. He took the job seriously, but he and Summers were always butting heads. No one was surprised when he left to join his brother’s law firm as an investigator. He could be helpful, but like I said, I have no clue how he’ll respond. Given his history with Summers, he might want to steer clear.”

Lizzy nodded. Only a fool would want to wade back into such a grisly mess. “Thank you. No matter what he says, I appreciate your help. I’ll wait to hear from you.”

NINE

July 21

Lizzy’s stomach knotted as Andrew turned onto Dover Point Road. Roger Coleman had agreed to speak with her, but with two stipulations: Andrew would be present for the interview, and he would under no circumstances be expected to interact with Randall Summers. It seemed Andrew had been right about the friction between the detective and his ex-chief.

She wasn’t sure what her reaction would be to seeing the detective again. She wasn’t crazy about the idea of being face-to-face with the man who had knocked on their door with a search warrant in his pocket. But it was too late to back out now. They were pulling into a narrow drive lined with tall, wind-battered pines.

The lot was deep and shady, a pie-shaped parcel snugged up against the shore of Little Bay. The house was a small one, a single-story, slate-blue cape with crisp white shutters. In the side yard, a sailboat sat up on blocks, presumably in some stage of repair.

Lizzy left her purse on the seat and got out. She wasn’t prepared when Roger Coleman suddenly rose from an upended milk crate beside the sailboat’s hull. She braced herself as he approached. She remembered him being tall, polite but imposing, with dark, close-cropped hair and a sharp, narrow jaw. He hadn’t changed much over the years. He was still tall, still angular, and still a little imposing, despite the fact that his hair was now threaded with silver, and he had traded his crisp khakis and blazer for loose-fitting jeans and a holey T-shirt.

Andrew was all smiles as he extended a hand. “Still working on the old hulk, I see.”

Roger grinned as he pumped Andrew’s hand. “She’ll be ready for canvas soon. With any luck, I’ll have her in the water before the docks come out.” His chest puffed proudly as he hiked a thumb over his shoulder. “I even got around to naming her.”

It was a smallish boat, not more than thirty feet, with a single mast and a faded blue hull. Lizzy squinted to make out the letters stenciled across the stern. SLEUTH JOHN B. It was a play on the old Beach Boys song, and fitting given his profession, though it was hard to imagine a man of Coleman’s considerable height folding himself into what would have to be a very tiny cabin.

Lizzy brought her eyes back to Coleman. She dipped her head when Andrew introduced her, unable to muster a smile as she extended her hand. She caught a whiff of polished shoes and freshly ironed cotton, which fit perfectly with a by-the-book detective. But there was something else, a faint trace of wet leaves, that felt at odds with the rest. It was a dark, slick smell, one she’d always associated with grief or sadness, but when she forced herself to meet his gaze, she saw nothing that hinted at either. Perhaps her radar was off.

“Thank you for agreeing to see me, Detective.”

Coleman studied her with eyes that were neither silver nor green, but somewhere in between. Lizzy remembered those eyes: sharp and unsettlingly steady, in no hurry to move on until they’d taken full measure. “Roger,” he corrected evenly. “It’s just Roger.”

He invited them inside and poured them each a glass of iced tea, then gave Lizzy a quick tour, pointing out the renovations Andrew had completed two years ago. The wall he’d knocked down between the living room and kitchen, the pass-through window out onto the porch, the bank of skylights in the living room.

When the pleasantries were complete, they wandered out onto the deck. Behind the house, the bay stretched lazily in the afternoon sun, silvery and still at nearly high tide. Lizzy lifted her face, grateful for the breeze coming in off the water.

“So,” Roger said when they had all settled into chairs. “Andrew tells me you’re on a mission.”

Lizzy glanced at Andrew, who was swirling the ice in his glass and gazing out over the water. He had set up the meeting and agreed to accompany her, but it was her show now.

“Yes, I suppose that’s what you’d call it.” She paused, not sure how to begin. “My grandmother didn’t hurt those girls,” she said finally. “But someone did, and if there’s a way to find out who it was, I want to try.”

He studied her again with those gray-green eyes. “You realize the odds of turning up anything new are slim—that all you’re likely to do is remind everyone what they thought, and why they thought it?”

“I do.”

“And you still want to do this?”

“I do.”

“Even if you learn something you don’t want to know?”

She knew what he was asking. In his mind, there was a chance that in her search for truth, she might actually uncover evidence that implicated Althea rather than exonerating her. But he didn’t know what she did—that Althea was incapable of harming anyone, let alone a pair of young girls.

“I won’t.”

He nodded coolly, willing for now to accept her at her word. “Well then, what do you want to know?”

“Why did you leave the department?”

Roger blinked back at her, clearly surprised by the question. “Because it was time.”

It was evasive, a polite way of telling her it was none of her business. But if she was going to trust him, she needed to know his story, and understand what had prompted him to walk away from what had surely been the biggest case of his career. “So you retired?”

“Officially? No.” He squinted out over the water, where a red-and-white sailboat bobbed lazily at anchor. “I quit. Because I was no longer able to be effective.”

“I don’t know what that means.”

“It means Chief Summers and I had different ideas about the department’s responsibility to the public. He wanted to make the Gilman case go away, and I wanted to keep digging until we solved it.”

Coleman’s matter-of-fact tone surprised her. “You don’t think he wanted to solve it?”

“In the beginning, maybe. When he was getting tons of press. Big man with his name in the paper, always available for an interview. Then the coverage turned ugly, and he slammed on the brakes. He started cutting man-hours, hamstringing us on resources, wouldn’t sign off on sending stuff to the state lab because it wasn’t in the budget. And the press was strictly off limits. All statements had to be cleared by him. It felt funny. He’d always been a bit of a tyrant, but this felt like something else.”

“What did it feel like?”

“Like there was something going on that the rest of us didn’t know about.”

“Did you confront him?”

“You don’t confront Randall Summers. But I did voice my concerns.”

“And what happened?”

He shrugged. “I bought a sailboat and went to work for my brother.”