Detective Davenport returns to Hawthorn House on Monday morning.
Harding comes with her, carrying inventory forms. They completed the initial search on Friday; today they are checking the room again and sorting what must be retained from what can eventually be released to Victor’s family.
“I’ll need access to the Lavender room,” Davenport tells Agnes. “And I’d like someone present while we pack — either you or Miss Daly.”
Agnes looks at me. I nod.
“I’ll do it,” I say.
The Lavender room is on the second floor, between Foxglove and Honeysuckle. It’s a small, pretty room — brass bed, floral wallpaper, a window that faces the garden. Victor’s suitcase is open on the luggage rack, half-packed, as if he’d started preparing for his Friday checkout and never finished. His sport coat is on the back of the chair. His toiletries are lined up on the dresser with the precision of a man who travels often and has learned to keep his essentials organized.
The room smells like his cologne — something clean and woody that I associated, all week, with the man who complimented my scones and asked too many questions. Now the smell makes my chest ache, not for Victor specifically, but for the strangeness of standing in a dead man’s room and seeing all the ordinary things he left behind.
Davenport works methodically. She photographs the room, then begins packing Victor’s belongings into evidence bags — clothes, toiletries, shoes. Harding takes notes on the clipboard. I stand by the door and watch, feeling useless and necessary at the same time.
“His laptop is here,” Davenport says, nodding toward the desk. A sleek silver laptop, closed, with a power cord still plugged into the wall. “The tech team will need to go through it. Did you ever see him use it?”
“A few times. He worked at the desk in the afternoons. I didn’t see what he was doing.”
“What about a notebook? A leather-bound notebook, maybe — something he carried with him.”
I think. I remember Victor on his walks, tucking something into his jacket pocket when he saw me watching. I remember him in the library alley with Marina, reading from a folder.
“He had a notebook,” I say. “Brown leather. He carried it everywhere. I saw him put it in his jacket pocket.”
Davenport opens the sport coat on the chair. She checks the pockets — inside and out. She checks the desk drawers, the nightstand, under the mattress, behind the headboard.
No notebook.
“It’s not here,” she says. Her voice is neutral, but I can see the tension in her shoulders. “Did you see anyone enter this room between Thursday night and Friday morning?”
“No. But I was in the kitchen most of Thursday evening, and I went to bed around nine-thirty. Anyone could have come up here while I was asleep.”
“Anyone with a key to the house,” Davenport says. She writes something in her notebook.
They continue packing. Harding folds Victor’s clothes with surprising care for a man his age — shirts, trousers, a pair of running shoes, a stack of paperback novels with cracked spines. Davenport collects the toiletries, the laptop, the power cord. She checks under the bed, in the closet, behind the curtains.
I’m watching from the doorway when she opens the nightstand drawer.
Inside: a Bible (the Gideon kind, the one every hotel and B&B keeps by the bed), a phone charger, a bottle of antacids, and a photograph.
Davenport picks up the photograph and looks at it. Then she looks at me.
“Come here,” she says.
I cross the room. She holds the photograph out to me.
It’s a color photograph, but faded — the kind of photo that’s been kept in a wallet or a drawer for years, exposed to light and time and the oils of human fingers. Two men stand in front of a house — a small house, a cabin, with wood siding and a porch and a garden that’s slightly overgrown. One man is younger, in his twenties, with dark hair and an easy grin. The other is older — maybe fifty, with weathered features and the kind of hands that belong to a man who works with wood.
On the back, in faded ink: Uncle Thomas, 1994.
“Uncle Thomas,” Davenport says.
I look at the photograph again. The older man — Thomas — has the same nose as Victor. The same shape to the jaw. The same set of the eyes, even in a photograph that’s thirty years old. He’s not just a man Victor knew or a subject he was researching.
He’s family.
“Victor Crane,” I say slowly. “That’s not his real name, is it?”
“His father’s surname was Crane. His mother was Patricia Marsh, Thomas’s sister,” Davenport says. “He was born Victor Thomas Crane in 1968. The name was real. The reason he gave for coming here wasn’t.”
The room tilts slightly. I sit down on the edge of the bed.
“Thomas Marsh’s nephew,” I say.
“He concealed the connection,” Davenport says. “He did write freelance travel pieces. This visit appears to have been personal.”
He wasn’t writing an article. He was looking for the truth about his uncle’s disappearance. And someone in Saltbreeze Harbor killed him for it.
“Davenport,” I say. “Does this change the case?”
She seals the evidence bag. “The food analysis has detected walnut in the bitten biscuit. The medical examiner’s findings support anaphylaxis. We’re investigating how that biscuit reached his plate.”
“Who knew Victor’s real identity?”
“That’s what I need to find out.” She picks up the bags and heads for the door. At the threshold, she pauses. “Miss Daly. You said you heard the kitchen door open and close at 8:55 Thursday night.”
“Yes.”
“And you assumed it was Mrs. Hawthorn.”
“Yes.”
“Mrs. Hawthorn says she was in her sitting room. Her sister confirms a call beginning at 9:10, but that doesn’t establish where she was fifteen minutes earlier. We need to distinguish what somebody remembers from what a record actually proves.”
She leaves. I sit on the edge of Victor’s bed and look at the empty space where the photograph was.
Who was at the kitchen door at 8:55?
I close my eyes and replay Thursday evening. The dinner. Dale leaving — I should get going, I need to call Melissa. The sound of the front door. The sound of a car engine. Victor in the conservatory. Me in the kitchen, washing dishes. Agnes saying goodnight, disappearing toward her sitting room. Me in the pantry, organizing supplies.
The kitchen door, opening and closing at 8:55.
I assumed it was Agnes. Coming back for something — a book, a glass of water, a blanket.
I want the call to settle Agnes’s movements. It doesn’t. Fifteen minutes remain before her sister can account for her, and I have no right to fill them in for her.
Someone crossed that doorway. I still have no face to put to the sound.
I think about the house on Thursday night. The layout — kitchen at the back, conservatory at the far end, Agnes’s sitting room on the opposite side, the garden door with the unreliable latch. The fog, pressing against the windows. The orchids, glowing in the dark.
And I think about a man I haven’t considered yet. A man who was at the B&B for Thursday dinner. A man who left at 8:30, saying he needed to call his ex-wife. A man who knows the conservatory door trick, who knows the kitchen, who has a key to the house.
Dale Musgrove left the B&B at 8:30.
But did he stay gone?
I look at the empty nightstand drawer. I look at the evidence bags. I look at the fog pressing against the window of the Lavender room, and I feel the puzzle shifting in my hands — the pieces rearranging themselves into a picture I’m not ready to see.
I take my phone out to call Marina. Then I put it away. She handed Victor a folder outside the library; she may know what he was trying to prove. I want to ask her face to face.
I go downstairs to finish the work he left behind.