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chair, watching the sunset over the bay. The glowing red ball had just sunk below the horizon. Now layers of gold and rose and violet bounced back and folded in on themselves in the banks of low-lying clouds around the rim of the darkening sky.
    “They’ve organized group houses out here for years,” Barbara said. “Lewis showed us scrapbooks full of photos before Jimmy gave him a check. And Oscar owns that house. He must be rich as a quart of Haagen Dasz.”
    “You’ve got food on the brain, my pet,” Jimmy said.
    “I love summer food,” Barbara said. “Strawberries and ice cream and corn and tomatoes and ice cream and hey, did you see the fancy gas grill out back? Mmm, steak and grilled jumbo shrimp and ice cream. The whole point of cheating is to keep things steamy— speaking as a professional. I mean a professional counselor.”
    “They didn’t have a whole lot of time for foreplay,” I said. “Someone else could have walked in any minute.”
    “Do you think what you saw was an episode of an ongoing drama,” Barbara asked, “or a one-night— call it a one-day-at-the-beach— stand?”
    “I have no idea,” I said. “They sounded pretty steamy.”
    “I bet they have a history,” Barbara said. “No foreplay is one thing. No build-up is another. They didn’t have time to make a connection that wasn’t already there.”
    “But does it have anything to do with the murder?” Jimmy asked.
    “We don’t know,” I said.
    “We could find out.” Barbara didn’t qualify for Al-Anon just because Jimmy drank a hundred years ago. She was hooked on minding other people’s business.
    Jimmy and I exchanged a resigned glance over her head.
    “You don’t have to quiver like a hunting dog,” Jimmy said. “We don’t even know it was a murder.”
    “But if it was,” Barbara insisted. “We’re the only newcomers. The others have been coming out here for years. And Oscar’s house belongs to him. He wouldn’t advertise shares, he’d invite people he knows, don’t you think?”
    “Okay, we’re the newcomers. So what?”
    “So we’re above suspicion.” Barbara bounced up and down. The lifeguard chair rocked.
    “Whoa, there,” I said. “It’s a long way down.”
    “I wish we could see those notebooks of Clea’s,” she said. “Any of the others could have had a motive.”
    “I don’t think the cops would want to share,” I said. “The boyfriend wasn’t even there.”
    “So he says.”
    Phil’s shock when Lewis broke the news of Clea’s death had seemed genuine. On the other hand, if he already knew because he’d killed her, he’d have rehearsed precisely that appalled astonishment. The cops wouldn’t take his word for it that he’d just come from the city. If he didn’t have a cast-iron alibi, he’d make a perfect suspect.
    “Can’t we just leave it to the cops?” Jimmy asked. A rhetorical question, if I knew Barbara.
    “Think of all the stuff they won’t find out,” she said. “The relationships, the undercurrents— all the dysfunctional group house family stuff I bet is going on. And the cops don’t go to meetings to investigate.”
    “Barbara!”
    “I wouldn’t break anyone’s anonymity,” she said with her best indignant frown. “But for background, you know we’ll hear a lot— and when you go to meetings, you get a sense of who’s reliable, who’s really working the program.”
    “You think someone who works the steps can’t commit a crime?”
    “Not a
murder
,” she said. “Recovery is about integrity, you can’t say it’s not an indication of character. Besides, doesn’t the thought of spending the summer with a murderer running around freak you out? I’ll feel a lot better if we’re trying to do something about it.”
    “What if it was an accident?” I scratched at my scalp with both hands. Sandy hair seemed to be a permanent condition at the beach. “Say whoever killed her didn’t mean to.”
    “A program person would own up,” Jimmy