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her.”
    They’d had me for more than three hours. And they still weren’t done with Evie.
    I hoped she was doing all right.
    I hoped they hadn’t caught her in a lie.
    A young Brewster patrolman drove me back to the cottage. A pair of sawhorses sat in the driveway at the turnoff. A cruiser was parked there, and an officer sat behind the wheel with the door open. When we pulled up, the officer got out and moved one of the sawhorses. We drove down the driveway. Two unmarked sedans were stopped near the place where Larry’s body had lain. There was a long string of yellow crime-scene tape around the area. A man with two cameras hanging from his neck and another in his hand waved us around it.
    My chaperon followed me through the cottage while I packed up Evie’s and my stuff. He watched me closely and didn’t offer to help me lug it to his cruiser. I told him I had
some things that I needed in my car. He said I’d have to leave them.
    Then he drove me back to the station.
    They were still questioning Evie.
    The receptionist at the front desk scribbled down the number for a local Ford dealer, told me they rented cars, and pointed to a pay phone on the wall. My friendly Ford salesman told me he could hold a Taurus sedan for me. Sixty-eight bucks a day, which was robbery, but I agreed to it and recited my credit-card number to him.
    I got two bags of peanuts and a Coke from a vending machine, sat in the waiting room, and waited. Police officers came and went. None of them looked at me.
    Poor Evie. I figured they were grilling her. Maybe she’d asked for a lawyer, and they were holding off their interrogation until he arrived.
    I couldn’t serve as her attorney. I was a witness in their investigation.
    Maybe they’d arrested her.
    That niggle of doubt came back. Actually, it had never quite left me. Maybe Evie had done it. The more Vanderweigh had questioned me, the more I’d realized that I had no idea whether she had done it or not.
    Means? A knife from the kitchen of our cottage.
    Motive? Larry Scott had made her life miserable.
    Opportunity? No witness could say where she’d been or what she’d done for the hour or so after she’d left the cottage in the morning.
    I didn’t want to think about it. I didn’t want to invent scenarios in which Evie came jogging back to the cottage and found Larry Scott standing in the driveway blocking her way, begging to talk with her. I tried not to visualize Evie going up to him and stabbing him twice in the stomach.
    But it was hard not to.

    It was almost two o’clock in the afternoon when Evie came into the waiting room. She glanced around, saw me, and shook her head. She looked dazed and pale and frightened.
    I stood up, went to her, and put my arms around her. She laid her forehead on my chest but did not return my hug.
    I kissed her forehead. “You all right?” I whispered into her hair.
    â€œNo,” she said.
    â€œI’m sorry, babe.”
    â€œNot your fault. Can we get out of here?”
    â€œYou’re free to go?”
    â€œFor now. They think I did it.”
    â€œThey think I did it too,” I said. “But we didn’t. They’ll figure it out.”
    She looked up at me. “Will they?”
    â€œOf course they will.”
    The same officer who’d driven me to the cottage took us to the Ford place, and pretty soon we were in a new-smelling Taurus driving west on Route 6A, heading back to Boston.
    I started to say something about my old vow never to visit the Cape in the summer. But when I glanced at Evie beside me, I recognized that jut of her chin and hunch of her shoulders, and I decided she was in no mood for stupid jokes.

FOUR
    I t was early afternoon on that sunny Saturday in August, and westbound Cape Cod traffic on 6A was stop-and-go. More stop than go. There were frequent turnoffs and stoplights all along 6A, not to mention antique shops and used-book stores and