“The kind I remember,” he said.
“What are you doing while you’re here?” she asked him. “You did say you weren’t staying.”
He shrugged. “I don’t like to think of anything as permanent,” he told her. “I don’t have fixed plans at the moment. I’ll spend some time with Liam, and with my great-aunts. Alice and Esther. I believe you know them-everyone always seemed to, anyway.”
Katie nodded. “Of course. They don’t spend much time in town, though.”
“No, at the age of eighty, they still compete over their flowers. Oh, and they both enjoy volunteering at a few of the museums. But will you see them swigging down a pint or two at Sloppy Joe’s? Probably not!”
“The man does seem to have a dry, pleasant and even self-deprecating sense of humor,” Bartholomew commented.
Katie refused to glance his way.
“So, family time, eh?” she queried.
He nodded.
“And dismantling the museum?”
He set his cup down. “Actually, I will get to that. In a month or so.”
“Okay, so, immediately on your agenda? Are you planning on swilling down a few pints at Sloppy Joe’s?”
He laughed. “I may. But that’s not my main intent or purpose.”
“What is?” she asked.
“I want to find out who did kill Tanya,” he told her.
She frowned, so surprised that she just stared at him for long seconds. “I…I don’t see what you can discover now. It happened a decade ago. The police tried-very hard, I’m certain-to find her killer. It’s now ten years after the fact. How could you possibly find out something now that they couldn’t discover then. And why would the killer have hung around?”
“A random killer wasn’t going to bring Tanya’s corpse and leave it in our family museum,” David said.
“Perhaps it had nothing to do with it being your family’s museum. Maybe he had just seen the Elena/Carl Tanzler tableau and decided it was the right place to leave a corpse. God knows, maybe he even thought that the body wouldn’t be discovered.”
“I have the files. Liam is a detective now. He’s been given leave to reopen the case. It’s time that it’s done.”
“They never even had another suspect,” Katie said. She bit her lip. She saw the slight tensing of his features. “I mean, they never had a suspect at all-”
“Other than me.”
“You were never really a suspect, were you?” She flushed slightly, looking away. Of course he’d been a suspect!
“Just a ‘person of interest,’” he told her. “And you’re right-there was never another suspect. And there had to be a reason for that. Either the police continued to believe that I had done it, or they were protecting someone else.”
“Like who?” Katie asked.
“I don’t know. But I intend to find out. Tanya deserves justice.”
“Her family is long gone, you know,” Katie told him.
He nodded, looking away. “I know. Her mother never recovered from what happened, but she came to see me, telling me that she knew I could have never done such a thing. I never saw her father, except at the funeral, and he took Tanya’s mother away the next day. They moved up to St. Augustine, and he had a heart attack a month later and died. Her mother went into psychiatric care, and she died about five years later. Tanya had an older brother-Sam-and to the best of my knowledge, he’s still doing charters out of Key Largo.”
“Oh,” Katie said, surprised. “I thought he had left the state.”
“Just Key West.”
For a moment, they were both silent. To her surprise, it wasn’t an awkward silence, just a sad one. And she did understand why he hated to see the museum reopened.
She reached a hand out to touch his across the table. Sparks seemed to jump into her, and she realized that he was far more tense and vital than she had imagined. “I’m sorry, really sorry,” she told him.
“Well, you see, their lives were destroyed. Our family was torn apart-I couldn’t stay here. I really couldn’t stay here. I might have been running away, but I honestly don’t think so. I just couldn’t stay. The destruction of lives and families was just too much. But now, I know that I will never really be fine with myself if I don’t discover the truth, no matter what it takes.”
“That’s ominous,” Katie told him.
“No, I don’t intend to hold people up at gunpoint or anything of the like. But I’m going to delve until I find something. A young woman was murdered. She had to have fought-Tanya was fond of living, believe me.”