The oranges were a birthday gift from my sister in Florida. She sent a huge crate every year and spoiled me for those pale, watery ones at the grocery store. I ate one from the crate every morning, peeling it right over the garbage, and watched the droplets spray with each rip of skin. The scent of it got on my hands and lingered all day, no matter how many times I washed. It was a good scent, bright and tangy, and I needed that this week. The further I dug into Hattie’s life, with the picture of her bloody, bloated-legged corpse waiting each time I closed my eyes, every bite of orange tasted sweeter, sharper.
I ate and read over my lists. We had two possible suspects now: Tommy and the person who’d signed that letter L.G., so Jake was working on ID’ing him through Hattie’s internet records. The guy was connected to her by two things, we figured from the messages Hattie saved. They both liked art—acting and reading and stuff—and neither of them cared for country life. They never mentioned names, their own or anybody else’s, or any places or events, so it was hard to pin him down. Boy was educated. Liked throwing the five-dollar words around and sounded pretentious as hell most of the time, but Hattie seemed to take to it. Girl like her probably would have. Probably thought he was refined. We knew they traded messages for about a month—talking books and then talking dirty—until they figured out who the other person was, somehow through Jane Eyre. That’s when he seemed to end it. In any case, that’s when Hattie stopped saving the messages. I couldn’t prove a relationship beyond October of last year, but the whole thing smelled wrong. So far he was the only person who’d clearly wanted Hattie to disappear, and that was enough to land him on the suspect list.
The evidence list was a little more promising. I had the semen on Hattie’s underwear, and the forensic boys had emailed their report over last night, saying there was more semen in one of the used condoms they’d found at the bottom of the lagoon in the barn. I had them send it over for analysis along with the underwear and Tommy’s sample. No latent prints turned up on any of the other recovered items, which meant they’d been down there at least a few days and weren’t part of our crime scene. I included Hattie’s purse on the evidence list, and the business card from Gerald Jones that was inside it. His Denver alibi had checked out clean, but as a play director he was plenty arty. Not a bad candidate for L.G. He’d caught the red-eye into Rochester this morning and I planned to drive over there first thing.
What I really wanted was the damn murder weapon. We were four days away from the murder now, a hundred hours that the killer could have used to stash, bury, or clean it. Shel had finished dragging the lake yesterday and hadn’t turned it up. The farther away we got from Friday night, the less likely it was that we’d find it.
I heard the Nguyens stirring around six o’clock and gave them until 6:30 before I went downstairs. Mrs. Nguyen answered the door and waved me inside, calling something to her husband. Mr. Nguyen came out, all smiles and hospitality until I asked to see Portia, then his forehead creased and he paused before nodding and calling her out. While I waited I noticed the cat lounging on the sofa, facing away from me like we’d never met before in our lives. I turned my back on him, too.
Portia had her father’s height and her mother’s round cheeks, but the manners of neither. She barreled into the room in a pink robe with bare feet and hair flying out behind her, demanding, “Did you find out?”
Her father chastised her in their own language and she backed off a little.
“We’ve found out a lot of things, Portia. Which one are you thinking of?”
“Who killed her? Who killed Hattie?”
“If I knew that, I’d have better things to do this morning. As it is . . .” I unrolled the newspaper and dropped it on the coffee table with a loud thwack. “You’ve been feeling chatty, haven’t you?”
She shrugged. “They were outside school at lunch yesterday. I wasn’t going to lie to them. The curse is real.”
“You didn’t mind the attention, did you? And you sure didn’t seem to mind getting to play Lady Macbeth in Hattie’s place.”
“What are you saying?”
“All these nuts are going to come rolling into town looking for interviews now, and if you jump in front of the microphone like you did here, maybe your face’ll be splashed on newspapers and TV programs all over the country. Mighty nice for you.”
“Stop it!” she yelled and then started crying. Mr. and Mrs. Nguyen stood behind her, motionless. “I was her best friend. I can’t believe she’s dead.”
“If you’re her best friend, you must know things about her. Private things. Things she wouldn’t have told anybody else.” I waited until her crying quieted down. “I need to know those things, Portia.”
“Like what?”
“Who was she seeing before Tommy?”
“Nobody.”
“She didn’t have a crush on anybody?”
“No, she used to make fun of Maggie and all the girls that dated a lot in school. She called them ‘he-tarded.’?”
She laughed a little and I couldn’t help joining in. It sounded like one of Hattie’s quips.
“Okay, no boy at school. How about someone she met somewhere else, like at the play over in Rochester last fall?”
Portia shook her head.
“Is there anything else that you know about Hattie? Something she confided? Anything that didn’t seem quite right?”