Cat looked up, then stepped back, realizing what she’d done. She blushed.
“I just got the nicest facial. I must be relaxed. I guess that doesn’t happen very often. What’s new, Detective? Catch any murderers today?”
“No.” He grinned, shaking his head. “Just crazy women.” He stared at Cat, studying her. Her hair—long and loose in big, lustrous hanks—gleamed. Her skin was rosy and flushed, her brown eyes even more enormous than they’d been the day before. He could see a wide strap of red lace peeking out from beneath her stiff white dress, and she carried a big straw bag filled with boxes wrapped in brown wax paper and tied with navy ribbon. She had a magic, easy quality to her that hadn’t been there yesterday, like she’d suddenly been unwrapped on the inside.
“I’m not crazy. I’m…investigating. Like we talked about.”
“What do you mean, investigating?” he asked. A group of Italian tourists split and passed around them like a school of fish.
“Buy me a drink and I’ll tell you all about it.” She smiled as the chorus of melodic Italian voices swept over her. “Come on. Let’s go. I love this place.”
Cat skipped into Leicester. Her long limbs bent every which way as she followed the hostess to their table. The air between them became magnetic, a force field, and Hutton followed, inhaling her floral-scented wake with every step. This is fun, Cat thought. Vittoria had been right. All her inhibitions were gone. All her self-confidence had bubbled to the surface. There’s power in these jars, she thought, feeling the heavy weight of the bag of product at her side.
After the waitress led them to a secluded wooden nook carved out of the patio in the ivy-covered backyard, Hutton ordered two gin cocktails. Just like the day before, when Molly had brought him coffee, Cat waited for him to give the beautiful and very young waitress an approving look, but he kept his eyes focused on the table’s wooden slats when she returned with their drinks.
“Tell me about yourself,” she demanded. “I want to know who you are.”
“No, it’s your turn,” he replied, grinning. “All I did last night was talk. Tell me about you.”
She twisted her mouth up in thought. “Okay,” she said, nodding, “I’ll talk.”
“What’s your first language?”
“It’s Flemish. It’s like…an antique Dutch.”
“Can I hear it?”
“Dat is een ander paar mouwen,” she said, reaching for his arms. She took out his cuff links and folded the sleeves of his shirt up and over his linen jacket.
“What does that mean?” he asked. “Your face is different.”
“Dat is een ander paar mouwen means…” she said slowly, her face changing back, the muscles rearranging themselves to match the current of self flowing into her body, “‘to have another matter.’ Paar mouwen, ‘to have a new pair of sleeves,’” she said insistently, tugging on his cuffs. “It’s an idiom from medieval tournaments. The knights wore tokens on their sleeves.”
She took the cuff links—two plain, silver knots—and set them into the sleeves of her own white cotton shirtdress.
“Are you stealing those?” he asked.
“It’s not stealing,” she explained. “It’s borrowing. It’s my new pair of sleeves.”
“So you’re the knight.”
“I’m the knight,” she said and nodded, laughing easily, her voice melodic and open. “You got it.”
“Is it hard for you to speak English all the time?”
“It’s not hard exactly. It’s different. I do feel sometimes like I’m only playing with half the deck. I have to dive under the ocean, kind of, to speak English. Or, I have to dive back, maybe, now, to speak Flemish. It’s one or the other. Not both.”
“That sounds sad.”
“It’s not. I have lots of oceans this way. I…contain multitudes.”
“I bet you do,” he said, reaching out for a piece of her hair, holding it between his fingertips before he caught himself and pulled back.
“You know, I was investigating, earlier,” she said. “Like we talked about.”
“I still don’t know what you mean by that.” Hutton looked concerned.
“I think I got something,” Cat said. “But…I’m wondering what you’re gonna do with it.”
“That depends. In the most basic terms, anything that’s recorded as evidence could make a difference, but I don’t know what you’re going to say.”
Cat smiled broadly. “Okay. That sounds good.”
Hutton tapped her hand, a tiny reminder to keep going. She tried to look serious. “Before we saw you at Sigrid’s, we found a handbag of Hillary’s. It contained what turned out to be custom eyedrops from this company, Bedford Organics. I went by this afternoon to check them out, and they gave me kind of a makeover.”
“Custom eyedrops? I don’t understand what that is.”
Cat didn’t answer. “I still can’t believe we ran into you last night on the street,” she said, changing the subject. She stroked his palm with her fingers, running the edges of her pointed blue nails along his heart and life lines, looking up at him with a cartoonish expression, full of a happiness and longing that he found himself wanting to believe was real.
Hutton reached past her and pulled the Bedford Organics bag onto the table. He took out some of the samples and unwrapped them from their butcher paper. Cat watched his long fingers as he expertly untied the ribbons with a few strategic pulls.
“How much was all this stuff? It doesn’t have any labels or price tags.”
“It was free,” Cat said, picking up one of the ribbons and tying it around her wrist.
“Is that common?”
“Sure. Beauty companies are always giving us free stuff, hoping that we’ll put it in the magazine, put it on Photogram, whatever kind of association they can get. But this company is direct-sale-by-referral only. She didn’t even ask about a feature, actually.”
“That’s interesting,” he said, turning over some of the bottles in his hands. “Is that a viable business strategy?”
“I guess so.” Cat shrugged.
“So which of these products was Hillary using?” Hutton’s tone grew serious as he turned each sample over, looking for clues.
“Other than the eyedrops, I don’t know.” She dug the small bottle out of her purse and handed it to him, unconsciously obeying his officious manner. “What do they test for when people die?”
“A standard toxicology screen would look for opiates, amphetamines, barbiturates, alcohol, marijuana, check for any prescription medication found in the home or near the body to confirm the amount taken, and anything that the body was reacting to, producing antibodies for, basically.”
“Would they have done anything else?”
“In her case, no. We didn’t have any reason to—until now.”