“I couldn’t resist,” he says, grinning. “I want you to have a couple of positive memories of the town.”
“Oh, I love the town itself. Just not what happened here. It’s kind of a battlefield for me, too.”
I help him spread out the blanket and we settle onto it. After the meeting with the DA, I used the ladies’ room of the county municipal center to change from a skirt and heels into shorts and sandals, and it feels nice to have the sun on my arms and legs. While Derek props the water bottles against the tote bag, I unwrap the sandwiches. They turn out to be baguettes with tomatoes, basil, and mozzarella, and I tell him how much I love that combo.
“I figured you for a caprese kind of girl.”
“Someday I intend to make a pilgrimage to Capri just to taste that dish in its natural habitat.”
“It sounds good to hear you talk that way—I mean, concentrating on the future and not all the crap that happened.”
“Yeah, I’m trying to think ahead as much as possible. About trips I’d like to take . . . My next book. It’s about reinvention, and I may end up including what happened to me here”—I offer a rueful smile—“because I’ve got a bit of reinventing to do myself.”
I’m not sure why the words began to flow again this past month. Maybe because I was finally in a truthful place.
“How did your meeting go today?
“Good. The district attorney seems really smart, and she treated me with a lot more respect than I ever got from Corcoran. It’s possible that Lisa—God, I’m still not used to calling her that—will plead insanity and will take some kind of deal, but there could also be a trial, and I’ll have to steel myself for it.”
Derek shakes his head in dismay. “To think that Miranda Kane died basically for nothing, for simply being in Dock Brown’s that day and catching Lisa’s eye.”
“Well, Eve died for nothing, too. Guy told the police that they hadn’t been involved. When I had lunch with Lisa, she claimed she’d heard Eve had been having a fling with a married man, but I think she did that just to taunt me. My guess is that Eve was going to be Guy’s next conquest. He just hadn’t closed the deal yet.”
As Dr. G suggested, Guy is a man who hates to be boxed in, and I now know that nothing I did in our marriage was ever going to stop him from feeling that way.
“I heard some news about Lisa from my reporter pal,” Derek says after taking a bite from his sandwich. “He interviewed people who knew her, mostly clients from her PR business because it doesn’t look like she had many friends. The one word that kept popping up was intense. Like too intense. Not when people first met her, but as they got to know her. It’s as if, sooner or later, her craziness would rear its head.”
“I bet the same thing happened with Guy. That day at the baths she told me he had cooled it with her for a while because I was moving up here. I’m thinking it was actually because he began to sense that she was a very troubled woman.”
Derek reaches out, touches my hand, and smiles wanly. “I know this may sound crass, but I’m so glad she chose to fixate on Eve initially, and not you,” he says. “You probably wouldn’t be alive otherwise.”
I smile back, taking him in with my eyes—the easygoing way he’s stretched out on the blanket, plus the wild way all his features come together to create an improbable appeal.
“In the beginning she clearly saw Eve as the real threat,” I say. “I was an albatross around Guy’s neck, but she figured he’d dump me when the moment was right. All she had to do was nurse things along by making me even more of an albatross. The burnt matches, luring me to the murder scene, that call with the fire crackling—they were all meant to wig me out as much as possible.”
“Why do you think she switched plans and decided to kill you?”
“She’d been keeping an eye on me, at first out of curiosity and then probably making sure I wasn’t figuring stuff out, suggesting I might want to see the event venue in case I gave her any reason to be worried. When I called and told her I wanted to speak to her privately, her alarm bells clearly went off. She lured me to the baths—she’d tricked a former client into giving her access—and then five minutes after I arrived, she could tell that somehow the truth had all come together in my mind.”
I take a swig of water and tear open the bag of potato chips, offering them first to Derek and then indulging in a handful myself.
“I may have to take a few bags of these back with me.”
“Has it been good to be back in the city?”
Derek fixes his gaze on me, and I spot what I think is a trace of wistfulness in his green eyes. I know that he’s been eager for me to be back here.
“It was good to just be home, to have my friends rally around me. And though I begged him not to, my brother insisted on coming from Jakarta. Fortunately he was able to combine it with business here.”