“Strangers on a train. Paid hit man. Who knows? It’s why we nose around. But he was never a serious suspect in my mind. He’s not now.”
“Is he a serious suspect in anyone’s mind?”
“Maybe.”
“Some days, I think he’s just so clueless. Such a total basket case. And then other days, I wonder if he’s sleeping with one of his students. Some wannabe poet my age. And then I’m furious with him.”
“Cut him some slack.”
“I do. I guess mostly I just worry about him.”
“I heard him speak in the church. He’ll be okay.”
I watched the way Gavin laced his fingers together on the railing. “If my mom’s death had something to do with sleep sex, was she out looking for someone? Someone in particular?”
“You mean, she wasn’t just sleepwalking? It’s possible. Obviously I’ve gotten out of bed any number of times and looked for…someone. But never someone in particular.”
“Did it scare her?”
“The sleep sex? A little. She knew what she was capable of. But mostly it embarrassed her. It shamed her. It shames us all.”
We gazed for a long moment at the lights from a passenger jet as the plane began its final descent over the water and toward the Burlington airport.
“So who killed her?” I asked.
“If she was murdered,” he corrected me.
I acquiesced. “If.”
“I don’t know.”
“Broadly speaking. What sort of person?”
“Use that cultural implant of yours,” he said. “Why do people ever kill people? Anger. Jealousy. Money. Love. And then, of course, there are the psychopaths: the serial killers.”
“And in Vermont?”
“Domestic violence. That’s our dark and dirty little secret. The majority of our homicides are women in very bad relationships. The rest? Drugs.”
“So, my mom was the exception.”
“Yes.”
“No one seems to think my dad or Paige or I are in danger.”
“Why would you be?”
“I don’t know. Maybe someone has something against my family.”
He wrapped his arm around my shoulder and pulled me into him. “No one has a vendetta against your family.”
“Okay…”
“You don’t sound convinced. You should be.”
“I guess I am.”
“Good.”
“Can I ask you one more thing about my dad? I don’t know where it fits in, but I keep thinking it does…somewhere.”
“You can ask me anything you like. No guarantees I can or will answer it.”
“Okay. What do you make of my dad e-mailing my mom articles about miscarriages as recently as this past summer?”
“Are you wondering if the miscarriages are somehow connected to her death?”
“I’m honestly not sure what I mean.”
He sighed. “It’s an ongoing investigation, Lianna.”
“So you’re not going to tell me.”
He shook his head. But I wondered if in my unfiltered questions, my random associations, I had tugged at a thread of some consequence for Gavin. It felt as if I had hit a nerve.
Was it the reality that I had, finally, been forced to say good-bye to my mother? Perhaps. But it may also have been the way his fingers had felt against the small of my back, the welcome pressure, or the way the sides of his face had felt against my fingers when we kissed. So warm. I felt the color rising up along the nape of my neck and the most exquisite tingling just below my waist. We fell upon each other the moment he had shut the door to his apartment, undressing on his living room couch, that sickle moon still agleam in the sky beyond his window. He knelt before me on the floor and I spread my legs, opening myself to him, losing myself to the wondrous, wet recklessness of the moment. His mouth. His tongue. Later, when he was inside me in his bed, he whispered how he had never been with a woman as beautiful as I was, and how he had never been happier than he was that moment. The whole world went away. It really was just the two of us.
And yet later, when I was lying with my head against his chest, warm beneath his sheets and listening to the waves of his heart, he urged me to leave. He said that was safest. I told him no; I told him I wasn’t going home. And when I refused, he said he would sleep once more on his living room couch, locking me safely in his bedroom. I said he would do no such thing. I insisted he remain in his bedroom with me because I could not bear to have him leave me that moment. It took us both a long time to fall asleep, though Gavin was more worried than me. I was twenty-one, and mostly I was curious. I watched him. I watched him so much, I made him uncomfortable, and so we made love again. But eventually we did fall asleep. Both of us.
And he slept through the night. As did I. It was lovely.