Page 108 of Haunted

“I have no idea. I’ve been asking myself that since Saturday.”

I hold it under the lamp. Suzannah Clemmons, twenty-odd years old, accepting a plaque from a man in a bad suit, and behind her at the edge of the frame is Rex Harlow with a full head of dark hair and no beard.

And then I see it, and I cannot unsee it. I don’t know how I have looked at this photograph three times and missed it.

“He isn’t clapping.”

“What?” Jonny asks, abandoning his speech. He climbs onto the bed and takes the picture.

“Everybody else in this picture has their hands together.” I turn it round so he can see. “Rex has one of his on the small of her back. Just like I do to you.”

“Oooh. Oh, wow.”

“So the former mistress takes a clipping because she recognizes a gesture—”

“—That the current mistress is receiving.” Jonny makes a face. “Ouch. Poor Mom. This isn’t a picture of my neighbor winning an award. It’s a picture of her lover with his new mistress.”

And then, with no warning whatsoever, I am seventeen years old and coming up the driveway at 110 Denning Court with smoke on the ridge and my heart going, and Angela Bishop is standing on her porch with a cigarette and a phone against her ear and her back to me.

I know exactly where you were Thursday. And who with.

Then find more. I’m not the one who has something to lose here.

At the time, I had thought for a second she was accusing me. I remember because I was trying to remember at the time where I had been that Thursday, and who with. Only when she turned did I see she was on the phone.

When I tell him, he goes very still.

“So, she was blackmailing him,” he says.

“She was getting money out of him for you and Elliott, and the lever wasn’t you. The lever was Suzannah.” I make myself keep going. “That’s the twenty thousand dollars. That’s Albatross Press.”

“Can we prove any of that?”

“No. Not one word of it.” I’ve already worked this part out. “No phone company on earth keeps records ten years back, and nobody had a reason to pull hers at the time, because a woman who dies in a wildfire doesn’t get her call logs subpoenaed. It’s gone. That conversation exists in exactly one place, and frankly, it’s a ten-year-old memory. It’s not even remotely reliable.”

He looks at the clipping in his hands for a long time.

“And less than an hour later, she was dead,” he says. “And he never said a word. Not when it happened, not in ten years, not last Monday when you stood in his office and told him my whole family burned to death.” His voice hasn’t changed at all, which is worse. “He didn’t have to do anything, did he. A fire came over a hill and solved his entire life for him. Two mistresses and one illegitimate kid, all eliminated at once. It would have been like Christmas.”

“No,” I say. “He didn’t have to do anything.”

I pick up the other scrap. A class schedule, Fairhaven University, almost thirty years ago, one line scored through with a ballpoint so hard it’s torn the paper. An economics section, Tuesdays and Thursdays. “There’s no Harlow on it,” I say. “Instructor of record is a Professor J. Gibson. So why keep this? What was it supposed to prove? Were they classmates?”

“Can you look up this Gibson guy?” Jonny suggests.

It takes four minutes on my phone. Gibson died that February—cardiac arrest, shoveling his own driveway, sixty-three years old—and there’s a paragraph in the archive of the Fairhaven Bee, the University newspaper, that’s mostly about how much the department will miss him, with one line near the bottom saying his remaining courses would be taken over by a graduate assistant named Rex Harlow.

“Well, there’s that smoking gun,” Jonny grumbles. “The one we didn’t need.”

I look at the screen. Men in their sixties die shoveling snow in this state every single February. It is the most ordinary death there is. And at that time, Rex Harlow had no motive that I know of to make sure the man died. I put the phone face down, because I have got enough on my plate without going out looking for a fourth one.

“Okay,” Jonny says. “So my father is a piece of work. We knew that on Saturday.” He hands the clipping back to me. “What’s actually bothering you?”

And this is where I have to say the thing I have been carrying around since about two this afternoon.

“Alice,” I say. “I think Henry killed her.”

He blinks at me. “Lance, we did this last night. How could he have even known where she would be?”