Maybe Harry really had killed his aunt.
But if so, where was the weapon?
If so, what had he done with the proof?
Rourke’s team searched the Joseph Milton House again and scoured the property, such as it was, for anywhere Harry Bridges might have disposed of a murder weapon. After canvassing the neighborhood, they’d turned up no evidence of an intruder on the morning that Anne was murdered. Two separate joggers along the beach recalled seeing one another but no one else. Ring camera footage taken from the neighbor’s house—the ones with the yapping dog—gave a decent angle on Soundview Drive but showed no one approaching the house at the relevant time.
Unfortunately, it showed no one leaving the house, either—no one sneaking out the French doors to chuck a murder weapon into the water, for example. Still, with the investigation stalling, and the case receiving breathless coverage from every news outlet in the county, Rourke eventually got approval to send a recovery unit into the sound to check. On both days, Rourke stopped by to supervise the dive team, and on both days, she had the uneasy feeling that the Joseph Milton House was watching, its wooden lips sealed around some inner secret.
After two days, they called off the search. They’d located a sunken mini-fridge, a plastic bag that contained nothing but miniature liquor bottles, and a mangled piece of metal that looked like a car bumper. But no heavy objects, roughly the same size and shape as a dumbbell.
That was the ME’s best guess about the murder weapon, due to the nature of the blows that had caved in Anne’s skull.
After the dive team came back empty-handed, Rourke had returned to the Joseph Milton House—which, withindays, Anne’s nephew had taken ownership of—with a request to look around again. Harry agreed readily—polite, cavalier, almost amused, Rourke thought. She didn’t like it. He smirked like someone who knew he’d gotten away with something.
They searched the home, rooted in closets, combed through the garage. They found no dumbbells, and nothing more than a few silver candlestick holders that even approximated the shape they were looking for. They bagged them up, anyway. But the ME said the candlestick holders didn’t match Anne’s injuries; besides, they weren’t nearly heavy enough to have caused all that damage to her skull.
The puzzle, the mystery, took on an agonizing geometry in Rourke’s head. No proof that anyone else had broken into the Joseph Milton House, no proof that the man who was there, a man who stood to inherit a multimillion-dollar estate, had had anything to do with it. And yet, Detective Rourke was increasingly sure that he had—that he had planned it, possibly organized his latest visit to his aunt with the express purpose of killing her.
No proof, no proof.
During the endless, torturous revolutions of her mind, she kept turning back to her conversation with that delivery driver, Lenora. Funny that she’d had the same instinct—deeper than a hunch, really—that somehow, in the quiet of the morning hours, Harry Bridges had snuck up behind his aunt and bludgeoned her to death, then clumsily staged a break-in. She wondered what had made Lenora so sure.
An interesting one, that Lenora. Twenty-six years old, but one of those people who seemed to oscillate in a sort of timelessness, appearing at once both far older and younger than her age. The intense, birdlike motion of her fingers drumming on the table, falling always into the samecadence,da-DUM, da-DUM, da-DUM? Childlike. The baggy, thrift-store clothing, which fell around her like a protective tent? Adolescent. The square-rimmed glasses and strange, almost penetrating attentiveness? That seemed to belong to someone much older. The careful, almost obsessive way she approached her chicken wrap—carefully rotating her bites so that not a single alfalfa sprout went astray, fussing to return an errant tomato to its proper location with the other fillings ... that was unique to Lenora, and neither old nor young. Just interesting.
Lenora had walked her carefully, thoughtfully, through her actions on that morning, from her arrival at the Joseph Milton House to her discovery of the body. Detective Rourke had tried to guide her to pinpoint exactly when she had begun to feel that something was wrong in that house. Lenora spoke about mounting the stairs to the porch, where she would usually find the storm door open and Anne waiting to greet her even before she had a chance to ring the bell. It was the quiet, Lenora had said. A quiet that felt like holding your breath.
It was around when she was scanning the package for return, Lenora had said, that she began to wonder why Anne hadn’t come to the door or turned on the radio.
“Did Anne order packages a lot?” Detective Rourke had asked her—a throwaway question, just a way of getting Lenora comfortable.
But Lenora had really thought about it. “Not as many as some,” she’d said. “But she ordered enough. She didn’t always remember what she’d bought. She didn’t remember what she’d ordered thelasttime I made a delivery. Whatever it was, I guess she didn’t want it.” Lenora made a funny face then. It looked as if she was trying to suck her lips back into her mouth. Detective Rourke thought, for a moment, that Lenoramight say something else—something important. But she just added, “She was getting older, you know. She told me her eyesight wasn’t so good. She didn’t like to drive, especially at night.”
“Any idea what she’d ordered this time?” Rourke was grasping, just trying to find a way to keep Lenora talking, thinking about the scene, recalling her impressions of it.
“A book trilogy,” Lenora said immediately, and Rourke was reassured. Lenora was a good witness, despite her peculiarities. In fact, theyhadfound a trilogy in an unopened package at the scene. Not that that got them anywhere. It was just more ancillary detritus of a life suddenly abbreviated.
Now, a week after that first interview, Rourke couldn’t shake the feeling that she’d missed something, left an important question unasked or unanswered. Lenora had seen something, responded to something, that had persuaded her that Anne’s nephew was a murderer. So what was it?
With the investigation stymied, Rourke called Lenora in for a second interview. It had occurred to her that there was a slim chance Lenora’s impressions of Anne’s nephew had been formedbeforethe morning of Anne’s murder—Lenora had mentioned interacting with him a day or so earlier, when she’d again brought a delivery to the Joseph Milton House.
Lenora’s eyes were pouchy with exhaustion, and her skin almost translucent, papery, showing off the veins running beneath it. She kept her hands tucked into the sleeves of an oversize sweatshirt, shrugging her shoulders almost to her ears, as if she hoped to disappear inside it.
“I’ve been dreaming about her,” she said abruptly, and then clarified: “About Anne. I’ve been dreaming that she has a package to give me. But somehow, I can never get it in time.”
Rourke let the remark sit for a minute. She felt something for this twenty-six-year-old girl, with her dancing fingersand her peculiar, tangential comments. She fantasized for a moment about the ability to map a person’s thoughts, the way we mapped roads and highways, to project the entanglement of a person’s internal life into a physical form that could, slowly, be reordered and redesigned.
“You said that the morning of the murder wasn’t the first time you’d seen Harry Bridges,” Detective Rourke said.
Lenora nodded. “He was there when I dropped off the last delivery, too.”
“Tell me about that,” Detective Rourke said. “Tell me about it in as much detail as possible.”
Lenora, misunderstanding the question, answered immediately. “It was a small package. But very heavy. Not books, though. I know the feel of books by now.”
Rourke had meant to ask about Lenora’s interactions with Harry—not about the contents of the package. Now, however, she felt a curious tingle on the back of her neck, as if an invisible wind had sprung up in the room.
“Small and heavy,” she repeated. “Did Anne tell you what was inside?”