Scorcher

thouse. He didn’t look away from Elana until he’d shut the squealing door.

He glanced down the beach at Adam, who was still seated as before and staring out to sea. Then he made his way toward the house and a phone.

An hour later Carver was sitting with McGregor on the screened veranda overlooking the beach and ocean. The police technicians had come and gone, and Elana had been removed in a black rubber body bag. Adam Kave had been taken inside and was being treated for shock. Nadine and Paul hadn’t been located and still didn’t know about their mother’s death. They hadn’t learned they were in a nightmare without end.

Carver sat at the glass-topped table where he’d seen the Kaves have breakfast. Not exactly amiable family meals. He tapped his cane lightly and rhythmically against a chair leg, trying to keep his mind from flashing to Elana dangling in the boathouse. It wasn’t unusual for suicides to hang themselves nude, as if the act were a return to the moment of birth rather than chosen death. The sea wind was brisk, and the canvas awning, rolled out to shield from the sun, rustled and snapped overhead.

McGregor was standing with just his fingertips slid into his pants pockets, as if he liked to stay ready for action. He was chewing on something infinitesimal and hard, working it around with his long jaw, probing now and then with his tongue to find out how he was doing. Carver could hear a faint clicking as McGregor’s eyeteeth slipped off the stubborn morsel and met with enough force to dismay a dentist.

“So, we know each other again,” Carver said. He watched McGregor turn his head and spit out whatever it was he’d been chewing, barely parting his lips.

“You betcha,” McGregor said. “Pals, you and me, right down the line. We done okay in this thing, Carver. Might even call us heroes.”

“Might,” Carver said. He knew McGregor had read Elana’s suicide note, which was in the white envelope the stricken Adam had clutched in his fist on the beach. “Why’d she hang herself?” Carver asked. “She’d just got her son back. Was it the cancer? She knew she wasn’t going to recover.”

“Wasn’t that,” McGregor said. He straightened his tall body awkwardly, as if his back were stiff, then walked over and sat down opposite Carver. He ran his tongue across the wide gap between his front teeth and folded his big hands. He seemed to consider not telling Carver about the note’s contents, but only for a second; pals all the way. He said, “She was, in a manner of speaking, Emmett’s accomplice.”