“Until last Friday.” I said.
“Until last Friday. Helena must have recognized Jeff’s name right away. We’ll never know exactly what she thought, but she would have realized he wouldn’t have come into her library two days after they’d been supposed to leave together, just to take out a book. Maybe she knew the handwriting wasn’t his.” Watson shook his head. “We’ll never know for sure, but we do know Lucinda saw the moment Helena realized what she was looking at. Lucinda’s saying Helena gave her what she calls an ‘evil eye.’ Which might be nothing but her guilt talking.”
“Helena knew, at that moment, Jeff hadn’t willingly left without her,” I said. “I’m sure of it. And I’m glad. I don’t think she suspected Lucinda of having something to do with his death. She didn’t react more negatively toward Lucinda than to anyone else that night. But as we’ve seen before, ‘The guilty run when no one pursues.’”
“So true,” Ronald said.
“And so sad,” Bertie said.
Charles and Charlene said nothing.
“Helena might have paid no attention to Lucinda,” I said, “but Lucinda was horrified when she first saw Helena at the party. I’d forgotten that until I started putting things together and then I realized how over-the-top her reaction had been.”
“Lucinda believed she had to kill Helena before Helena could do anything about what she suspected happened all those years ago,” Watson said. “If, when the police first started looking for Jeff, Helena had told them he was supposed to meet her the night in question at the library, Lucinda might have been caught. Instead, Helena believed she’d been betrayed and was too humiliated to say anything, even when word got out that the police were looking for Jeff Applewhite.”
“I suspect,” I said, “she feared the mocking of her twin sister above all.”
“So sad,” Bertie repeated.
“The police assumed Jeff had left with the necklace. A natural enough assumption to make. Lucinda quit her job and moved to California not long after, wisely not wanting to be around if they did come to wonder if Jeff had left Nags Head. As for the necklace, Lucinda went to California, but she never showed signs of having anything in the way of money, so she didn’t have it. Jeff never showed it to her, she says, so it’s even possible he wasn’t the one who stole it. If he was, perhaps he had it on him when she pushed his body into the waters of the marsh. And there it lies.”
We were all silent for a few moments.
“In several hundred years,” Charlene said, “the sands will shift as the sea level rises and the tides move, and the necklace might be exposed once again. And everyone will wonder how such a precious thing came to be at the bottom of the ocean. Books will be written about it.”
“What happens now, Sam?” Bertie asked.
“Lucinda Lorca has been charged with the murder of Helena Sanchez. I’ve started gathering evidence for that, which means I need to talk to you at length, Lucy.”
“Happy to help,” I said.
“I’m also reopening the investigation into the disappearance of Jeff Applewhite. Lucinda confessed that she killed him, but a confession means little in court without evidence, particularly in the absence of a body. We’ve got divers back in the marsh. The tides are strong around here, and it’s been a long time, but his body might have snagged on a root or something and still be here.”
“Please, please, do not tell Louise Jane that,” Bertie begged. “I do not want her trying to make contact.”
Watson laughed. “Believe me, I don’t want her help either.”
I said nothing. Louise Jane had said the marsh spirits told her, “Appearances can be deceiving.” That phrase put the idea in my head of using Tina pretending to be Helena to frighten the killer into confessing. Had the spirits truly been trying to send us a message?
Of course not. I’d simply taken my inspiration from Louise Jane’s attempt to make herself sound important.
“About that, Sam,” Ronald said, “you might be too late. Before I came down, I spotted Louise Jane and her binoculars heading for the boardwalk at a rapid pace.”
Chapter Twenty-Five
Connor had a council meeting that night, but he called me when it ended. We decided to postpone the trip to Rodanthe until next weekend so we could look at engagement rings tomorrow after work and then have a special dinner to toast each other on the beginning of our life together. He’d invited his parents to his house for dinner on Saturday without telling them why.
I hoped they’d be delighted at the news. We’d decided to have our wedding next autumn. It seemed so far away, but I knew the time would pass quickly. We talked for a long time, and I turned out the light and snuggled under the covers with a warm, happy feeling.
I should have dreamed about weddings on the beach and beautiful dresses and the man I loved, but instead my night was full of the work that had been done earlier this year on the lighthouse foundations. Shoring up the historic building had been a major, not to mention expensive, job but it had gone well and we expected the lighthouse to stand tall and proud in the face of storms for many decades, hopefully centuries, to come. In my dream, the job hadn’t finished, and I was frantically running to and fro with piles of shovels cradled in my arms, trying to convince people to come and help me dig.
I woke in a sweat and a tumble of bed clothes. Charles snoozed peacefully beside me. I stared up at the ceiling, wondering why I’d been dreaming about the restoration.
And then I knew.
I checked the time. Quarter past four. Far, far too early to call Bertie.
I tried to get back to sleep, but sleep
