“But three years is still a long time.”
I nodded. This was one of the situations that came up sometimes and made me question the priorities of the criminal justice system. I’d seen rapists get shorter sentences than that.
“And what if I got sentenced for both? What if they say, okay, you burned that place down, and then you went over to the marina and fought with your dad and—you know?”
I nodded. I had to acknowledge that was a risk. The autopsy hadn’t been able to pin down a time of death for Karl, partly because of decomposition and partly because, although he had food in his stomach at a certain stage of digestion, there was no evidence as to when he’d eaten it.
We sat in silence for a minute, long enough that I could’ve sworn I saw the sunbeam across our table slide over a little bit. Then, just to break the silence, I asked, “Did you know the family that runs that ice cream stand? Or did Karl?”
A shield went up in his eyes. He said nothing.
I shrugged and said, “I was just wondering.”
“They ain’t good people,” he said. “Or the dad ain’t.”
I waited. After a second, I said, “How so?”
He winced and looked away.
“It don’t matter,” he said.
I left the jail later than I’d meant to, close to dinner time, and had to stop by Roy’s office to get a Blue Seas accordion folder full of old contracts to review that night. When I got home, I saw Terri’s car parked out front and remembered that I’d suggested she stop by for some pizza and a check-in about the case. When I walked in the front door, apologizing, she and Noah were sitting at the coffee table talking up a storm, with half a pizza left in the box between them.
“Dad,” he said, “she’s like a spy! She literally spies on people!”
“He was asking me about my job,” she explained.
I couldn’t remember the last time I’d seen Noah looking enthused about anything. He said, “It’s like something out of a movie! How cool is that? I mean, if you ask any of my Charleston friends what they do, they’d all be, like, ‘Oh, I’m majoring in business at Clemson’ or something. Like, ‘I’m a frat boy in cargo shorts majoring in business.’ I mean, who cares? But anyone asks you that, you get to say, ‘I’m a freaking private eye—’”
She laughed. “Yeah, that is the best word for it. It’s more fun than saying detective or investigator.”
Over his head, I smiled a silent thanks to Terri. For a couple of weeks, Noah had been moping about his old friends in Charleston, how they were about to head back to college for their sophomore year while he was still stuck here doing physical therapy and not much else. Their lives looked amazing on Instagram, and he felt like a loser. It was good to hear him poking fun at them. He’d finally realized they weren’t actually all that cool.
He looked from Terri to me and sighed. “Well,” he said, “I guess you guys got to talk about stuff I’m not allowed to hear.”
“Yeah, sorry,” I said.
Terri said, “That’s where the ‘private’ in ‘private eye’ comes in.”
“That’s awesome,” he said. “I’m going to go look some of that stuff up online.” He put two more slices of pizza on his plate, got up, and made his way carefully down the hall to his room. It had been months since the last time he’d fallen, but he was still very careful how he moved.
I sat down across from Terri and got myself a slice of lukewarm pizza. I flipped the TV on to the news to make it harder to overhear our conversation.
“Thanks for that,” I told her. “I can’t remember the last time I saw him excited about… well, anything, really.”
“Yeah, he seemed a little down when I got here.” She slurped the last of her soda, looking thoughtful. “I think he must’ve been on social media or something, because he was talking about how all his friends he hadn’t seen in a year were heading back to college again without him. I just said writing term papers wasn’t nearly as interesting as investigating a murder, and it went from there.”
“That’s great,” I said. “He always did love that Hardy Boys and Scooby Doo stuff when he was little. He used to sit in his window and watch the neighbors with binoculars.”
She laughed. “So it’s not my fault. If your kid skips college to become a private eye, don’t blame me.”
“I won’t,” I said. “I’ll credit you. Any productive path that gets him out of his funk is fine by me.”
For a second I felt Elise there, smiling with me. She’d given him the binoculars, for his seventh or eighth birthday as I recalled, and she would listen with exaggerated interest whenever he came to her and reported on what he’d seen the neighbors doing. I’d thought it was a little weird, but she was determined to support him in whoever he was becoming. It had taken me a while to get there, as a parent, but I was learning. It felt like she approved.
Terri was looking at the TV. She said, “Is that anyone you know?”
The newscaster was saying something about the Charleston solicitor’s office. It took me half a second to recognize Tony Rosa, maybe because he wasn’t wearing his pink cummerbund. He was standing at a podium, about to give a press conference in pinstripes and a blue tie.
“Oh, yeah,” I said. “We weren’t work friends or anything, but I knew him. I actually saw him recently, over at Collin Porter’s place.” She looked at me quizzically, and I realized she didn’t know who that was. “Porter’s some big investor in Blue Seas,” I said. “Rich as all hell. Lives in a mansion in one of them gated communities on the islands.”
“Huh,”
