They found a place to have coffee, and Julia said, “You didn’t say, and I didn’t ask, but I’ll ask now. It’s done, isn’t it?”
“It’s done.”
“I want to hear, but I don’t want to hear now. Okay?”
“Sure.”
“I miss Jenny. I miss her like crazy. I’ve been sort of holding that off to one side, how much I miss her, but now we’re on dry land and we’ll be home in a couple of hours and it’s okay to let myself feel it. I miss her something fierce.”
“So do I.”
“They were nice, weren’t they? Roy and Myrt.”
“Very.”
“And there was a lot to him besides the stamps. That opened the door, but he’s an interesting person in other respects, don’t you think?”
“Definitely.”
“I wouldn’t mind seeing them again. I wonder if we ever will.”
“We have their email.”
“And they have ours, but did you see all the people exchanging email addresses last night? How many of them do you think will ever get in touch?”
“We could make a point of it,” he said. “Maybe go on a cruise with them again sometime.”
“With Jenny, though.”
“Absolutely.”
“And with no—”
“Work connected to it. Again, absolutely.”
“That might be fun. Okay, I think I’ll read the paper now. There won’t be anything in the paper, will there? No, of course there won’t, it’s far too soon. Honey? We’ll talk later.”
“Okay.”
“When I’m ready.”
“Right.”
Keller always liked the New Orleans airport, not least of all because it was named for Louis Armstrong. He didn’t know who O’Hare was, but doubted he ever amounted to much as a horn player. Neither did JFK or LaGuardia. Orange County had named an airport after John Wayne, and that was pretty good, and there was Bob Hope Airport in Burbank, but Keller figured New Orleans had them all topped.
They drove straight from the airport to the Wallings house. Donny wasn’t home from work yet, but Claudia and the kids were there, and something unwound in Keller the second he saw his daughter, something he hadn’t even known was coiled tight. He picked her up and nodded happily as she told him a million things, some of which he could even understand.
Claudia poured coffee and put out a plate of cookies, and Julia unzipped her bag and played Lady Bountiful, passing out presents for everybody. Claudia got a blouse, which she professed to love, and for Donny Julia’d picked out a Hawaiian-style sport shirt with a desert island motif.
“I don’t know if he’ll ever wear it,” she said.
Claudia said, “Are you kidding? He’ll love it, and you know it’s something he’d never pick out and buy for himself. The hard part’ll be getting that man to take it off.”
The kids got what they got, and seemed content. And, as soon as they decently could, they packed up Jenny and headed for home.
He’d found a spare moment to call Dot from the Fort Lauderdale airport, reporting success in an ambiguous sentence or two, ringing off after she’d expressed congratulations. Now he busied himself with the week’s worth of mail. There was a new list from one of his favorite dealers, ten pages of Portugal and Colonies, and while it was hardly a priority, he’d been a week away from his stamps and couldn’t resist.
He was circling an 1899 set of four Lourenço Marques overprints when Julia came into the room. He looked up and saw her face.
“I found the story online,” she said.
“And?”
“It was simple and straightforward. An American couple, Mr. and Mrs. Michael Carmody, were found in their cabin, the victims of a double homicide. He’d been stabbed once, she’d been stabbed multiple times. The cabin was ransacked, and the apparent motive was robbery. The killer left behind an extra key card for the cabin, and one seems to have gone missing from the desk.”
Keller nodded. That was the connection they were supposed to make.
“The murder weapon was also left behind. It was a steak knife, suggesting that a member of the kitchen or dining room staff might have been responsible.”
“I can see how they might think that.”
“Yes.” She was sitting down now. Her hands were loosely clasped on the table in front of her, and she was looking down at them. “I knew you had to do it that way. Not the knife, I didn’t even think about how, but I knew you were going to kill them both.”
“I didn’t really have much choice.”
“No.”
“The minute she walked in on me in their cabin, it was pretty much settled. When I met her out on deck in the middle of the night—”
“Two a.m., wasn’t it?”
“Something like that. When she said what she wanted, I thought about doing her right then and there. Put her down fast and fling her overboard.”
“And take care of him later?”
“If I could figure out a way. What I decided was the best thing to do was wait until the last night.”
“And do them both.”
“Yes.”
She thought about this. “If you did what she thought you were going to do, made his death look like a heart attack—could you have done that?”
“I could have tried. But a good medical examiner wouldn’t be fooled. And the guy was going to be a star witness, and his two bodyguards had gone down the first day out of port.”
“One of them died.”
“I didn’t know that.”