It was hard, after that, to keep my mind on my job. I tried to connect the dots. Had I ever heard Reston Marsh’s name before? It didn’t ring any bells. How many society Marsh families could there be in Vancouver?
And Reston Marsh had sought me out, I knew he had. Why? Sure, I was an attractive young woman alone at a charity function. But the place was crawling with attractive women.
“Are you related to the artist Steve Marsh?” I asked.
“Yeah. Our fathers are brothers.”
“So he was your cousin?”
“That’s right.”
“Not close, I guess?”
“No,” he said. “We weren’t. You might say we lived on different sides of the tracks.”
“On which side of the tracks did he live?”
“All that artsy stuff. He had an apartment in Yaletown and a studio at 1000 Parker.”
I didn’t think Yaletown was the wrong side of the tracks. It also wasn’t a surprise. I’d known where he lived. But the studio? That was news to me.
“You guys weren’t close,” I said again.
“What makes you keep saying that?”
“You’re here instead of off crying in your beer someplace. I did the math.”
“Well, we weren’t tight, but we weren’t unfriendly. Some bad blood with our dads when they were kids, so Steve-o and I never really hung out.”
“Bad blood?”
“Something about his dad, I think it was. But no one was ever really talking about it.”
“What about his girlfriend?”
“Caitlen?”
“Sure,” I said.
“We’ve both known her since school. I never got it, really. She always seemed a cold one to me.”
“In what way?”
He looked at me carefully. “Off the record?”
“Okay.”
“She was never quite right.”
“Right?”
“Just this”—he searched for the right word—“distance? She just wasn’t someone you could talk to. Even when we were kids.”
“Did they live together?”
To my surprise, he laughed. “Oh no. Steve lived in Yaletown.”
“I know.”
“But I’m pretty sure Caitlen had a place on English Bay.”
“That seems an odd detail for you to know.”
“Not really. Our family has owned the building for decades. I got the idea Caitlen’s family had money problems a few years ago. Steve had to get the family trust to approve her living there. This is turning into quite the little interrogation.”
I indicated the party still going on around us. “Just doing my job. But now that you mention it, you did seem awful eager to talk to me. What was that about?”
He reached out then. Slid one smooth hand down my bare arm. Looked straight into my eyes.
“You have to ask?”
We didn’t talk anymore about work or dead cousins after that.