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I TURNED ONTO Jefferson Street and slowed the car, peering at house numbers. Rocky Bay, Long Island, is only twenty-six miles from Crystal Harbor, but it’s light-years away in all other respects. I passed a few dozen modest, cookie-cutter houses on lots about forty feet wide. The properties were decently maintained for the most part. Serviceable sedans and minivans occupied the driveways. I spied a few kids walking home from school, and two young moms with strollers chatting on the sidewalk. It was another sunny spring afternoon.
I’d already made the long drive to Tierney’s Publick House way out in Southampton. Tommy, the grumpy owner, remembered me from my first visit two weeks earlier. He gave Sexy Beast, my “service animal,” the stinkeye as he informed me Martin was off that day. I asked him for the padre’s home address.
He frowned in intense cogitation. “Am I allowed to do that?”
“Absolutely,” I replied without hesitation.
That had been good enough for Tommy, who’d scrawled the address on a cocktail napkin.
I’d often wondered where Martin lived, my overactive imagination conjuring one mysterious man cave after another. A gloomy abandoned warehouse in Brooklyn. A slick penthouse apartment in Manhattan. A sleeping bag that traveled from beach to woods to friends’ floors as the mood struck.
I had to admit, a one-and-a-half-story Cape in working-class Rocky Bay had never been in the running.
I pulled up in front of 2639 Jefferson and sat staring at it. White paint, light blue trim. A patched roof. A few azaleas fronted by a straggle of daffodils. I tried in vain to picture the padre on his knees planting bulbs. And next to the front stoop, a cluster of big-eyed lawn ornaments: a lop-eared mama rabbit and three baby bunnies.
Oh, and? A big, gleaming red Mercedes in the driveway. I recognized the first prize in the recent Crystal Harbor Historical Society Poker Tournament. It was parked behind a bodacious black Harley which I also recognized.
All right then. I settled Sexy Beast in a comfortable football hold, grabbed my tote bag, and traversed the short distance to the front door, which was adorned with an Easter wreath—pastel eggs, baby chicks—that should have been taken down a couple of weeks earlier. I had to ring twice, but eventually the door swung open.
I wasn’t surprised to see a woman on the other side of the threshold. That girlie wreath was the clincher. The padre did not live alone. She had longish blond hair, the top section wrapped around some of those fat Velcro rollers, the kind I could never quite master. She was barefoot and wore faded jeans and a logo tee-shirt featuring a band I’d never heard of. The woman was in the process of putting on her face. The way I knew this? She held a blush compact and makeup brush in one hand and a portable, lighted mirror in the other. Plus one cheek was rosier than the other. See? I could have been a detective.
“Yes?” she asked, not rudely but with an unmistakable I don’t want whatever you’re selling vibe.
“Um...I’m here to see Martin?”
“Marty!” she hollered over her shoulder. “Look sharp, you have company.” She stepped aside and beckoned me to enter. “I’m Stephanie. Everyone calls me Stevie.”
“Hi, Stevie. Jane Delaney.” I stuck out my hand, then retracted it when she apologetically indicated her full hands. “I’m a, um, friend of Martin’s,” I added.
“And yet you look so respectable. Marty!” Stevie had a good figure. From the neck down, she could have been thirty. Her face was unlined, but her throat and hands told a different story—this lady was no spring chicken. I supposed that said something good about the padre, that his live-in wasn’t some airhead half his age.
“And who’s this cutie?” she asked, bending to admire SB, only to jerk back with a startled laugh when he tried to lick her freshly made-up eye.
“His name is Sexy Beast.” I braced for the usual snort of derision.
Instead she said, “Loved the movie. Go on, sit.” She nodded toward the matching sofa and love seat. “Just shove the newspapers onto the floor.” The living room was cluttered, but in a normal, lived-in way, not a Buried alive in their home! Story at six! way. SB sniffed avidly, taking inventory.
A Siamese cat strolled into the room, prompting him to stiffen and growl. I tightened my grip, certain that a showdown between the two animals would not end well for my runty pet. The cat growled right back, long tail twitching, blue eyes skewering SB like lasers.
Stevie wagged a finger. “Miss Persephone, you behave yourself.” She offered me a drink, which I declined. I heard feet pounding down the stairs, then Martin appeared, pulling a black tee-shirt over his torso. Just like at the bar that time, he showed zero surprise at seeing me. He was altogether the most irritating man I’d ever met.
“Don’t mean to be rude,” Stevie said as she headed for one of the rooms off the small central hallway, “but I’m running late.”
Martin stalked over to the cat and unceremoniously lifted it by the scruff. He stared it down as its growls intensified. “I hate this thing.” Following in Stevie’s tracks, he opened the door she’d disappeared behind, flung the animal inside, and slammed the door shut.
He said, “You gonna sit or what?” and threw himself on the love seat.
I shifted the stacks of newspaper on the sofa and sat on the end nearest Martin. SB curled up next to me. “So,” I asked. “How long have you and Stevie been together?”
“Forty-two years.”
It took my wee brain a couple of seconds to figure it out, then I muttered a bad word as my face warmed.
“Mom!” he yelled toward the hallway. “Jane thought you were my girlfriend.”
Peals of delighted laughter rang out from behind Stevie’s closed door. She called out, “I like Jane.”
“Wow,” I said. “She looks good for her age. Whatever that is.”
“Sixty-one,” he said. “Mom’s a poster child for good genes and an active lifestyle. She still dances.”
That triggered a memory. At Tierney’s, Martin had mentioned the married deacon who’d sired him: Arthur and Anne McAuliffe’s middle son, Hugh. My mom was an exotic dancer he was screwing on the side.
He smiled, watching my expression. “She long ago retired from that kind of dancing.”
“Of course,” I said. “I didn’t think...” I hated how smug he looked. I decided to do something about that. “So does this work for you? Being a middle-aged man living with his mom?”
“It’s temporary. And it beats being a middle-aged woman living in Mr. F’s basement,” he replied smoothly. “Oh, but wait. You fixed that.”
I bit my tongue to keep from blurting, I didn’t fix anything, I didn’t even know Irene was leaving me the house. He already knew that. Instead I said, “I consider the lower threshold for middle age to be forty. That gives me ten months before I have to start shopping for mom jeans.”
“Let’s agree on forty-five and I’ll never mention Dogpatch again.”
“Deal,” I said.
“And you’d look good in anything.” A flirtatious smile. “Even mom jeans.”
Good grief. And just when the heat in my cheeks had begun to cool. Martin hadn’t asked why I’d come looking for him. Maybe he thought I just couldn’t stay away. I said, “I was noodling around the internet and came across something interesting.” I pulled a folded sheet of paper out of my tote bag and handed it to him. I watched him unfold it and examine the image I’d printed out.
It was a silver shield topped with a gold boar’s head. Three blue stars decorated the shield, along with three blue mermaids, each holding a comb and mirror.
The McAuliffe family coat of arms.
He tossed the paper onto the coffee table. “Took you long enough to make the connection.”
“You could have made it for me and saved me the research,” I said.
“Where’s the fun in that?” He stood. “You want a beer?”
“No, thanks.”
I left SB on the sofa and followed him into the kitchen, where he grabbed a Guinness from the fridge and popped the cap with a gargoyle-shaped opener screwed into a knotty-pine cabinet. I parked my buns on a counter stool and watched him expertly pour the dark brew down the side of a glass, resulting in a thick, creamy, downright sexy head.
“You could have been a bartender,” I said.
“So I’ve been told.” He tipped back the glass and took a deep gulp.
I was dying to know what other occupations he’d had, or still had, in addition to bartender, but I didn’t waste my breath asking. “So I already knew that the mermaid brooch is a family heirloom,” I said, “made by some famous jewelry artist over a century ago. What I didn’t know is that the mermaid design is based on the McAuliffe coat of arms.”
He leaned back against the sink. “What’s your point?”
“I’m curious, is all,” I said. “Have you fenced the brooch yet?”
“Don’t tell me you’re still trying to get her back for O’Rourke.”
“I don’t think you have any intention of selling her,” I said. “I’m beginning to think you weren’t BS’ing Irene, or me, about why you swiped her. She belongs in the family.” Just as his grandmother Anne’s dream house, now my home, belonged in the family. Martin McAuliffe had a complicated love-hate relationship with his father’s people. Theirs was a blood connection, almost tribal. He despised most of the McAuliffes, yet he was inescapably one of them.
“That’s why Grandma returned the mermaid to Grandpa when they divorced,” he said. “Because she’s a McAuliffe heirloom. He gave her to Grandma when they got married and she could have kept her—would’ve been well within her rights after he dumped her for Irene—but she did the right thing. Answer me,” he said. “Is that why you’re here? To get your hands on the mermaid?”
I puffed out a conflicted sigh. “Technically she belongs to Patrick. He’s Colette’s heir.”
Martin turned his hand into a stop sign. “He’s the heir of the woman who persuaded her granddaughter, paid her granddaughter, to poison her old friend Irene, who herself was so protective of her dead husband’s heirloom that she threw it into the pot during a poker game. Just to put the whole thing into perspective. Proceed.”
“None of that changes the fact that Patrick is the legitimate owner, strictly from a legal standpoint.”
Martin sensed my reservations. “But...” he prompted.
I took a deep breath. “But the thing is, he’s super-rich now. He doesn’t need the brooch to, you know, elevate his lifestyle.” Or to send his daughter to college, as I’d originally hoped. Cheyenne was going nowhere but prison. “And he has no sentimental attachment to it. I mean, he’s not a McAuliffe. The brooch means zip to him.”
“While you’re working so hard to justify stiffing the ‘legitimate owner,’ there’s something else you might want to take into consideration. O’Rourke is suspect numero uno in Nina Wallace’s disappearance. He might be off the hook for Irene’s murder, but until his pregnant mistress turns up...” He spread his hands.
“Yeah, well, innocent until proven guilty and all that,” I said. “It bugs me that the cops are concentrating so hard on Patrick. I mean, I haven’t known him that long, but he just doesn’t seem capable of anything really awful.”
“That’s not what you were saying a few days ago.”
“Only because the evidence seemed so compelling,” I said, “linking him to Irene’s death. Even then I had a hard time picturing him as a murderer.”
“Why, because he’s a good family man?” Martin offered a crooked half smile. “Because he loves his wife and kids?”
“Okay, so I’m hopelessly naïve. Better that than being hopelessly cynical.”
“If you say so.”
From somewhere far away came a familiar tune and Isaac Hayes’s mellifluous voice inquiring as to the identity of the African-American private detective who reliably provides satisfying carnal relations to all the young females of his acquaintance. Except not in those words.
It was the “Theme from Shaft,” which just happened to be Irene’s ring tone. I leapt off the stool. “You have Irene’s phone! No wonder I couldn’t find it.” I followed the music out of the kitchen and up the carpeted stairs. Not until I stood staring at Martin’s crisply made bed did I realize where my indignation had taken me.
I let out a startled yip as he brushed past me to get to Irene’s cell phone, which was on his chest of drawers. He answered it, listened for a moment, then said, “Mrs. Storch, this is Irene’s grandson, Martin. Step-grandson. I’m sorry to be the bearer of sad news. Irene died two weeks ago.”
He listened some more while I scanned his surprisingly neat and clutter-free room, which had nothing in common with either the abandoned Brooklyn warehouse or the swanky Manhattan penthouse of my imagination. Or any variety of man cave, however that term might be defined.
“I know,” he told Mrs. Storch in soothing tones, “it was a shock to everyone. Very sudden... I agree, we can be grateful for that.” His eyes never left me as I roamed around his room, taking in the small desk with laptop and reading lamp, a pair of guitars in a stand, a stack of plastic milk crates crammed with CD’s and paperbacks: thrillers, sci-fi, dog-eared classics.
The walls were bare—no art or posters. No curtains covering the blinds.
“No, ma’am,” he said, “my dad is Hugh, Arthur’s middle son... Don’t blame your memory. I’m sure Irene never mentioned me. I was born on the wrong side of the blanket, to use a quaint old expression.”
He watched me lift a framed photograph from his chest of drawers, an outdoor shot of Arthur and Anne sitting on a picnic blanket with a boy about twelve years old. The boy had shaggy blond hair and blue, blue eyes. I recognized the rear of my house, Anne’s dream house, in the background. About three years after this photo was taken, Arthur would divorce his wife of fifty years to marry Irene Hardy, a well-preserved forty-nine-year-old home wrecker who’d probably passed herself off as thirty-nine.
“Well, that’s a very enlightened attitude, Mrs. Storch,” he said. “I wish everyone shared it.” He gave her the where and when of the memorial mass that would be held at the end of the month and said good-bye.
“Have you been doing that a lot?” I asked. “Answering Irene’s phone and telling complete strangers about the ‘wrong side of the blanket’ thing?”
“Every chance I get.”
“I wonder how your father the deacon feels about that,” I said. “It has to be getting back to him.”
“I know how he feels about it. It makes him nuts. To hell with him.” He sat on his bed and idly punched buttons on Irene’s phone. “I spent too many years being that man’s dirty little secret.”
It seemed to me that Martin had far more reason to be ashamed of Hugh than Hugh had to be ashamed of Martin.
He casually patted the bed next to him, an invitation to sit. I hesitated, but after all, I told myself, the door was open and his mom was right downstairs.
Good grief, this man turned me into a nervous teenager. I sat, not too close, and leaned across to look at the phone. “What are you doing?”
“Checking out the calls she made and received.” He scrolled to the top of the list, which displayed names, phone numbers, and the date and time of each call. “Here’s the day Irene died. Looks like you were the last person to talk to her.”
I took the phone and saw Jane, cell, on the screen, along with my number. Apparently I’d made the call at 8:07 p.m., not long before she died. My throat tightened with emotion. I recognized the names of a couple of her friends who’d phoned her earlier in the day.
Martin peered at the list over my shoulder. He’d moved closer. I found I didn’t mind. “Jonah Diamond called, too,” he said.
The call from Jonah, cell, had come in at 5:12 p.m. “I know what this is. He was supposed to be at Irene’s at six, but he had to cancel.” I filled Martin in on the carrot-cake drama and Jonah’s unwarranted conviction that he’d let Irene down.
“So he throws away the cake?” he said. “Doesn’t that strike you as a little suspicious? I mean, the guy’s patient croaks and he takes pains to make sure no one knows he was supposed to be there that day?”
“Stress makes people do dumb things,” I said. “And speaking of dumb things, we already know who killed Irene.”
“By accident, supposedly. I can’t help it, though, the cake thing just seems fishy.” He took the phone from me and swiped his finger up the screen, swiftly scrolling through Irene’s calls in the last weeks and months of her life.
“You aren’t going to give that back to me, are you?” I asked.
“No, I don’t think that’s going to happen. Hey, I know this guy,” he said, peering at the screen. “Ben Ralston. His name comes up a few times.”
I frowned. “Why does it sound familiar?”
“I’ve known Ralston for years,” he said, “since before he took his police pension and set up shop as a PI.”
“Oh, right. Sten mentioned him. Ben Ralston’s the guy Irene hired to get the goods on Nina during the election.” I could only imagine what sorts of dealings Martin might have had with a cop turned PI.
“Wonder if he called to tell her he found out who Nina was getting it on with,” he said.
“I suspect that if Irene had lived long enough to find out that said mystery lover was none other than her own beloved son Patrick, she’d have paid Ben’s bill and added a big bonus to keep his mouth shut.”
“Marty!” Stevie called up the steps. “Shake a leg. We’re supposed to meet Lexie at the caterer’s at three-thirty.”
Martin rose and lazily descended the stairs, leaving me to follow. “We’ve been through this,” he told his mother. “Maia just wants to go over the final menu. You two don’t need me for that.”
Stevie had finished her hair and makeup. Her colorful outfit—dress and leggings, suede boots, and unconstructed blazer—was funky and flattering. Young looking, but not too young. “Lexie wants you there,” she said, as if that settled it.
“I don’t know why,” he said. “I’d just be in the way. Women are better at that stuff.” This from the man who’d recently catered Uncle Morty’s shivah spread for Sophie.
Stevie gave me the fed-up look women have been giving one another for millennia: Men!
When I’d spied Martin chatting with Maia Armstrong at the tournament, I’d naturally assumed it was a boy-girl thing. Then later I’d just as naturally assumed he was using her to horn in on my business. Now it appeared the two of them had indeed been discussing a catering job, as he’d claimed. I suppose stranger things have happened.
But what kind of catering job? And who was Lexie? My imagination readily filled in the blanks, and in a way I didn’t particularly care for, but hadn’t I just learned the folly of making assumptions?
“Anyway,” Martin said as he grabbed SB and ushered me out the door, “Jane and I have an urgent appointment.” He pinched my arm before I could say, We do? “Piggies in a blanket,” he called to a fuming Stevie as he slid into the passenger side of my Civic. “You can never go wrong with piggies in a blanket.”
I stopped Martin from tossing Sexy Beast into the backseat and instead attached the dog’s safety strap to his seat belt. SB settled on his lap and commenced car-whining. As I pulled away from the curb, I asked Martin why we weren’t taking his lovely new Mercedes instead. Turned out it now belonged to Stevie. The man who had no use for family had given his mother a brand-new, bells-and-whistles Mercedes Benz.
“Anyway, I prefer my bike,” he said. “If you want, we can take that. I have an extra helmet.”
“Right,” I snorted, “that’ll happen.”
Will you be shocked if I admit I entertained a momentary fantasy of clinging to the padre’s sinewy flanks as his big, bad motorcycle ate up the miles and the engine vibrations did unruly things to my body?
Yeah, that’s what I thought. Already you know me too well.
“So who’s this ‘urgent appointment’ with?” I asked.
“Here’s a hint.” Martin lowered his voice to a rumbling baritone and crooned the opening lines of Irene’s ring tone.
“We’re on our way to see John Shaft?”
“Wrong Black private dick.”
“Ben Ralston?” I said. “What can we learn from him? Except maybe that Patrick is the guy Nina was sleeping with, and Ben never got that far in his investigation before Irene died.”
“I want to hear it from him.” Martin muzzled SB with his fingers, commanding him to shut up. The dog wrenched his snout free and whined louder. “Ralston’s a tenacious SOB. I can’t see him just dropping an investigation.”
“His client died.”
“Let’s just see what he has to say.”
“You know,” I said, “you could just pick up the phone and call him.”
“Face-to-face is always better.”
I realized that our dropping by unannounced might not be the swiftest move. I didn’t know much about the PI biz, but I was willing to bet Ben was bound by some sort of confidentiality rule. At the very least, he wouldn’t want it getting around that he blabbed about sensitive investigations to anyone who asked. So I pulled over, called Sten, and persuaded him to phone Ben and grant permission, as Irene’s executor, for him to discuss his investigation with me.
Ralston Investigations occupied a modest office on the top floor of a venerable three-story brick building on Main in Crystal Harbor. It was just him, no receptionist. Ben was a Black man in his late forties, just under average height and fit looking if you didn’t count the slight paunch beneath his red polo shirt.
He’d been expecting me, thanks to Sten’s call, but was surprised to see his old pal Martin tagging along. He made friends with SB and gestured for us to sit on the well-worn, leather-upholstered guest chairs. “What’s a seemingly decent girl like you doing hanging with a bum like this?” he wanted to know.
“Funny,” I said, “someone else said pretty much the same thing today.”
“Who?” he asked.
I jerked my head toward Martin. “His mother.”
Ben laughed. “Well, I guess Stevie knows her boy. So.” He thumped his desk, signaling an end to the small talk. “I’m going to go out on a limb here and guess that our very own Marty McAuliffe—” he tossed his hand toward the padre “—is somehow related to the Crystal Harbor McAuliffes, seeing as you guys are here to discuss the assignment that Irene Hardy McAuliffe hired me for. How am I doing so far? Do my powers of deduction thrill and amaze?”
Martin might have known Ben for years, as he claimed, yet he’d never bothered to fill him in on his connection to the “Crystal Harbor McAuliffes.” I wasn’t surprised.
“Irene was my step-grandma,” Martin said. “Her late husband’s son Hugh had an extramarital fling with Mom way back when.”
Ben said, “So that means I have to get married and/or win the Lotto to have a chance with Stevie?”
“Don’t worry, she got over the rich-family-man thing,” Martin said, “around the time Hugh McAuliffe sicced a squad of high-priced lawyers on a pregnant, homeless teenager.”
I spoke up. “Stevie was homeless?”
“When Mom started showing, her folks kicked her out of the house.” To Ben he said, “Give her a call. She thinks you’re cute.”
“Hey.” Ben indicated himself with a flourishy gesture. “It doesn’t get much cuter than this. So.” He pulled a large brown envelope off a stack of folders. “You guys know why Irene hired me, right?”
The padre and I answered in the affirmative.
“Then you also know that before her death,” Ben said, “I was able to report that there was compelling evidence that Irene’s election opponent, Nina Wallace, was doing the nasty with a man who was not her husband.”
“By now the whole town knows that,” I said, “which I guess was the point. Now that Nina’s gone missing, we thought you might—”
“Hold on.” Ben straightened. “Nina’s missing?”
“You didn’t know?” Martin asked.
“I’ve been out of the loop for a few days. Had to fly out to Chicago to see my mom. Medical emergency.”
“Oh no,” I said. “I hope she’s okay.”
“She’s fine.” Ben waved away my concern. “Audrey Ralston is the queen of the fake stroke. And fake pneumonia. And fake sudden-onset paralysis. One time she decided to mix it up and give herself a case of fake flesh-eating virus.”
“Let me guess,” Martin said. “By the time you rush out there...”
Ben spread his arms. “An immediate and miraculous cure, Lord be praised! It’s not like I never visit, but when that woman takes it into her head that she wants to see me, she means now. You’d think I’d stop falling for it. I mean, people pay me to tell them when other people are lying, and I’m very good at it.”
I chewed back a smile. “But it’s your mom.”
A frustrated growl rumbled in the PI’s chest. Sexy Beast lifted his head and offered a halfhearted response, then snuggled back into my lap.
“Anyway,” Ben said, “I just got back to town about an hour ago. So Nina Wallace is MIA?”
“For five days now,” Martin said. “Since last Thursday.”
“I flew out Wednesday night,” Ben said. “Missed all the excitement. Who’s handling the investigation?”
“Bonnie Hernandez,” I said.
Ben gave an approving nod.
“I thought you two had issues,” Martin said, “from when you were on the force together.”
“We don’t always see eye to eye, but Bonnie’s a capable detective,” Ben said. “Is she leaning on the husband?”
“Mal’s the one who sounded the alarm,” I said. “He’s really broken up over it.”
Ben looked skeptical. “I’m betting he knew his wife was stepping out on him.”
“Not until Nina told him she was leaving him for the other guy,” I said. “Mal still wants to salvage his marriage.”
“That’s what he says. Bonnie’s talking to the boyfriend, too, I assume?”
“Patrick O’Rourke’s at the top of the suspect list,” I said.
Ben frowned. “What’s O’Rourke got to do with it?”
Martin and I exchanged a look. “That’s who she was screwing,” Martin said.
“I don’t know where you got that,” Ben said. “Sure, the guy was at her house a lot, doing odd jobs, but the most intimate thing he did was nibble her muffins—and no, that’s not code.”
I said, “Then who...?” and watched the hint of a smug smile form.
“Nina and her boyfriend took great pains to keep their affair under wraps,” Ben said. “They were good, but I’m better, and just before I left town, I was able to get these.” He slid a stack of eight-by-ten photos out of the envelope and pushed them across his desk.
Martin and I leaned forward. The top photo was an expanse of gray interspersed with thin horizontal slivers revealing the interior of a room. It took me a moment to realize the shot had been taken at a downward angle through the narrow gaps between closed window blinds. Anyone viewing the window straight on or from street level would never see past the blinds.
I was just able to recognize Nina Wallace. She appeared to be setting her purse on a chair near the window. I saw a tile floor and the edge of a utilitarian cabinet.
I was about to ask where the picture was taken when Ben said, “I was on the rooftop across the street with a telephoto lens. Here’s a better angle.” He slid the top photo aside. The next one showed Nina unbuttoning her blouse.
“Now it’s getting interesting.” Martin lifted the picture, and that’s when I noticed it.
“She’s in a doctor’s office.” I squinted at the sliced-up image. That certainly looked like an exam table, partially shrouded with white paper.
“Bingo,” Ben said.
In the next shot Nina was stepping out of her slacks, leaving her in a black-and-ivory lace demi-bra and matching thong.
“Damn blinds,” Martin grumbled.
“Wait,” I said. “You can’t take pictures of someone at the doctor.”
“I told you,” Ben said. “I’m good.”
“No, I mean it’s an invasion of privacy.”
Martin had moved on to the next shot. He said, “Whoa,” and tried to show it to me. The pig. I pushed it away and crossed my arms.
“It’s just wrong,” I told Ben. “It’s a violation.”
“Jane.” Martin waggled the picture. I refused to look.
“There have to be limits.” I was all hopped up on moral outrage. “You can’t just invade someone’s—”
Martin grabbed my head, turned it, and shoved the photo in my face.
In this shot Nina had been joined by a second person. She sat perched on the exam table, her arms and legs wrapped around the man. Even at the downward angle, and with most of the image obscured by the window blinds, and with the couple tangling tonsils as he reached around to unhook her bra, there was no mistaking the identity of Nina’s mystery lover.
Dr. Jonah Diamond.
