Page 67 of Saltwater

Only, the bad actor is me.

“Thank you for this,” the officer says, taking possession again of the letter from his two juniors. “We will have to verify it, you understand?”

My uncle nods.

“Please let us know,” Marcus says, “if you find anything additional in the area. We will send out our own divers, but we are eager to recover any of the money Lorna was transporting for us.”

The officer nods, makes a note in his book. “Of course. And wewould like to talk to each of you about your alibis for the night Lorna disappeared. Strictly procedure, of course.”

“Whatever you need,” my uncle says.

“And you can understand,” the officer continues, “why we might have come here first, right?”

“Naturally,” my uncle says. “She worked for us.”

The officer shakes his head and pulls something out of his back pocket.

“That is part of it, yes,” he says.

Then he sets the paper down on the table; it’s a clipped article fromIl Mattino,Naples’s daily paper. I read the headline:La Morte di Sarah Lingate Ha Riaperto.

I say it aloud: “The Death of Sarah Lingate Has Been Reopened.” It’s identical to the piece in theFinancial Times,an AP bulletin.

My father pulls the slip of paper toward him.

“Why?” he says, his voice strained. “Why would you bring this here?”

“You can see that we might think the two crimes are related, no? The case reopened just as your assistant is found dead? It would be quite the coincidence,” the officer says. “We will need you to come to the station this afternoon to identify the body.”

He looks around, expecting several of us to volunteer. My uncle agrees to go.

“And we would appreciate it if you would remain available in the event we need to come back and ask additional questions.”

My father is doing his best to tune them out, to read the article as quickly as he can. He was, I realize, surprised by the news about Lorna, worried by it, even. But this—this stuns him. This small article drains the color from his face. If one of them buried it, it wasn’t him.

He reads it over and over and over again until Marcus finally pulls it away.

“I’ve already told you,” my uncle says, “we weren’t involved. In either event. Sarah’s death was not a crime. And it seems too early to determine if Lorna’s was.”

“Lorna’s what?”

Naomi is standing behind the officers; somehow, I haven’t noticed her progress across the garden. I remember her lying on the couch in the living room in the dark; the thickness of that sleep muffling the way she speaks now, the way she moves.

“Lorna’s death,” my uncle says to her. “A drowning. Such a tragedy.”

A drowning—but the officer never mentioned where she was found.

Naomi sways, shifting her weight from one foot to the other. And then, as if on command, she falls. A soft thud as her body hits the grass, like someone has just dropped a bag of mulch. And in everyone’s efforts to help her—the officers are down on their knees now, Freddy and my uncle, too, I call for the housekeeper—my father pulls the scrap of newspaper from where my uncle dropped it on the ground and reads it again and again and again.

Helen

Now

The carabinieri leave an officerat the end of the Via Marino Occhio. He leans against the façade of a luxury hotel and watches the tourist girls. He has been so busy watching the girls, in fact, that he has missed my father. Who slipped out, it seems, while Marcus was on the phone with the attorney.

“None of you,” Marcus says, “will say a word without his consent.”

He looks at Freddy, too, who nods, relieved he won’t need to call in his own counsel.

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