Conor stared at Kate, seeming stunned. He reached for her hand.
“There’s another element,” Kate said. “It’s insane, literally. Sam and Maeve found out that Belinda had been married before, and her husband was murdered in the exact same way as she was. His throat was slashed. Belinda was right when she told you she could marry a doctor—she did. He was a psychiatrist at a hospital ...”
“Where?” Conor asked.
“Maynard-King,” Kate said. “It’s a psychiatric hospital in Narragansett, not far from here.”
“There’s a woman out on the island,” Conor said. “Her name is Grace. She said she had been in treatment, like other girls—‘Ghost Girls,’ she called them. She talked about girls going to ‘MK.’”
“MK—Maynard-King,” Kate said.
Conor nodded. “That must be the same place. She said that she survived, but some of the other girls didn’t.”
“Survived what?” Kate asked.
“I don’t know,” Conor said. “But women are being taken, held captive, and murdered.”
“How do you know?”
“You sawPsyche,” Conor said. “The restraints on the bulkhead. He—whoever he is—uses the sailboat to bring them to the island, and then he locks them in a room. TheBeauty and the Beastroom.”
“Where the photo is?” Kate asked, thinking of the text he had sent her, with the image from the Jean Cocteau film.
“Yes,” Conor said. “He has some sort of obsession with the fairy tale.”
“But who is he?” Kate asked. “If there’s a connection to Maynard-King, could it be another doctor there?”
“Possibly,” Conor said. “He has a whole bookcase full of different editions, including translations. Some are vintage, probably valuable, which—along with the boat and mansion itself—makes me think he has money.”
“Who owns the house?” Kate asked.
“Joe is on that,” Conor said. “Another thing—the way the number 1740 runs all through this.”
Kate nodded, excited. “The year Gabrielle-Suzanne Barbot de Villeneuve wrote and publishedLa Belle et la Bête. It’s the oldest known version of the story ...Beauty and the Beast,” she said.
“The date was stenciled onto the door of Suzanne’s truck,” Conor said.
“It was at the grave too,” Kate said. “Someone left a note by Jonathan Tyler’s headstone, along with a bouquet of white roses.”
“Roses?” Conor asked sharply.
“Yes, roses are an important part of the story. They are the reason Beauty became the Beast’s prisoner.”
“In what way?” Conor asked.
“Beauty’s father stole roses from the Beast’s castle, and the forfeit he had to pay was his daughter. He gave his daughter to the Beast,” Kate said. “So it makes it even stranger that Belinda calls you both by those names. Because if you’re the Beast, it means you somehow imprisoned her.”
“But I didn’t,” Conor said.
Kate touched his hand. “I know,” she said. “Of course you didn’t. But someone did, and obviously she would have suffered trauma.”
Conor was quiet for a minute. He walked over to a window and stared out across the ocean, toward the island. When he turned back to Kate, he shook his head.
“I think it’s the other way around,” he said. “Talking to Grace, I have the feeling that the girls became more traumatizedafterthey went to Maynard-King. Maybe the doctor was reenacting the fairy tale—or someone was. And whatever happened there took away their hopes of getting well. Or got them killed.”
“How do you and I figure in?” Kate said. “She started calling you Beast on that weekend in Salem ... but what about me?”
“She hated you because I love you,” Conor said.
