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“Ack. Kristina wasn’t a good decision maker. Don’t want to speak ill of the dead,” he added quickly, when he could see Hale was about to object. “But I’m not telling you anything you don’t know. She wasn’t for you, son.”
Hale stared at his empty wineglass. He’d moved from bourbon, which he’d been drinking much too quickly, to cabernet. He and Declan had eaten some of the casserole that Magda had brought from the office, one of many, apparently, that were showing up from business associates, Hale and Kristina’s only real friends. Neither he nor his grandfather had much of an appetite.
Half an hour later Savannah joined them. “I put him back down. He’s asleep.”
“How’re you going to do this, girl?” Declan asked. “With your job.”
“Declan . . . ,” Hale warned.
“I don’t know,” Savvy answered. “Things are . . . confusing at the moment.”
“Clear as glass to me,” Declan said, ignoring Hale’s glare. “Quit that job. Become a full-time mother. Most important job in the universe.”
Savannah broke into a wide smile, unnerving Declan a bit, apparently, as he demanded, “What are you grinning at?”
“I’m not going to argue with you. You’re . . .” She seemed to bite off what she was going to say. “I like my job, and I need to support myself, and no, I’m not going to live off Bancroft/St. Cloud money, so you can just forget that before you even get started.”
Declan had opened his mouth
, and now he snapped it shut into a thin line of disapproval.
“I’ll feed Declan as much as I can. I want to. But I can’t be with him all the time.”
“Maternity leave,” Declan said flatly.
“We’re all figuring this out,” Hale said. “We’ll take it an hour at a time.”
Savannah shot him a grateful look, then asked, “Could I talk to you alone for a minute?”
They returned to the master bedroom, and Hale closed the door behind him while Savvy walked back toward her chair but didn’t sit down. “You know I’ve been following up on some leads at work, on the Donatella case.”
“I thought you were going to tell me something about Kristina,” he said.
“That too. This is going to sound strange, but the two cases may be dovetailing. Several sources told me that Kristina was having an affair, and that she was . . . She’d been seen with a man at the Donatella house, apparently after Marcus and Chandra moved out or weren’t there.”
Hale thought about his wife, her strange behavior the last weeks and months of her life. “She and I were friends with the Donatellas. . . .”
“I know it doesn’t sound like her,” Savvy said, picking up his train of thought. “I’m having trouble believing it myself. But it gets stranger, and more . . . and more . . . terrible.”
Hale felt himself go still. “What is it?”
Savannah took a breath and launched in. “Last Thursday, before I came here to see Kristina, I stopped by Siren Song and met with Catherine Rutledge. . . .”
Savannah didn’t know how much to tell Hale, whether she should go through every detail or hit the highlights. In the end, she settled for somewhere in between, telling him about Catherine’s worry that Mary’s son, who’d been adopted out when he was still a baby, apparently, had been lured to Echo Island, where Mary was exiled, and had ultimately killed her there, stabbing her to death with a knife, which was currently being tested for DNA evidence from the blood residue on its blade. She then added that Mary had named the boy Declan as a means to get back at Catherine, who’d apparently had a relationship with Hale’s own grandfather at one time. Catherine believed that Declan Jr., as they were calling him, was as mentally unstable as his mother had been, or worse; that he was the one who had had an affair with Kristina and had killed her; and that he was now setting his sights on his half sisters, the women of Siren Song, on his father—or the man he assumed was his father, Declan Bancroft—and maybe even on those who were delving into his life in some way or investigating the Donatella homicides, a crime that might ultimately end up being laid at his feet, as well.
Hale absorbed all the information, a look of incredulity on his face when Savvy finished. He started to ask a question several times, stopping himself, then approaching it from another direction, only to stop himself again. In the end, he asked, “How did this Declan Jr. meet Kristina?”
Savvy said, “I talked to Owen DeWitt, and he implied that he knew someone who calls himself Charlie, not his real name, and who, DeWitt thought, is the devil incarnate.” Hale made a disparaging sound, and Savvy couldn’t blame him. “If he’s the same person Catherine calls Declan Jr., and I kind of think he is, then I’d say he met Kristina here on the coast. I’ve put in a call to DeWitt. I didn’t know on Saturday, when I talked to him, that my sister had been killed. I didn’t press him on Charlie. It seemed . . . I don’t know . . . untrue that Kristina was having an affair.”
“But now you think it’s fact.”
“Several people saw her with someone at the Donatellas’. I’m not sure exactly what nights, but sometime close to their deaths.” Savvy couldn’t hold his gaze and looked away. “I just want to talk to this Charlie—DeWitt called him Good Time Charlie—and see who he is and how he’s connected to this all.”
“What aren’t you telling me?”
Savannah recalled Mickey’s comment about Kristina being with her husband. “I need to talk to DeWitt before I say anything else. I was hoping he’d get back to me by now. Lang is trying to reach him, too. Maybe already has. I just want to know more about Charlie.”
Catherine lay awake in the dark, staring toward the beamed wood ceiling. She was torn over whether to trust Ravinia, but what choice did she have? She’d set the investigation in motion by giving Detective Dunbar the knife because she wanted to know who’d killed her sister. But that was last week, and what had been a question mark last week was almost a certainty now. It was Declan . . . Declan Jr.
