Chapter 4
CHAPTER FOUR
The Starfall Bay police station smelled like burnt coffee and old carpet, and the detective behind the front desk looked like he’d been marinating in both.
I’d spent two days arguing with myself about this.
Two days of Rosaria appearing in every reflective surface in the cottage—the bathroom mirror, the kitchen window, the back of a spoon—demanding I do something.
Two days of Lori’s voice in my head saying “training first.” Two days of staring at the ceiling at three a.m., thinking about my kids and my ex-husband’s family and the word “murdered” rattling around my skull like a marble in a tin can.
In the end, Rosaria won. She always did.
The station was tiny. It occupied what used to be a bank, and you could tell—the chief’s office was in the old vault, and the main room still had the high ceilings and marble floor of a building designed to make you trust it with your money.
Now it held four desks, a watercooler, and a corkboard covered in community notices about lost cats and the upcoming lobster festival.
Only one desk was occupied. The man behind it was tall, broad-shouldered, with salt-and-pepper hair that was mostly silver at the temples and a five o’clock shadow that looked like it had been there since about 2019.
His suit was rumpled in the way that suggested he’d slept in it, or hadn’t slept at all.
He was reading something on his computer and drinking coffee from a mug that said “World’s Okayest Detective,” which I suspected was not self-purchased.
He didn’t look up when I walked in.
I stood there for a moment, clutching my purse strap, then cleared my throat.
He held up one finger. Still didn’t look up.
I waited. Shifted my weight. Looked at the corkboard. Someone had lost a cat named Chairman Meow and was offering a reward of homemade brownies.
“Help you?” He finally raised his eyes. They were brown, deep-set, and currently communicating that whatever I was about to say had better be worth the interruption.
“I’d like to report a possible murder.”
That got his attention. He straightened in his chair. “Sit down.”
I sat in the wooden chair across from his desk. It creaked. His desk was covered in coffee cups—at least four, in various states of emptiness—and case files stacked in towers that defied engineering.
“Detective Tony Caruso.” He picked up a pen. “Name?”
“Gina Ferraro.”
“And whose murder are you reporting?”
“Rosaria Ferraro. My former mother-in-law. She died a few months ago after a family dinner where my divorce from her son was announced. The cause of death was listed as cardiac arrest due to emotional shock.” I’d rehearsed this part. “I have reason to believe she was actually poisoned.”
Tony wrote something down. His handwriting was terrible. “Several months ago.”
“Yes.”
“And you’re coming in now.”
“Yes.”
He set the pen down. “Was a toxicology report done?”
“No. The family didn’t want one. They said it was too painful, that they just wanted to lay her to rest.” I’d called the hospital in New Hampshire to confirm before coming here. “She was seventy-eight. The doctors didn’t push it.”
“And what makes you think it wasn’t natural causes?”
I gripped my purse strap tighter. “Let’s just say I’ve heard things.
The family has a lot to gain from her death.
Rosaria controlled the finances. The estate is substantial—a house overlooking the ocean, investments, jewelry.
With her gone, her children inherit. All three of them. And their spouses.”
Tony studied me. The look wasn’t hostile, exactly, but it wasn’t warm. It was the look of a man who’d heard a lot of stories from a lot of people and had learned to wait for the parts that didn’t add up.
“Mrs. Ferraro—“
“Ms. The divorce is final. I kept the last name as it’s the same as my children’s.”
“Ms. Ferraro. You said she died after a dinner where your divorce was announced?”
“My ex-husband announced it. I’d already moved out.”
“And the family blamed you for her death.”
“They blamed the shock of the announcement. Which they blamed on me. Yes.”
He picked up the pen again, turned it between his fingers. “So you have a personal interest in proving it wasn’t shock.”
I’d been expecting that. It still stung. “I’m not here to clear my name, Detective.”
He raised an eyebrow. Just one. It was annoyingly effective.
“Okay, I’m a little bit here to clear my name. But mostly I’m here because someone got away with murder and nobody’s even looking.”
Tony leaned back in his chair. It groaned under him. “You said you have reason to believe she was poisoned. What reason?”
This was the part I hadn’t rehearsed well enough. I couldn’t exactly say “her ghost told me.” I’d googled “how to report a crime based on psychic information” and the results had not been encouraging.
“I know things,” I said.
Tony stared at me.
“About the circumstances of her death,” I added quickly. “Things that suggest it wasn’t natural.”
“You know things.” His voice was perfectly flat. Not sarcastic, not dismissive—just flat in the way that a lake is flat right before a storm.
“Yes.”
“What kind of things?”
I shifted in the creaky chair. “I’d rather not say how I came by the information.”
“That’s not how this works.”
“Can you just—look into it? Check the details, see if they hold up?”
Tony put the pen down and rubbed his eyes with his thumb and forefinger. When he looked at me again, something in his expression had recalibrated. Not sympathy. More like a very tired man trying to figure out which box to put me in.
“Ms. Ferraro. You said the divorce was finalized—when?”
“Three months ago.”
“And you moved here?”
“Three months ago.”
“Where were you the night of the dinner?”
“At the dinner.” I paused. “I sat through the entire thing. My ex-husband made the announcement over dessert.”
“And your relationship with the deceased?”
I almost laughed. “She hated me. Thirty years of making that very clear.”
“So you had a contentious relationship with the victim, you were in the area at the time of her death, the family blames you, and now—several months later—you walk in here saying she was murdered, but you won’t tell me how you know.
” He tapped the pen against his notepad.
“You see why I might have some follow-up questions.”
“I’m not the one who benefits from her death, Detective. The divorce settlement was already done. I got nothing from Rosaria’s estate. Nothing.” I met his eyes. “I’m the only person in that family who doesn’t have a financial motive.”
Something shifted behind his eyes. Not belief—nothing close to belief—but a flicker of the thing that makes a cop a cop. Curiosity, maybe. The itch of a question that doesn’t have a neat answer.
“Why now?” he asked. “If you’ve suspected this for months—“
“I haven’t suspected it for months. I came to know recently.”
“How recently?”
“Very.”
“And you can’t tell me how.”
I shrugged, going for casual and probably landing somewhere around desperate. “Sometimes it takes a while. Things come to you.”
Tony looked at me for a long time. Then he picked up his coffee, drained what was left, and set the empty mug on top of a stack of files with the precision of a man who builds coffee cup towers out of habit.
“I’ll make some calls,” he said.
“You will?”
“Don’t sound so surprised. It’s my job.” He pulled a fresh notepad from his desk drawer. “Tell me everything you ‘know.’ I’ll decide what’s worth checking.”
I was about to start when the air behind Tony’s desk went cold.
No. Not here. Not now. I’d thought this exact thing at Tammy’s, and it had worked about as well then as it did now.
Rosaria materialized in the reflection of the framed commendation on the wall behind Tony’s head. She took one look around the station and her lip curled.
“This is the police? This is who you are trusting with my case?” She peered at Tony through the glass. “He has four coffee cups on his desk. That is not a dedicated officer, that is a man with a drinking problem.”
I kept my eyes on Tony. “Rosaria had a very specific routine. She drank tea every night at eight o’clock. Every single night, for as long as I knew her. Chamomile with honey. She was religious about it.”
Tony wrote it down. “Okay.”
“Tell him about the cup,” Rosaria instructed. “My good china cup. The one from the set my mother gave me. I only used those cups.”
“She had a set of specific cups she used,” I said. “Fine china. Her mother’s set of six different patterns. She never let anyone else touch it.”
Tony’s pen paused. “How’s that relevant?”
“If someone wanted to poison her, they’d know about the tea. Eight o’clock, every night. She’d choose the cup in the morning and have it on the counter until it was time to make the tea. It’s a window.”
“The cup.” Rosaria’s voice had gone tight. “When the family came back to the house after I was found, the cup was gone. Washed, dried, put away. Someone had been in that kitchen, Gina. After everyone left dinner. But I don’t know who, everything after the divorce announcement is a blur until now.”
I relayed this, minus the source. “The morning, after she was found dead, the family went back to her house. Everything had been cleaned. Dishes washed, counters wiped down. But nobody was supposed to be there. Everyone had gone home after dinner.”
Tony stopped writing. He looked up at me, and this time the expression on his face was harder to read. Still skeptical—that was baked in, part of the architecture of the man—but there was something else underneath it. The pen tapped twice against the notepad.
“Someone came back.”
“Someone came back and scrubbed that kitchen before anyone thought to look at it. The tea cup, the counter, everything.”
“Who had a key?”
“Half the family. Sal, George, Paula.” I gripped my purse strap. “But I don’t know who went back. Nobody’s ever mentioned it. That’s the point—nobody’s mentioned cleaning the kitchen because nobody wants to explain why they were there.”
“Have him find out—“ Rosaria started.
“I’ll find out,” I said, too sharply, and Tony’s eyebrow went up again.
“Talking to me or someone else?”
“You. Sorry. Just—thinking out loud.”
He held my gaze for a beat too long. I had the uncomfortable feeling that Detective Tony Caruso didn’t miss much, even if he looked like he’d been assembled from coffee grounds and overdue paperwork.
“Ms. Ferraro.” He closed the notepad. “I’m going to be straight with you. I don’t know what’s going on here. Your story has some holes, your source is a mystery, and you’re asking me to investigate a months old death that was ruled natural causes in another jurisdiction.”
“But?”
He almost smiled. Almost. It was more like a shift in the geography of his face, a slight relaxation around the eyes that disappeared before it fully arrived.
“But the tea thing is specific. The dish-washing is specific. And in my experience, people who make things up go big—conspiracies, cover-ups, drama. They don’t come in with teacups and dishwashing schedules.”
He stood, and I realized exactly how tall he was. He hadn’t seemed that tall sitting down, but standing, he had a good six inches on me and shoulders that suggested he’d played something physical in another life.
“I’ll look into it,” he said. “No promises. And I’m going to need you to come back with something more concrete than ‘I know things.’”
“Fair enough.”
I stood too, gathered my purse, and turned toward the door. Behind me, I heard him pick up his phone.
Rosaria appeared one more time, a shimmer in the glass door as I pushed it open.
“He does not believe you,” she said.
“No,” I agreed quietly. “But he’s going to look anyway.”
“That is something.” She paused. “He has good posture, at least. For a man who clearly lives on caffeine and stubbornness.”
I walked out the door and didn’t dignify that with a response.