Chapter 13
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
“Walk me through it again,” Lori said, both hands wrapped around her tea like she was holding herself steady. “Who had access to the methanol, and who would know how to use it?”
We were in the backroom of Bayberry House.
The scorch marks from my napkin fire were still visible on the table, which Tammy had covered with a cheerful plaid runner that wasn’t fooling anyone.
Jill had her legal pad open to a fresh page with two columns: Access and Knowledge.
The columns were currently empty because we kept going in circles.
“The methanol is the easy part,” I said. “Tony said it’s industrial. Solvents, paint strippers, adhesives. You can buy it at a hardware store.”
“Or an art supply store,” Tammy said.
The table went quiet in a specific way. The way a table goes quiet when everyone arrives at the same thought simultaneously and no one wants to say it first.
Jill said it. “Paula’s an artist.”
“She must work with solvents every day,” Tammy added, her voice careful. “Turpentine, mineral spirits, varnish removers. She’d have access to methanol-based products without raising a single eyebrow.”
“Access isn’t knowledge,” I said, even as the thought settled into my stomach. “Having the solvent and knowing how to turn it lethal are different things.”
“Are they, though?” Jill was writing now, pen moving fast. “Tony said you’d need to modify the concentration. But the base compound is right there in her studio. She handles it constantly. She’d know the properties, the smell, the taste—or lack of taste, if it’s been diluted properly.”
“Paula came to my cottage,” I said. “Told me about the diary, so she knew about it. Why do that if she’s the one who took it?”
“Misdirection,” Jill said. “Classic strategy. You get ahead of the information by being the one to introduce it. That way you control the narrative around it. I’ve seen defendants do it a hundred times—bring up the evidence yourself, frame it the way you want, and nobody suspects you of hiding it because you were the one who mentioned it. ”
“Or she’s innocent and she was genuinely wondering about the diary,” I said.
“Also possible.” Jill capped her pen. “But we need to rule her out before we can move on. Right now she’s got access, proximity, knowledge of the diary, and a lifetime of motive.”
“Her alibi for the evening is solid,” Lori said. “Gallery opening, witnesses, timestamps. But the poisoning could have happened earlier. The tea cup was sitting on the counter all afternoon.”
“We keep coming back to that counter,” Tammy murmured. “Forty years of routine. Anyone who’d been in that kitchen knew the cup would be sitting there, unattended, for hours.”
Rosaria materialized in the bar mirror, and I could tell from her expression that she’d been listening. Her face was tight—not angry, something more complicated. This was her daughter they were discussing.
“Go to her gallery,” Rosaria said quietly. “See what she works with. See what she knows.”
I relayed this without attribution. “I’ll go see her. Visit the gallery, casual. Admire the art. Ask some questions.”
Tammy raised an eyebrow. “You think she’ll talk?”
“Paula always talks. It’s her best quality and her worst.”
Paula’s gallery was on a side street in Portland, a converted mill building with exposed brick and huge windows that let in the kind of light artists would commit crimes for.
The sign outside said Ferraro Gallery in clean black letters, which must have driven Rosaria insane—Paula using the family name for the one thing Rosaria had dismissed as a waste of time.
I walked in like I was browsing. The space was bigger than I’d expected—high ceilings, concrete floors, Paula’s paintings on the walls in various sizes.
They were good. Better than good. Bold colors, confident brushwork, landscapes of the coast that felt alive and slightly wild.
One large canvas near the entrance showed Starfall Bay at dawn, the water silver and violent, the sky cracked open with pink light.
It looked like hope feels when you’re not sure you deserve it.
Not the careful, pretty paintings you’d hang in a dentist’s office. These had edges.
A smaller piece near the back caught my eye—a woman alone in a garden, face turned away, surrounded by flowers that were just slightly too bright, too vivid, like the color was compensating for something. I recognized the garden. It was Rosaria’s.
Paula was in the back, behind a half-wall that separated the gallery from her working studio.
I could see easels, canvases stretched on frames, a long workbench covered in paint tubes and jars and rags stiff with dried color.
The smell hit me before I rounded the corner—turpentine and linseed oil and something sharper underneath, chemical and clean.
“Gina.” She looked up from a canvas she was priming, surprise shifting quickly to warmth. She had paint on her forearms and a smear of cobalt blue on her cheek. “Twice in two weeks. People will talk.”
“They already talk. It’s a small coast.” I wandered along the workbench, looking at the supplies without trying to look like I was looking at them. Jars of solvent, clearly labeled. Bottles of medium. A ventilation hood over one end of the bench, the professional kind. “This is a beautiful space.”
“Took me fifteen years to afford it. Rosaria told me I’d never make a living with paint.” Paula set down her brush. “She was almost right. I almost didn’t.”
I picked up a jar of solvent, casual, turned it in my hand. The label read Methanol-Based Cleaner — Flammable — Use in Well-Ventilated Area. My fingers tightened around it and I set it back down.
“You work with some serious chemicals in here.”
“Part of the job. Solvents, varnishes, fixatives—half the stuff in this studio could kill you if you drank it.” She said it matter-of-factly, the way people who work with dangerous materials talk about them. Then she paused. Her eyes went to the jar I’d just set down. Back to me.
Something shifted in her face. The warmth cooled.
“Half the artists in New England have that solvent, Gina. But to actually turn it into something lethal? You’d need chemistry knowledge. Real chemistry. I barely passed high school science.”
“I wasn’t—“
“You were.” Her voice was flat now, direct.
Paula without the warmth was a different person—sharper, harder, the rebel who’d survived Rosaria’s disapproval by building walls of her own.
“You came here to see if I could have made the poison. That’s why you’re touching my solvents and asking about chemicals. ”
I didn’t insult her by denying it. She’d always been too smart for that.
Paula crossed her arms, paint-stained fingers gripping her elbows. She studied me for a long moment, and I watched the calculations happening behind her eyes—what I knew, what I might know, what I was really after.
“Why are you really here?” she asked. “Did you find the diary?”
I kept my face neutral. “No.”
“But you looked.”
I didn’t answer. That was answer enough.
Paula let out a breath and turned away, pacing to the window and back. When she faced me again, her composure had cracked—not broken, but cracked, like a plate that’s been dropped and is holding together by habit.
“There’s something in there about me,” she said.
“Something no one else knows. Mom held it over my head for twenty years. Every family dinner—that look she’d give me.
That little smile, like she was turning a key in a lock only we knew about.
” Paula’s jaw worked. “Twenty years of that smile, Gina. Twenty years of knowing that any time she wanted, she could destroy me.”
She didn’t say what the secret was. The words gathered at the edge of her mouth and she pulled them back, swallowed them down. Her eyes were bright and hard, daring me to push.
I didn’t push.
“My alibi is solid,” Paula said. “Gallery opening. Dozens of witnesses. Timestamped photos. I didn’t kill her.”
“But you could have slipped something in the cup earlier. During the party, before dinner. It was sitting on the counter all afternoon.”
“So could anyone. So could George.” Paula leaned in, and her voice dropped.
Not quiet—intense. “You want to look at someone acting guilty? Look at George. He’s been a mess since Mom died.
Jumpy. Secretive. Locking himself in that den more than ever, with the deadbolt on.
Won’t let Claudia in. Won’t let anyone in. ”
“George has always been like that.”
“Not like this. This is different.” She shook her head.
“I went over there last week and he nearly jumped out of his skin when I knocked on the den door. Dropped a bottle of paint he was using on one of his models and just—froze. Stood there with paint all over the carpet, staring at me like I’d caught him doing something terrible. ”
“What kind of paint?”
“Model paint. Enamel. The little bottles he uses for his airplanes.” She waved a hand.
“That’s not the point. The point is the way he looked at me.
Like a trapped animal. And then Claudia came around the corner and he snapped back to normal so fast it gave me whiplash.
Just—wiped up the paint, smiled, said he’d been startled. Like nothing happened.”
“What do you think he’s doing?”
“I don’t know. But something’s going on with him.
Has been for months. And Claudia—“ Paula paused, choosing her words. “Claudia acts like everything’s fine. She’s always acted like everything’s fine.
But I’ve watched her at family events. She watches George the way a handler watches a dog that bites. ”
She uncrossed her arms and sat on the edge of her workbench, suddenly tired. “Look, Gina. I know how this looks. The artist with the solvents, the angry daughter with the motive, the woman who said she was glad the old witch was dead. I know I’m on your list. But I didn’t do it.”
She met my eyes. Steady. Direct. The kind of eye contact that either meant she was telling the truth or she was very, very good at lying.
“I loved her,” Paula said quietly. “Underneath everything, all the fighting and the years of silence—I loved her. And I hate that she died thinking I didn’t.”
I stood in the chemical-scented studio with the light pouring through the big windows and the paintings watching us from the walls, and I wanted to believe her. Every instinct said to believe her. Paula was blunt and honest and she wore her damage on the outside where everyone could see it.
But someone in this family had poured poison into a teacup and washed the evidence before the body was cold, and that someone had looked their family in the eye every day since and smiled.
“I believe you, Paula.”
I mostly did. Mostly was the best I could offer anyone right now.
She walked me to the door. At the threshold she stopped me with a hand on my arm.
“Find the diary, Gina. Before whoever has it uses it.” Her grip tightened. “Because whatever Mom had on me, she had worse on other people. And some of those people don’t handle pressure the way I do.”
I drove home thinking about George in his locked den, paint on the carpet, jumping at shadows. Did he use solvents with methanol for his model planes?
Paula was either innocent or the best liar in the family. George was either grieving or hiding something that made him lock his door against his own wife. And somewhere, in someone’s hands, a diary full of leverage was ticking like a clock.