Chapter 15
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
The Humane Society benefit was being held at the Seacoast Grand in Portland, a hotel that was trying very hard to live up to its name.
The ballroom was done up in navy and gold, with tables of silent auction items lining the walls and a string quartet playing something inoffensive in the corner.
Waiters circled with trays of canapés. The wine was, as Tammy had predicted, cheap.
Claudia was in her element. I spotted her the moment I walked in—cream dress, those pearls again, moving through the room like she’d been born to chair galas.
She touched elbows, tilted her head at the right moments, laughed at the right volume.
Every gesture calibrated. The devoted daughter-in-law turned community pillar, channeling her grief into good works.
I took a glass of white wine from a passing tray and positioned myself near the silent auction tables, where I could watch without being obvious.
The auction items ranged from spa packages to a weekend at someone’s lake house.
A local artist had donated a painting of the harbor—bright, loose brushstrokes, a little rough around the edges.
The placard read: Paula Ferraro, First Light, Starfall Bay. Early work. Donated by the artist.
I paused in front of it. Paula had donated one of her early pieces to Claudia’s charity event. That was either an olive branch or a middle finger, and with Paula it could go either way.
George was there too, which I’d expected but which still made my stomach tighten.
He stood near the bar with a bourbon he hadn’t touched, watching the room the way a rabbit watches an open field.
He kept tugging at his tie. His eyes moved to Claudia every few seconds and then away, like he couldn’t stop tracking her but didn’t want to be caught doing it.
Claudia glided past him on her way to greet a couple near the entrance. She touched his arm as she passed—light, wifely, automatic. George flinched. His bourbon sloshed, and he grabbed a napkin to blot his sleeve, face burning.
She didn’t notice, or pretended not to. She was already shaking hands with someone in a blue blazer, her laugh carrying across the room.
Something was very wrong between them.
I waited until Claudia was between conversations—a brief pause while she scanned the room for the next person to charm—and approached.
“Claudia. Beautiful event.”
Her expression did a quick shuffle: surprise, calculation, then the warm mask snapping into place. “Gina. I didn’t expect to see you here. Are you a Humane Society supporter?”
“Always loved animals.” I smiled. Lying to Claudia felt less like dishonesty and more like speaking her language. “How’s George holding up? He seems a little on edge. This whole thing with the family—it’s been hard on everyone.”
Claudia’s smile tightened at the corners, the way a seam tightens before it splits. “George is... George. You know how he gets.”
I did know. I’d watched George be overlooked and overshadowed for thirty years of family dinners.
“He just needs time,” Claudia continued, reaching for her clutch. “We all do.” She unclasped it and pulled out a lipstick—matte, expensive—and as she did, something slid out and landed on the carpet between us.
A keycard in a paper sleeve. I bent to pick it up before she could.
Harborview Inn, Portsmouth.
I held it out. Claudia snatched it—too fast, fingers closing over it like she was catching something alive. Color rose up her neck and into her cheeks, the first crack in that polished surface I’d ever seen.
“George forgot this in his jacket.” Her voice had gone brittle, thin as old ice. “I keep finding things in his pockets lately.”
She shoved the keycard deep into her clutch and snapped it shut. Her eyes met mine, and for half a second the mask dropped entirely. Underneath was something raw and humiliated—the look of a wife who knows her husband is up to something and would rather die than discuss it.
“Men, right?” She attempted a smile. It didn’t land.
“Right,” I said quietly.
She excused herself to refill her wine, and I stood there holding my own glass, turning over what I’d just seen. Across the room, George was staring into his bourbon like it contained the secrets of the universe. He looked miserable. He looked guilty.
George was having an affair. Poor Claudia.
I found Claudia again near the dessert table twenty minutes later. She’d reassembled herself—mask back in place, lipstick fresh, clutch firmly closed. I picked up a chocolate-covered strawberry I had no intention of eating and stood next to her.
“I’ve been thinking about that morning,” I said, keeping my voice casual. Sympathetic. “When the cleaning lady found Rosaria. It must have been awful for you and George.”
“It was awful for everyone.”
“So George was really home that night, though?” I gave her a pointed look. She was covering for his affair, maybe she covered for him that night too.
Claudia’s warmth cooled by several degrees. She set down her wine glass with a precise click. “George was home.”
A pause. Then she seemed to catch herself, recalibrating, pulling the gracious hostess back on like a coat.
“Look, Gina.” Her voice went lighter, almost dismissive. “If you’re looking for someone with secrets worth killing over, you should look at the whole family. Rosaria had something on everyone.”
“What do you mean?”
“Sal and his money problems—you must have known about those, even before the divorce. Paula and that award she built her entire career on.” She waved a hand toward the silent auction, toward Paula’s painting on its easel.
“George never being enough, no matter what he did. Even me.” A tight smile.
“I was a vet tech making twelve dollars an hour when George and I met. I didn’t come from money.
Rosaria never let me forget it. That’s why I do things like this”—she gestured at the ballroom—“the charity work, the volunteering. I love animals. It’s the one thing that was always mine, before George, before the Ferraros.
But Rosaria thought I was beneath the family. She thought I was playing a part.”
She spread her hands, the gracious hostess again, as if presenting the evidence of her innocence on a silver tray.
“We all had reasons to resent her, Gina. Every single one of us. That doesn’t make any of us a killer.”
She touched my arm—a brief, practiced gesture of warmth—and excused herself to greet a donor who’d just arrived.
I watched her cross the room, smile already in place, and thought about how quickly she’d shifted from humiliated wife to poised hostess to woman baring her soul to woman ending the conversation.
Four modes in two minutes. Seamless transitions. Not a seam showing.
Rosaria materialized in the glass of a framed auction poster on the wall beside me. She was watching Claudia too.
“She is good,” Rosaria said. There was something almost like respect in her voice, and she clearly hated it. “I will give her that. She is very good.”
“At what?”
Rosaria’s expression shifted. Frustration rippled through her form, edges going fuzzy. “Pretending.”
“Rosaria—”
But she was gone.
I stood alone next to the dessert table, holding a strawberry I didn’t want, in a room full of people who didn’t know a ghost was watching them.
Across the room, Claudia laughed at something a donor said.
George stared at his drink. Paula’s early painting hung on its easel under a soft spotlight, bright and rough and hopeful in a way that Paula hadn’t been in years.
Everyone had reasons. Everyone had secrets. And somewhere in the tangle of this family’s resentments and lies, a murderer was sipping cheap wine and smiling.