“It was meant as one. Did you handle money that way with your fiancé?”
“Absolutely. We split all expenses.”
“Rent? Utilities?”
She frowned. “We didn’t live together, so rent and utilities weren’t a problem. Paying my own way for everything else made things a lot simpler when we split up. There was no arguing over money.”
“Sounds like you were planning to go into the marriage with one foot already out the door. Wait, I take that back. You didn’t even have a foot in the door, because you weren’t sharing living quarters.”
“Let’s just say I was ready to adjust to changing circumstances.”
Mason nodded once. “Right. You had one foot out the door.”
She was starting to get annoyed. “You’re not in any position to talk. How long did your marriage last?”
“About five minutes. I told you, I’m a lousy communicator.”
“Is that the reason you didn’t have kids?”
“No.” He smiled briefly, but there wasn’t much humor involved. “That particular kind of communication I understand. I just wasn’t good at the verbal kind.”
Intuition told Lucy to hold her tongue.
There was a beat of silence, and then Mason exhaled slowly.
“Irene said she wanted to wait to have children until we were both making more money. She found someone else who was already on the fast track financially. That was before Fletcher Consulting became successful.”
The waiter returned. Mason signed the slip, tucked his credit card back into his wallet and got to his feet. Lucy rose and collected her windbreaker. She hesitated.
“Thank you,” she finally said. She was going for simple and gracious, but she knew that it didn’t come out that way.
Mason looked amused. “Now who’s having trouble communicating?”
Face burning, she headed for the door. “You know, this has actually been a very nice getaway in spite of the stop at Rainshadow Farm. Back in Summer River I feel like I’m always on guard, waiting for another Colfax to spring out of the bushes.”
“Things have definitely been lively since you arrived in town,” Mason agreed. “We’ve got time. Let’s take a walk on the beach before we drive back.”
“Sounds like a plan.”
Mason drove a short distance out of the small community and found a lay-by on the bluffs above a rocky beach. He parked the car, and they made their way down to the water, pebbles skittering beneath their shoes. The snapping breeze off the ocean whipped Lucy’s hair and sent a rush of pure, unadulterated delight through her. It was good to be here, alone on a beach, with Mason.
She glanced at him, smiling to herself at the sight of his tousled hair. He looked delicious in his black windbreaker, jeans and sunglasses. She was no longer sixteen, but the hormones she thought had matured and perhaps gone a little stale in the past thirteen years were playing havoc with her senses and emotions.
Stop staring, woman. You’ve got him all to yourself for a while. Do what Aunt Sara would tell you to do—be in the moment.
That bit of enlightenment advice was all well and good, except that she wanted the moment to go on indefinitely. Not a realistic option.
She refocused her attention on the rough beach and stuffed her hands into the pockets of her own windbreaker to restrain herself from doing something rash like, say, grab Mason and kiss him senseless. Assuming she could kiss him senseless. Her commitment issues had some disappointing side effects when it came to sex. But given the hot embrace at the river’s edge the other night, she had cause for hope.
“What are you thinking?” Mason asked.
Caught off guard, she groped for words and finally came up with the question that had been on her mind since she had walked into Fletcher Hardware and found Mason behind the counter.
“Why did you return to Summer River?” she asked.
She didn’t expect a straightforward answer, so she was more than a little stunned when she got one.
“I screwed up,” he said. “Someone died.”
It took her a moment to process the information. Shaken, she came to a halt and turned to stare at him. He stopped, too, and looked at her. They were both wearing sunglasses, so she could not read his eyes, but she could see the grim line of his jaw.
Shadows, she thought. Sara said that everyone carried a few around.
“What happened?” she asked.
Again, she did not expect an answer. But she got one.
“We were consulting for a small-town police department. Twenty years ago there were three murders, all within a hundred-mile radius of the community. The victims were hitchhikers who had been picked up by the killer. They were homeless men.”
“Victims who had no family to push for a thorough investigation.”
“The crimes were clearly the work of one person, but the victims appeared to have been chosen at random. The killings stopped within a few months, but the killer was never found. The cases went cold. The locals didn’t have the money or manpower to pursue the investigations. But a few months ago they called us in when a new murder occurred.”
“A new crime that looked like part of the old pattern?”
“Right. The current chief of police had started out on the force twenty years earlier as a rookie cop. He recognized the pattern and asked for our help. We ran the program, but the results were too vague to be useful. All we got from Alice was the standard unhelpful profile of a serial killer. It described over half the adult males in the community.”
“Alice usually gets closer than that?”
“Much closer. Aaron’s program is good. But like any computer program, Alice depends on the data that is fed into it. The basic gi-go rule has never changed.”
“Garbage in, garbage out. I’m very familiar with that particular rule in an investigation,” Lucy said. “I come up against it frequently in my work.”
“I looked over the files that had been sent to us and decided there was something wrong with the data. So I visited the scenes of the crimes myself, to see if I could get a feel for what was off.”
“You said it helped to go into the field sometimes.”
“It took me a while, but it finally hit me. The killer had to know how the program worked.”
“Good grief, the new murderer was someone who worked for you?”
Mason’s mouth twisted. “He was an employee who had left a year earlier to establish his own investigation business. Gilbert Porter, one of our first hires. He knew some of the trapdoors, and he also knew some of the key algorithms Alice uses to analyze data.”