“Is there anything else you can think of that I should know about?” I ask.

  Celeste looks back and forth, like she’s making sure no one is listening to her, then leans a little closer.

  “I think you should know about The Board,” she says.

  “The Board?” I ask.

  “The Twilight Cove Board of Community Enrichment,” she says. “They’re just called The Board.”

  “Who are they?” I ask.

  “That’s a really hard question to answer,” she says. “They are a group of very powerful people who are known around Twilight Cove for not just their association with each other but also their seeming involvement in just about everything that happens around the community. They don’t talk about what they do and would probably never openly describe themselves as having the kind of influence and control they do, but they are not shy about their position within the community. They donate tremendously to charitable organizations and causes. They even sponsored the Mardi Gras parade. They also get involved in the politics of the area through endorsements and support, promoting businesses, speaking up about issues. Everything that would create influence, they do. Outwardly, they seem to want to make the community the best it can be and do all good things.”

  “‘Outwardly’?” I ask. “That sounds like there’s something else going on with them.”

  “That’s where things get a little more shadowy. They do great things for Twilight Cove. There’s no denying that. They do massive fundraisers that support charitable efforts, and they are always championing things like beautification efforts and laws that protect the island. But there are whispers they aren’t all what they seem to be. Some say they will make things happen and ensure things go a certain way, but for a price. Sometimes that price is as simple as building up donations or lining their own pockets, but for the most part, they want power over people’s lives and commitment of their total loyalty and obedience.

  “They want to be able to mold things into the way they think they should be, and if they are going to do something that benefits a person, it will only be because it fits into their vision and they know they are going to get something out of it—possibly just the existence of a lingering ‘favor’ that they keep in their pocket with the full awareness of the other party that they expect to be able to cash that favor in at any time,” she tells me.

  “That sounds like The Order,” I murmur to Xavier.

  He nods. “Except they didn’t admit they even existed.”

  “Who is The Order?” Celeste asks.

  “They were a secret society that Xavier worked for years ago. You remember me telling you about my cousin Emma?”

  “The FBI agent?” she asks.

  “Yeah. She discovered the existence of the group and their involvement in several murders and the disappearance of an actress, which led to the discovery of a whole network of things they were doing. They wouldn’t admit that the group existed, but those who could get into it would have their lives made for them. They would be completely backed by the group and have whatever they needed done. But getting into the group was very difficult, and there was a lot of darkness surrounding the kind of power they had,” I say.

  I stop short of telling her about what they did to Xavier. It’s not my story to tell right now, and I give him the chance to add it if he wants to or let it go if he’d rather. He meets my eyes, and I can see the pain in them. They turn away, and I know he’s decided to leave the story unspoken.

  “What does The Board have to do with Joseph Palmer?” I ask.

  Celeste glances around again. “Joseph was always involved in things that The Board was doing, and it seemed like they might have been supporting him in a lot of ways. I got the feeling he was a pawn for them. I just don’t know for sure what that means.”

  I’m still thinking about The Board and how Celeste described them when we finish lunch. I want to find out more about them, so Xavier and I get on the ferry to go to the island. When we arrive, we head for the Twilight Cove library in hopes of doing some research. We search through newspaper clippings and back volumes of local newsletters to find everything we can about the Twilight Cove Board of Community Enrichment.

  “They could not have chosen a vaguer name,” I mutter as I read through an old newspaper recounting a fun run organized by The Board as a fundraising effort.

  “That’s the point,” Xavier says. “They want to be whatever people want them to be. They can’t be too precise.”

  “All of these things are talking about the wonderful things they’ve done for the community and all the efforts they’ve made toward improving the island. But some of the quotes…” I read through a few of the things that people said when they were interviewed about the events and effects of the efforts. “They sound like Celeste was really accurate in her description of something being off about them. This one guy said, ‘All I’ll say about The Board is, they know what they’re doing.’ I can see where that might be a good thing, but hearing Celeste say that they have a shady side gives it a different feeling.”

  I find a listing of all the members of The Board and get a strange feeling from looking at the rows of pictures of identical poses and beige smiles. They were all the image of perfection. The kind of predictable similarity that was supposed to create a feeling of trust and dependability but managed to be vaguely unsettling.

  “A couple of these men look like they should be hanging out with a thimble, a race car, and a dog and building tiny red hotels on things,” Xavier says.

  “I want to talk to them,” I tell him.

  “What do you think they’re going to tell you?” he asks. “What do you think they have to tell you?”

  “I don’t know,” I say. “But I feel like I need to at least try.”

  I walk into the office building for the Twilight Cove Board for Community Enrichment and walk up to a curved jade-green desk rising up out of a sea of white marble in the airy lobby. A woman looks up from her computer screen and gives me a dazzling, heavily rehearsed smile.

  “Good afternoon,” she says. “Welcome. How can I help you?”

  “Hello. My name is Dean Steele. I’m a private investigator. I was wondering if there are any members of The Board available for me to speak with,” I say.

  “Do you have an appointment?” she asks, moving as if she’s going to check a log of appointments set with the members.

  “I don’t,” I tell her.

  “I’m so sorry, but our members are very busy, and…”

  “I know they are busy, and I’m sorry for just showing up like this, but this situation has only very recently happened and is evolving at the moment. I’m just asking for a few moments,” I say.

  I hope I can appeal to her enough that she’ll be willing to reach out to anyone who might not currently be in a meeting or engrossed in whatever they do behind the heavy glass doors I see behind the desk. She looks at me for a few seconds, then her expression softens.

  “All right. Let me see if anyone is available. You can wait over there.”

  “Thank you so much.”

  I follow the slight nod of her head over to a waiting area off to the side of the lobby. Xavier and I sink into the white cushions of the chairs to wait. Xavier pokes at the stack of magazines on the table like he’s not sure if he can trust that they are truly just magazines. He picks out a crafting magazine and starts flipping through it.

  We wait for several minutes before the receptionist calls out to me.

  “Alec Walker will be out in just a moment,” she tells me. “But he doesn’t have much time.”

  She says it with a heavy sense of importance, like I should truly understand the value of every second of this man’s time and what he could be doing with them if he wasn’t using them on me.

  “Thank you,” I say.

  It takes another couple of minutes for the glass doors to open, and one of the men I recognize from the website comes toward me. He looks like he walked out of his picture and directly through the doors, right down to the soft, unthreatening smile.

  He puts his hand out toward me as he’s still approaching, a subtle sign of control.

  “Alec Walker,” he says.

  “Dean Steele,” I tell him.

  “What can I do for you, Mr. Steele?” he asks.

  “I’m a private investigator, and I am consulting on the Joseph Palmer case,” I tell him. “I know that he has been heavily involved in many of the activities and efforts of your board and was hoping you might be able to tell me about him.”

  “Joseph,” he says, shaking his head and making a slight tut-tut sound under his breath. “Such a tragedy. He was a good man and will be missed by all. I know I speak for all of us when I say I can’t imagine Twilight Cove without him.”

  It was a quintessential brochure response, something as glossy and eerily calm as the man who was speaking the words. It carries no real emotion, no reaction beyond the slight movement of his head.

  “Do you have any thoughts on who might have wanted to hurt him?” I ask.

  Alec’s eyes narrow just slightly, another choreographed movement meant to ensure I saw confusion on his face rather than a genuine reaction. His head tilts to the side.

  “Isn’t this being looked at as retaliation for his speaking out about his time on the jury?” he asks.

  It sounds like he thinks this should have been a foregone conclusion and he doesn’t understand why I would be considering anything else.

  “No motive has been determined as of yet,” I say.

  “Oh,” Walker says. “I just can’t imagine why anyone else would want to hurt someone like Joseph.” He glances behind him at the glass doors. “I’m sorry, Mr. Steele, but I’m really going to need to get back to my work now. If you can think of anything else, please call and make an appointment. Thank you for stopping by.”

  He shakes my hand again and disappears into the back of the office again. I watch after him, chilled by the interaction. It isn’t sitting right with me, and as I get Xavier and leave, I know there is something very strange going on.

  Early the next morning, I get a call from Detective Bronson letting me know that Joseph Palmer’s phone records should be in soon.

  “Xavier and I are moving hotels,” I tell him. “I’ll be in as soon as we get everything settled in Twilight Cove.”

  Xavier and I have packed up everything and are transferring to a hotel on Twilight Cove to make investigating Joseph Palmer’s murder easier. The ferry brings us to the island, and we drive past Main Street to a small hotel just past the village. When I called them to check if there were any reservations available, they told me that they had been booked solid, but then after the murders during Mardi Gras, many of their rooms opened up. They sounded happy to be welcoming new guests to fill the empty space.

  As soon as Xavier and I get into our rooms, we head to the police department, where Detective Bronson has set up his own war room in one of the conference rooms. He has several crime scene photos spread out on the table along with papers scribbled with notes.

  “Can I get you some coffee?” the young officer who brought us to the room asks as we enter.

  “That would be great,” I say.

  Xavier nods as well. Usually, he doesn’t drink coffee, but this doesn’t seem like the kind of place where he’s going to get a lot of options. The officer leaves us alone in the room and is back a couple of minutes later with cups of coffee along with packets of cream and sugar. We both heavily augment our coffee, and I can nearly hear Emma’s voice teasing me for how pale my coffee is now. She drinks hers black as night and bitter as an ashtray. I much prefer something closer to what she describes as melted ice cream. Xavier much prefers his not coffee.

  We’re just taking our first sips when Detective Bronson comes into the room. He’s holding a file folder of papers and sets it on the table in front of me.

  “Are those the phone records?” I ask, reaching over to open the folder.

  “They are,” he says. “And it looks like we might have a problem.”

  “A problem?” I ask. “What do you mean?”

  “According to these, Joseph Palmer didn’t get any phone calls during the hours of the party at all, much less at the time it shows on the footage,” he tells me.

  “How could that be?” I ask. “We saw the security camera footage. It shows him answer the phone and go out of the room talking on it.”

  “I know,” he says. “But that’s what’s on the records.”

  I look at the records and see that Detective Bronson is right. There aren’t any incoming or outgoing calls recorded at all for the entire evening and night of Mardi Gras.

  “Can we watch the footage again?” I ask.

  He leaves and comes back with a computer. Cueing up the footage, he replays the few moments that we watched.

  “We watched everything that Seth Powers had, and he wasn’t recording around this time,” he says. “This is all we have to go on.”

  I watch the footage again. Something stands out to me, and I watch it one more time before pointing it out to the detective.

  “Did you see that?” I ask. “Watch what he does.”

  We watch again, and I point out when he briefly touches one of his pockets before pulling a phone out of another.

  “It looks like he was reaching for something in that other pocket,” the detective says.

  “Was a phone found on his body?” I ask.

  “Yes. Give me a second, and I’ll see if I can get it out of evidence,” he says.

  It takes a little while, but Bronson finally returns with a plastic bag containing a black cell phone. I scan the footage back again, and as soon as Joseph Palmer pulls the phone out of his pocket to answer it, I pause the recording.

  “That’s not the same phone,” Xavier points out. “They are different.”

  “That’s why he almost reached into one pocket before getting that phone out of the other. He had two phones on him,” I say.

  “Why would he have two phones?” Detective Bronson asks.

  “And where is the other one?” I ask. “Did the crime scene unit do a full investigation of the office?”

  “They investigated where the body was found and collected everything out of the fireplace,” the detective says.

  “Can we go back to the house and look at the office again?” I ask.

  “Sure. It’s still secured as a crime scene,” he tells me.

  We drive to Palmer’s house, and I immediately notice how empty and cold it looks in the sunlight. A lockbox is attached to the front door, and Bronson puts a code into it to release the key to open the door. We go through the living room, still strewn with evidence of the gathering.

  “What’s going to happen to the house?” I ask. “Who’s going to handle all this?”

  “I don’t know,” the detective says. “As far as I know, Palmer doesn’t have any family anywhere around here. I guess there could be family somewhere, but we weren’t able to find even a next of kin to notify of his murder, so I don’t know who’s going to take possession of the house. If it’s declared abandoned, it will be sold at an auction, and whoever buys it will have to deal with everything however they want to.”

  The thought makes me shudder. It’s a common misconception that the police or someone associated with them takes care of crime scenes after they’ve been fully examined and the evidence gathered. This is far from reality. The truth is that crime scenes are left to the owners of the property, or those using it, to clean up and fix after they are no longer of any use to the investigation. There are, mercifully, services who will take on the horrifying task of cleaning up after a grisly murder or suicide, but often it lands right in the laps of devastated families and friends.

  We go through the house to the office and step past the remnant of the police tape that has since been disconnected from one side of the door frame. There’s still blood on the floor from where the body lay, and the acrid smell from the fire hasn’t fully left the air. I look around the room, trying to see anything that might be helpful.

  A large paper calendar on the desk catches my eye, and I walk around to examine it. The squares of the days are filled with notes and times for appointments.

  “I’m surprised someone like Joseph Palmer still had a paper calendar,” I say. “I would think he would have everything on his phone.”

  “I don’t know why that would surprise you,” Xavier says. “You and Emma both prefer to write things down when you’re investigating.”

  “It helps me remember,” I say.

  “The same goes for a calendar,” Xavier says. “Physically writing down his obligations would make them stick in his mind better. Besides, having a calendar this big right in front of him all the time is a lot easier to notice and more likely to remind him of things than if he always had to rely on timers on his phone to check things. It looks like he was pretty busy.”

  “It certainly does,” I say, scanning over the various commitments filling each of the dates. Something stops me. I look at a scratched-out note on a date a week before Palmer’s death more closely. “Wait.”

  I lift up the top sheet of the calendar so I can look at the impressions on the second sheet. Just as I hoped, it shows the indentation of what was originally written more clearly.

  “It looks like Palmer had a meeting with someone with the initials ‘S. R.’”

  Bronson meets my eyes. “Scott Russo.”

  “Why would he be meeting with Scott Russo?” I ask.

  “If that really is who those initials mean,” the detective says. “There are a lot of other people with those initials.”

  “I’m sure there are,” I say. “But look at the rest of the calendar. They have full names. This is the only one with initials. And Russo was killed on the same day Palmer was.”