Body Double: A Rizzoli & Isles Novel

saying she did it herself?”
    “I’m just saying I didn’t.”
    “Did you scratch her car?”
    “What?”
    “Did you mark up her car door?”
    “That’s a new one to me. When did that supposedly happen?”
    “And the dead canary in her mailbox?”
    Cassell gave an incredulous laugh. “Do I
look
like somebody who’d do something that perverted? I wasn’t even in town when that supposedly happened. Where’s the proof it was me?”
    She regarded him for a moment, thinking: Of course he denies it, because he’s right; we can’t prove he slashed her screens or scratched her car or put a dead bird in her mailbox. This man didn’t get where he is by being stupid.
    “Why would Anna lie about it?” she said.
    “I don’t know,” he said. “But she did.”

TEN
    B Y NOON M AURA WAS ON THE ROAD, yet one more weekender caught in traffic as it streamed north like migratory salmon out of a city where the streets were already shimmering with heat. Trapped in their cars, their children whining in backseats, vacationers could only inch grimly northward toward the promise of cool beaches and salt air. That was the vision Maura held on to as she sat in traffic, gazing at a line of cars that stretched all the way to the horizon. She had never been to Maine. She knew it only as a backdrop in the L.L. Bean catalogue, where tanned men and women wore parkas and hiking boots while, at their feet, golden retrievers lolled on the grass. In the world of L.L. Bean, Maine was the land of forests and misty shores, a mythical place too beautiful to exist except as a hope, a dream. I am sure to be disappointed, she thought as she stared at sunlight glaring off the unending line of cars. But that’s where the answers lie.
    Months ago, Anna Leoni had made this same journey north. It would have been a day in early spring, still chilly, the traffic not nearly as heavy as today. Driving out of Boston, she too would have crossed the Tobin Bridge and then headed north on Route 95, toward the Massachusetts–New Hampshire border.
    I am following in your footsteps. I need to know who you were. It’s the only way I’ll learn who I am.
    At two, she crossed from New Hampshire into Maine, where the traffic magically dissolved, as though the ordeal up till then had been merely a test, and now the gates were opening to admit the worthy. She stopped only long enough to pick up a sandwich at a rest stop. By three, she had left the interstate and was traveling on Maine’s Route 1, hugging the coast as she continued north.
    You came this way, too.
    The views Anna saw would have been different, the fields just turning green, the trees still bare. But surely Anna had passed that same lobster roll shack, had glanced at the same junk dealer’s yard where eternally rusting bed frames were displayed on the lawn, and had reacted, like Maura, with an amused shake of the head. Perhaps she too had pulled off the road in the town of Rockport to stretch her legs and had lingered beside the statue of André the seal while she gazed over the harbor. Had shivered as the wind blew in a chill from the water.
    Maura climbed back into her car and continued north.
    By the time she passed the coastal town of Bucksport and turned south, down the peninsula, sunlight was already slanting lower over the trees. She could see fog rolling in over the sea, a gray bank of it, advancing toward shore like a hungry beast swallowing up the horizon. By sunset, she thought, my car will be enveloped in it. She had made no hotel arrangements in Fox Harbor, had left Boston with the quaint idea that she could simply pull into a seaside motel somewhere and find a bed for the night. But she saw few motels along this rugged stretch of coast, and those she did pass all displayed NO VACANCY signs.
    The sun dipped even lower.
    The road made an abrupt curve, and she gripped the wheel, barely managing to stay in her lane as she rounded a rocky point, past scraggly trees on one side, the sea on the other.
    Suddenly there it was—Fox Harbor, nestled in the shelter of a shallow inlet. She had not expected it to be such a small town, little more than a dock, a steepled church, and a string of white buildings facing the bay. In the harbor, lobster boats bobbed at their moorings like staked prey, waiting to be swallowed up by the incoming fog bank.
    Driving slowly down Main Street, she saw tired front porches in need of paint, windows where faded curtains hung. Clearly this was not a wealthy