Eclipse Bay

keeping a half-assed record, I say.”
    Hannah flipped pages. “There are a lot of entries here. It’s going to take a while to go through them.”
    “Take your time.” Arizona shoved herself to her feet. “Reckon I’ll go out into the sunroom and relax while you two conduct your little investigation. Mind if I pour myself some more of your coffee, Rafe?”
    “Help yourself.” He reached for a pen and the lined tablet he had set out on the table.
    “Thanks.” Arizona reached for the pot. “Been a while since I sat in Isabel’s sunroom. Miss those visits. Isabel always had something interesting to say.”
    The sad, faintly wistful note in Arizona’s voice caught Hannah off guard. She looked up quickly.
    Arizona headed for the kitchen door, chunky mug in hand. “I could talk to her, you know? She understood when I told her about the goings-on up at the institute. Didn’t laugh the way some folks do.”
    Arizona ambled out into the hall and disappeared in the direction of the solarium. Hannah gazed after her for a moment, aware of a glimmer of curiosity.
    “I wonder just how close Arizona and Aunt Isabel actually were,” she said quietly. “As far as I know, neither of them ever married. They were friends for a long time. You don’t suppose—?”
    “None of our business.” Rafe wrote down a license plate number. “This will go faster if you take the notes while I read the entries.”
    “All right.” She took the pen from him and positioned the yellow tablet. “Go.”
    It was a discouraging process. Arizona’s log was more than a simple list of license plates, names, and times. It was complicated by extensive notations. Rafe read some of them aloud.
    …Member of the Inner Circle?

    …Claims to be from Portland but spotted a copy of the New York Times on the backseat…

    …Showed up for last Tuesday’s secret meeting at the institute. Probably on the inside…
    “She’s crafted a fantasy world for herself,” Hannah whispered. “It’s amazing.”
    “I’m not so sure it’s any more amazing than the fact that we’re sitting here going through her fantasy world logbooks because we think we can use them to solve an eight-year-old murder.”
    “Okay, you’ve got a point.” Hannah tapped the pen against the table. “I can see where some people might conclude that we’re as far out in left field as Arizona herself.”
    It took nearly half an hour to get through the log for the night of Kaitlin Sadler’s death. Hannah was privately on the verge of conceding defeat when Rafe paused at a license plate number.
    “Huh,” he said.
    She looked up quickly. “What?”
    “We’ve been concentrating on plates and vehicles connected with the Thornley campaign.”
    “So?”
    Rafe sat back slowly and shoved his hands into his back pockets. He studied the open logbook. “None of them left and returned during that two-hour window. Maybe we’ve been coming at this from the wrong angle.”
    Hannah did not like the dark excitement in his voice. “You think maybe whoever left to meet Kaitlin borrowed someone else’s car?”
    “Maybe.” Rafe hesitated. “But there’s another possibility. From what we can figure out, Kaitlin was acting on impulse that night. She had made up her mind to leave town in the morning. She needed cash in a hurry. We’ve been going on the assumption that she tried to sell the blackmail tapes to someone from Thornley’s camp. But there was another potential market for those tapes.”
    “What market is that?”
    “The media.”
    “Well, sure.” Hannah tossed aside the pen. “But why would anyone in the media murder her after agreeing to buy the incriminating tapes? The last thing a journalist would want to do is get rid of his source. He’d want backup for his story.”
    “Not if,” Rafe said slowly, “he planned to use the tapes to blackmail Thornley himself.”
    Hannah drew a breath and let it out carefully. “The news of Thornley’s interest in lingerie never appeared in the media. You think that’s because some journalist who attended the reception that night kept the tapes and has been using them to blackmail Thornley all these years?”
    Without a word, Rafe took one hand out of his back pocket and rotated the logbook so that she could see the entry he had marked.
    “Not some journalist,” he said quietly. “One Kaitlin knew well enough to call in a hurry that night. One she had reason to believe might be interested in handling a sleazy story