The only problem was that scenario didn’t fit with what Will knew of ­Vincent—­but he wasn’t about to rule out anyone or anything at this point. As soon as the weather cleared, he planned to go into Christchurch to talk to jewelers about Miriama’s watch. Someone had given it to ­her—­and maybe, just maybe, it hadn’t been an out-­of-­towner.

Vincent had that kind of money. So did Daniel May.

And Christchurch was where Miriama had traveled to meet her mystery lover. It was possible she’d had a hand in designing the watch.

“I’m going to make a stop,” he said to Vincent. “I need to check on Mrs. Keith.” She was older, might be in bed if he waited till after he’d dropped Vincent off.

The other man said nothing in response to Will’s statement.

Pulling up beside the small ­white-­painted house minutes later, Will jumped out and ran up the steps. He couldn’t see any lights, but he knocked nonetheless. Then he waited. He knew how long it took Mrs. Keith to get to the door.

A light finally came on several minutes later; the door cracked open two minutes after that. “I knew it would be you.” A smile that made her wrinkles fold in on themselves, her makeup yet in place. “I’m all fine and snug in my house. And if it hasn’t fallen down in the past forty years, it’s not going to fall down tonight, either.”

“Do you have everything you need?” Will knew the people in Golden Cove were ­self-­reliant, but Mrs. Keith wasn’t in the best health. “Emergency supplies just in case?”

“Why are you asking this old dog if she knows all the tricks?” It was a chiding question. “I’m fine, honey.” She patted at the bouffant perfection of her hair, the color a pure, impossible black. “You get yourself to your own house before you catch a chill.”

Will waited until Mrs. Keith had shut her door and locked it before he ran back down to the flashing red and blue of his vehicle.

Not long afterward, he turned into the long drive that led up to the Baker homestead. The electronic gate was wide open despite the stormy darkness, probably because Vincent’s family was waiting for him to come home.

Will glanced at Vincent halfway up the drive. “I don’t want you driving until you’ve got clearance from a doctor. Make sure you show me that clearance before you get behind the wheel.” Stopping the car before they reached the house, he pulled out a Breathalyzer he had in a small case behind his seat. “You know what to do.”

Vincent didn’t argue.

“Reading’s clean.” Will hadn’t really expected anything else. He’d never seen Vincent ­drunk—­the other man only ever had one beer when he came to the pub.

“I just slid on the road,” Vincent repeated as Will drove the rest of the way up the drive. “Misjudged how slick it was.” It almost sounded like he was practicing what he was going to say to his wife.

Pushing open the ­passenger-­side door once the SUV had come to a standstill, Vincent looked over at Will. “Thank you. For doing everything you can to find her. She deserves that.” He shut the door on those words and walked up to his front door, in which a lovely blonde woman stood silhouetted by golden light.

27

Will wished he could see clearly through the rain that crashed against his ­windscreen—­he’d be very curious to see the look on Jemima Baker’s face. Because if something had gone on between Miriama and Vincent at any point, the wife had to know. That was something Will had learned on one of his first cases as a ­detective—­the wife almost always knew.

The only problem was, in a town as small as Golden Cove, the town also always ­knew—­and not a single person had pointed Will in the direction of Vincent Baker. Right now, Vincent remained a “foolish married man” with a crush on a young woman who’d always flown free, in contrast to Vincent’s own ­mapped-­out life.

As for the other wealthy man in town capable of affording that watch, he’d already proved willing to indulge in an affair with another man’s wife. Not many people knew that. Will only did because he’d driven a drunk Nikau home once, and the other man had angrily blurted out the truth.

It turned out that Nikau and Keira had still been living together in Wellington and trying to work on their troubled marriage when Daniel entered the picture. “While I was speaking at a conference in Paris,” Nikau had said, “that motherfucker was sleeping with my wife and selling her on a life I could never give her. I came back home to find her wearing a necklace she told me she’d bought on special from a local shop, and I was stupid enough to believe her.”

It wasn’t a stretch to imagine Daniel giving another woman jewelry as part of a new affair.

But though Daniel and Vincent made convenient targets, Will couldn’t afford tunnel vision. Miriama could as easily have met a rich tourist. There was also the slim chance that someone in town had more money than Will realized. Shane Hennessey, for one. The novelist had a habit of saying he worked for “love, not money,” but he’d had enough cash to tidy up the old Baxter place. Then there was the residency he offered. According to the listing on the creative sites, it came with room and board and a stipend.

Will would do nothing to narrow the focus of his inquiry yet.

He’d switched on the heat when he and Vincent got into the SUV, but he wasn’t appreciably warmer or drier by the time he turned the vehicle around and headed down the drive. The gate began to close behind him straight after he passed, so someone at the house had been watching the feed from the discreet security camera trained on the gate.

It was a fairly unusual thing in Golden Cove, that gate, but Will could understand Jemima’s need to keep her and Vincent’s kids from running out onto the main road. They’d have to get down a long drive to do so, but kids had fast little legs and could easily tumble out, and on these quiet roads, people didn’t always think to watch their speed.

The Bakers certainly didn’t begrudge anyone who wanted to walk the trails that cut through their sprawling property, only asked that any walkers or hikers remain outside the wire fences that marked the family’s residential area.

The trees were opaque shadows around him as he drove through the road unlit by anything except his headlights. The wind howled beyond, bending the trees as the rain began to batter the landscape in slashing punches.

Golden Cove seemed even more deserted when he went through this time. Only the police station glowed with anything but basic night ­lighting—­Will had left the station lights blazing and the door unlocked so that if anyone got caught outside, they could stumble out of the rain and into shelter. He wasn’t worried about damage. The safe was empty, the filing cabinet was ­locked—­and didn’t contain sensitive documents ­anyway—­and his computer was hardly ­cutting-­edge.

As for the gun safe, it was heavy duty and concealed under his desk. Will was qualified to handle both a Taser and a gun, but he had neither of those at the moment. His Taser had acted up the last time he’d checked it, so he’d sent it in for repair or replacement. As for the gun, the paperwork was still going ­through—­or that was what he’d been told when he inquired.