“Sammy, wait. What do I tell Ma?”

“Tell her I’ll be back someday to play her a song.”

Eugenie Fonda had been briefly famous as a mistress in another relationship. In the summer of 1999 she had dallied with a man named Van Bonneville, a self-employed tree trimmer in Fernandina Beach. Soon after the affair had begun, a hurricane pushing thirteen feet of tidal surge struck the coast and smashed Van Bonneville’s house into toothpicks. He survived, but his wife was lost and presumed drowned.

Hurricanes being to tree cutters what Amway conventions are to hookers, Van Bonneville was an exceptionally busy fellow in the days following the tragedy. While neighbors were impressed by his stoicism, his in-laws were disturbed by what they considered an inadequate display of grief by the young widower.

Certain grisly suspicions were floated before the local police, but no one paid much attention until Mrs. Bonneville’s body was found in her Pontiac at the bottom of the St. Johns River. It was her husband’s contention that Mrs. Bonneville’s Bonneville had been swept away by the onrushing flood as she wheeled out of the driveway in a frantic quest for Marlboros. Doubt fell upon this story as soon as police divers revealed that Mrs. Bonneville had been snugly strapped into the driver’s seat. Well known among her friends was the fact that on principle Mrs. Bonneville never buckled her seat belt, even though it was required by state law; an ardent libertarian, she opposed government meddling in all matters of personal choice.

Another clue was her knockoff Seiko titanium, which, unlike the genuine item, was not even slightly water-resistant. The face of the wristwatch was frozen on a time and date that preceded by a full nine hours the hurricane’s landfall, suggesting that the Pontiac had gone into the river well in advance of the fierce weather, and that Mrs. Bonneville’s corpse had been strapped inside to keep her from surfacing prematurely.