She’d never cried in front of Bob or Scoop, any of her fellow police officers.

I see Owen Garrison down on the rocks, near the waterline, below the skeletal remains of the original Garrison house, burned in the great Mt. Desert fire of 1947.

I can taste the ocean on the air and smell the acidic odor of the damp, peat-laden earth.

My mind doesn’t want to take in what I’m seeing.

The body of a man.

Owen tries to stop me from running. “Don’t, Abigail…”

She picked up the spiral notebook on the bottom of her pile. The last one to burn, and the first one she’d filled, the handwriting oversized and thick, a pen difficult for her to hold in those initial, terrible weeks of rage, shock and grief.

With a sharp breath, she ripped out too many pages at once and distorted the metal spiral, ended up tearing sheets on an angle. She threw what she had onto the fire and pulled off the bits that had stayed behind, then grabbed another fistful and yanked those pages free.

Bob O’Reilly continued to watch her.

“I’m taking the ashes with me to Maine. As many as I can fit in the coffee can. I’m going to dump them in Frenchman Bay. It’s part of the ritual.”

“Should be pretty up there,” he said.

I keep running. I don’t slip on the rocks or hesitate, even as Owen grabs me by the waist. “Chris was shot, Abigail. He’s dead. I’m sorry. There’s nothing you can do now.”

Owen won’t let me go to my husband. He won’t let me contaminate the crime scene when there’s no hope.

All we can do now, he says, is find the killer.

Bob hooked the tongs back onto the side of the grill. “Forget it, Detective Browning. You’re not fooling me. You’re not even coming close. Cleansing rituals. Emotional clutter.” He snorted. “Bullshit.”

Abigail tilted her head back and gave him a lofty look. She could feel her tank top sticking to her back. Her hair, short and dark, had twisted itself into corkscrews. Bob didn’t wilt under her scrutiny, and finally she sighed. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”