“What if it were your wife?” Kayla asked Paul. “Would you call off the rescue? What if it were your daughter?”

“Calm down, ladies. The pilot just asked me if it’s possible this woman’s not out there at all. It’s highly unlikely that if she entered the water at the time you said she did, that our men wouldn’t have picked her up on the radar. The coast guard uses mathematics, Kayla. They know where to look. They also know how long a person can survive in waters like these. I promise you, if they thought Ms. Riley were alive out there, it would still be a rescue mission.”

“She’s dead,” Val said.

“Is there any chance your friend swam down the beach instead of out?” Paul asked. “You said she lives in Polpis. Is there any chance she headed home?”

“Why would she do that?” Val asked. “That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard.”

“You ladies have had a lot to drink,” Paul said. “And this thing about her dancing, well, it sounds odd to me, like she was kidding around or something. Maybe she swam down shore and climbed out, and you never even saw her.”

“Ridiculous,” Val said.

“Where does she live?” Paul asked. “We’ll check her house.”

Kayla told him the address; then she said, “Can we come with you?”

“This is turning into police business,” Paul said.

“Paul,” Kayla said. “Please. She’s our best friend. We’ve known her for twenty years.”

“Okay,” he said.

Kayla climbed into the Trooper, but Val stood in the sand with a strange look on her face.

“I’m going to ride with Raoul,” Val said. “I want to talk to him about something. Is that okay with you, Raoul?”

Raoul tossed his keys in the air and caught them. “Sure thing. Hop in. We’ll see you at the house, sweetie,” he said to Kayla. “Think positive.”

“I’ll try,” Kayla said. A pesky jealousy gnawed at her heart. Why should Val ride with Raoul? Kayla thought about the warm cab of Raoul’s truck, Raoul fresh from bed, and Val sitting next to him with just a towel wrapped around her waist. Val’s linen pants were in the back of the Trooper, along with her ridiculously expensive Italian sandals. She was riding next to Kayla’s husband half naked. Val wasn’t afraid to cheat on her husband; she was fucking Jacob Anderson. Anger, jealousy, and fear surged through Kayla, and she almost slammed into Raoul’s back bumper.

Why did Val want to talk to him? Was she going to tell him what Kayla said before Antoinette entered the water? Here were other things that money couldn’t buy: loyalty from your best friend or your husband or your wife.

Their caravan pulled down Antoinette’s long dirt driveway: Raoul and Val in the truck, Kayla in the Trooper, Paul and his partner in a police Suburban. When Kayla saw the cottage, her heart soared. Every light in the place was on, the front door was wide open. Antoinette was home! Kayla jumped out of the Trooper and ran to Raoul, reclaimed him.

“Oh, thank God,” she said. She tugged on Raoul’s arm like one of the kids: Love me, love me best. Forget what Val has told you and love me. I’m not a murderer after all. “Thank God.”

“Let Paul go in first,” Raoul said quietly.

Val pulled Kayla toward the open front door. “I can’t believe this,” she said. “She left us on Great Point thinking she was dead. Now I am going to kill her. Antoinette!”

Paul Henry and his partner brushed by them; the partner had his hand on his gun. Kayla didn’t even know Nantucket policemen carried guns, but this guy carried surgical gloves and a gun.

“Stand back, ladies,” he said. He peered inside the open door. “Oh, baby.”

Paul Henry looked in over his shoulder. “Uh-oh. Whoa.” He knocked on the door frame. “Ms. Riley? Ms. Riley, it’s Paul Henry with the Nantucket Police Department. Are you in there?”

“What’s going on?” Val said. Her bottom half was still swathed in just a beach towel, and Kayla had an urge to tell her to put on her pants.

Raoul stayed in the driveway, studying the outside of the house. At first Kayla thought he was admiring his handiwork in the moonlight The house had only four rooms, but it was one of his favorite designs. Huge living area, huge kitchen, huge bathroom, huge bedroom. High ceilings, big windows, lots of custom touches. He once told her he could stare at his houses for hours, the same way she had watched enthralled as the children slept when they were babies.

“She’s not in there,” he said.

“Raoul?”

He shook his head. “She’s not in there, Kayla. What does Paul say?”

Paul and his partner had just taken their first steps through the front door into the living room. Val was close behind them, and Kayla was a few steps behind Val. When Val poked her head in the door, she screamed.

Antoinette, hanging from the exposed beams?

Antoinette, lying in a pool of blood?

“What is it?” Kayla asked, afraid to move.

“Ms. Riley?” Paul Henry called out.

Kayla looked through the front door.

The place had been torn apart. Antoinette’s things were everywhere. The floppy beige cushions of her sofa were strewn about, her books had been swept off her built-in shelves, the hand-dipped candles that she ordered from Woodstock, New York, had been snapped in half. Her Norfolk pine lay on its side. Bottles of Stag’s Leap chardonnay were scattered across the floor like bowling pins.

“Oh, dear God.” Kayla took a step inside, but Paul Henry raised his hand.

“Don’t move,” he said. “This really is police business now, Kayla. Is it safe to assume this place didn’t look this way when Ms. Riley left this evening?”

“We didn’t come inside,” Kayla said. She turned to Val, who was back to wearing her wide-eyed, doped-up expression. “Did we, Val?”

Val shook her head.

“So it could have looked like this,” Paul Henry’s partner said. He put his surgical gloves on before he started picking things up. “For all we know, Ms. Riley could have made this mess herself. Meaning she was in a certain frame of mind when she headed to the beach.” Every light in the house was on-the in-ceiling track lighting, the Tiffany lamps, the lights in the kitchen and the bathroom. Antoinette hated lightbulbs. She preferred sunlight, candlelight

“These lights weren’t on when we picked Antoinette up,” Kayla said. “Someone else has been here.”

“Is anything missing?” Val said. “Was she robbed? You might as well let us look around because we’re the only ones who will be able to tell you.”

“The TV is missing,” Paul Henry said. He nodded at the big square blank spot in Antoinette’s built-in shelves.

“Antoinette doesn’t own a TV,” Kayla said. “Val’s right. You should let us in.”

The partner glowered at them. “Don’t touch anything,” he said. “And you,” he nodded at Val. “Put on shoes.”

“They’re in the back of my car,” Kayla said. “Along with your pants.”

Val disappeared to dress. Raoul remained in the driveway, but now he was drawing patterns in the dirt with his feet. He kicked up clouds of dust.

“Antoinette is still missing,” Kayla said.

“Yes,” he said.

Kayla and Val moved through the house behind Paul Henry and his partner, whose name Kayla learned was Detective Dean Simpson-an actual detective here on Nantucket!-ogling the mess. They found Antoinette’s checkbook and wallet hidden deep in a pile of clothing that had been dumped out of the drawers onto her bed. The checks were all accounted for on the register and there was cash, $227, in the wallet. Detective Simpson dusted the handles of the dresser drawer for fingerprints. They were all of a sudden in the middle of a crime scene. Kayla tried to remember what Antoinette had been like at the beach. She had been in a good mood, Kayla thought, although maybe a little nervous about her daughter. But then there was the confession she was going to make. What was the confession?

They entered the bathroom. Everything from the medicine cabinet had been thrown onto the floor or into the toilet. “This could have been a person looking for drugs,” the detective declared. He picked up the prescription bottles.

Kayla yanked Val into the kitchen. “All right. Tell me what you think. Did Antoinette come back here and make this mess herself?”

“Why would she do that?” Val asked.

“Maybe she wanted to disappear,” Kayla said. “Maybe she wanted to ditch the daughter.”

“Speaking of the daughter,” Val said. She pointed to a note on the fridge-a cocktail napkin smeared with blue ink: L., Cape Air, noon Sat. “That’s in a matter of hours. We’re going to have a lot of explaining to do.”

“She was going to confess something, Val,” Kayla said. “Maybe she was telling us she was going to disappear.”

Val looked doubtful. “I don’t think so.”

“Why? Do you know what she was going to say?”

“No.”

“What were you two talking about while I was asleep?”

Val fiddled with the refrigerator magnet-from the Islander liquor store-and furrowed her brow. “I can’t remember. I was probably doing most of the talking. I usually do.”

“So she didn’t tell you her secret?”

Val put her hands on Kayla’s shoulders. “No, friend, she didn’t.”

“Well, do you think she-? I mean, we know she tried to kill herself before.”

“That’s true.”

“You think she’s dead, don’t you?”

They heard a voice-clearing from the bathroom and then Paul Henry, “Ladies, would you come in here, please?”

Val raised her eyebrows and mouthed the word ladies. Kayla looked out the front window at Raoul, still in the driveway, systematically smoothing the dirt with the edge of his work boot.

They entered the huge, brightly lit bathroom.

The floor alone, jade green tiles, was worth several thousand dollars, according to Raoul. Paul and the detective had their paws all over Antoinette’s collection of little brown bottles-they were popping the child-proof caps off and shaking a few pills out onto the countertop between the double sinks. The detective wrote the names of the drugs into a little notebook.

Out the window Kayla saw the sky brightening; it was almost half past five. If things had gone as planned, they would be waking up on the beach ready to hit the Downyflake for some chocolate doughnuts before heading home. Raoul would be putting on his boots, sliding his lunch box from the top shelf of the fridge and driving out to the Tings’, who, Jack Montalbano had so pointedly reminded them, were Chinese. But no. No.

“Do either of you know why Ms. Riley had so many prescription drugs?” the detective asked. He pronounced either “eye-ther,” which Kayla found annoying.

“Menstrual cramps,” Val said. “Bad ones.”

Kayla looked away. Migraines, she thought, depression. Was Antoinette’s committing suicide such a far-fetched idea? Kayla remembered back to the first Night Swimmers: / want to be able to kill myself if that’s what I decide.

On the back of the toilet Kayla saw a perfect whelk shell that she and Antoinette had found on Tuckernuck, back when Theo was a little boy. Kayla remembered the afternoon well-they’d borrowed a seventeen-foot Mako from one of Raoul’s workers, and Antoinette had motored them through Madaket Harbor and out past Smith’s Point until they reached the next island over, Tuckernuck, which was still mostly wilderness. Kayla had Theo bundled in an orange life jacket, and she made him sit on the floor of the boat with both arms wrapped around her legs. And then Antoinette lifted him onto the deserted beach and they had a picnic and swam and collected a bucket of perfect shells like this one.

Kayla lifted the whelk shell, disobeying the detective’s orders to not touch anything, but he was engrossed with Antoinette’s Fiorinal and his notebook, and didn’t notice. Underneath the whelk shell Kayla saw a white plastic stick that made her catch her breath. She practically slammed the whelk shell back down.

Val had moved around her to look at the pills with the police. “These are the ones for the cramps,” she was saying. “These blue ones, I’m pretty sure.”

Seven green tiles separated Kayla from Val and the policemen. Val was shielding Kayla from view. Kayla picked up the whelk shell again and slid the plastic stick into the pocket of her sweatpants, completely unobserved.

Detective, ha!

They probably wouldn’t even have known what the stick was, but Kayla, the mother of four children, knew only too well.

A pregnancy test, with two purple stripes showing. Positive.

When they emerged from the house, Raoul was still smoothing the dirt in the driveway. The detective flipped out.