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stay away from me... I said I’d kill her.” Kelly’s voice cracked. “She just laughed at me again. Why did she always do that, Claudia? Why’d she always have to laugh at people that way?”
    That godawful mocking, nails-on-a-blackboard laugh.
    Claudia rolled off the sofa and took the phone out to the deck. It was too dark to see the ocean, but she could hear the shushing of the waves, feel the mist on her cheeks. “What happened after that?”
    “I don’t remember.”
    “What do you mean, you don’t remember?”
    “I... I blacked out.”
    Kelly had begun drinking in middle school, where she’d discovered that alcohol could deaden the pain of dealing with a drug-addicted mother who was often out of touch with reality for days at a time. As the eldest child, the responsibility of parenting four younger siblings had fallen on Kelly’s young shoulders. Neighbors of theirs for years, Claudia’s parents had tried to help fill in the gaps so that Child Welfare wouldn’t split up the children in foster care, and Kelly had become an unofficially adopted member of Claudia’s family.
    “Do you remember leaving the apartment?”
    “That’s the worst part. When she started laughing at me I lost it. I just lost it. I don’t know what happened afterward. I woke up in my car a long time later, feeling like shit on toast. I drove home and threw up.” The tears began to flow in a torrent and it was all Claudia could do to make out the words. “Then it was all over the news that she was dead and I... I... I...”
    Kelly’s blackout had been smack in the middle of the coroner’s estimate of when Lindsey had died. Claudia’s heart sank a few degrees lower.
    “They said she drowned. I think I might have pushed her into the Jacuzzi and held her head under the water, Claud. I was angry enough to do it, and buzzed enough. I just don’t remember!”
    Claudia’s hand went to her neck and she began massaging the knots of tension that had formed. “Let’s think this through. You said you thought she was expecting someone, right?”
    “Yeah, she was all made up, lipstick, everything.”
    “Well, in the event she didn’t kill herself, what makes you so sure that this other person didn’t show up and kill her after you left?”
    “Jeez, I hadn’t thought of that.” Kelly’s voice brightened as she latched onto this explanation like a life preserver. “That must be what happened. She didn’t act like someone who was about to kill herself.”
    “Don’t repeat that,” Claudia cautioned. “It could easily work against you.” If the police got wind of Kelly’s story, they would be on her like a pack of starving mongrels. Yet, what if a killer was on the loose? “The cops need to know someone else might have been there, Kel. You’ll have to tell them.”
    Kelly’s voice grew shrill with panic. “Forget it! Not after Lindsey called 911. They can’t know I went back.”
    “There wasn’t a restraining order against you and the coroner ruled her death a suicide. Unless there’s evidence that someone else was there, that’s how it will stand.”
    If another visitor had arrived after Kelly, that person’s name might be in the log, although the concierge had let Kelly pass without signing in. Claudia made herself a note to suggest Ivan Novak have the log checked.
    “Claudia, did you hear me?” Kelly was asking in a plaintive voice. “What if I did kill her?”
    “I’m going to have to examine the suicide note tomorrow. If Lindsey wrote it, you won’t have to say anything. But if it’s not her handwriting, you’ll have to tell the police that you saw her again and that she was alive at ten o’clock.”
    “I’m not talking to the cops, Claudia.” All of a sudden Kelly sounded stone cold sober. “And neither are you.”
~
    By the time she’d cleaned up the kitchen and dumped the bag of trash into the plastic bin in the alley behind her house, Claudia had resolved to get to the bottom of Lindsey’s