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and found the documentary she had made.
“
A Murder of Good-Byes,
”
said her recorded voice.
    Mimi scrolled to the restaurant scene.
    “Well, I never,” said Lou. “Even the glorious Marc Soto is getting old.”
    Jay stared at the screen. Jack Nicholson came to mind, but it was probably just the dark glasses and the what-me-worry grin. He glanced at Mimi; she seemed to be waiting for him to say something. But what could he say? He took the camera from her and looked at the stranger who was not a stranger and saw in him … what?
    “You’ve got his forehead,” said Lou.
    “That’s what I thought,” said Mimi. “And his long tapered fingers, too. See?”
    Jay saw fingers wrapped around a wineglass.
    “I’ve got way more hair,” said Jay.
    “He’s pretty self-conscious about hair loss. He had this jet-black rug for a long time.”
    “He was going prematurely bald when he was in his twenties,” said Lou.
    “Well, he’s now pretty much bald,” said Mimi. “I’m not sure how mature he is.”
    “I’ll make coffee,” said Jo. “Or should I break out the Scotch?”
    Apparently, she was only kidding. She drifted back to cleaning up.
    Jay just stared at the moving image before him, as if in a spell. “This is so freaking weird,” he said.
    His mother slipped her arm around his waist. “You okay?”
    “Sure,” he said, his eyes never leaving the screen. He rewound the bit and watched it again. Lou joined Jo at the counter and started loading the dishwasher. It seemed to Jay as if they had tacitly agreed to give him some space—some privacy.
    He looked at Mimi. “Chill,” he said.
    She shrugged. “I think I’m nervous because I want you to like him. And I’m trying to figure out why.”
    Jay reached out and touched her arm. It was maybe the nicest thing she’d said all evening. But her eyes wouldn’t hold his gaze. This was hard for her, too, he realized. As if her life was somehow under scrutiny. He examined the camera. “Very cool,” he said.
    Mimi looked relieved. She showed him the features of the HDD. She showed him the rest of the film, too.
    “Who is that?”
    “Jamila. Hot, huh? Well, stand in line,” said Mimi. She fast-forwarded.
    “This is my mother,” she said. She tilted her chin up and did an impression of her mother raising an eyebrow. Jay laughed.
    The women came over to look and said how intelligent Grier Shapiro looked and what a beautiful color her pashmina was, and Lou marveled that anyone could walk with such style in high heels. “I never mastered that,” she said. Then they went back to cleaning up and Mimi joined them, but Jay didn’t. He’d made dinner, and anyway he was distracted. He sat on a stool at the kitchen island, playing with the camera. “Hey,” he said. “Here’s the house at the snye.”
    Mimi was carrying stuff in from the porch. “What?”
    He held up the camera for her to see. She put down the plates and bowls and took the camera from him. She frowned.
    “I don’t remember shooting the house,” she said. The camera zoomed in on the upper gable. Someone was standing in the window, looking out at the garden.
    It was Mimi.

CHAPTER NINE
    H ALF A MILE UPSTREAM from McAdam’s Snye, the mouth of Butchard’s Creek opened onto the Eden. But you had to know it was there to find the creek’s mouth. Passing by on the river, you’d see nothing but swamp, dense with soft rushes, water lettuce and arum, arrowhead, loosestrife. Cramer knew where the seam of water ran deep. He had an eye for the creek’s current and a craft responsive to his every demand. She was a fifteen-footer, cedar covered with red canvas, modeled on the old prospector trapper, the Bunny model. Bunny was a good name for her, too, the way she leaped to his response.
    The creek opened out about fifty or sixty yards up from the river—too far away for any casual boater to discover it by chance. There were too many mosquitoes, anyway, and the fetid smell of rotting vegetation