Chapter 30 Maria

Chapter 30

?Maria

Maria sips her coffee as she watches the office building across from her.

London is cold. And though she is wrapped up warm against the chill, she shivers in spite of herself.

She knows she isn't at her best, she's still recovering from her injuries, from her rapid weight loss and trauma. She should be in bed somewhere, she should be recovering, family and loved ones surrounding her. But she has no family, not really, and the last thing she wants is people surrounding her.

No doubt that's one of the reasons she was chosen for the job in the first place. She fit the profile of a missing person perfectly, a woman working abroad on short contracts, a woman who—having quit Cornell after just one year—is evidently unreliable. A woman with friends in different states, with busy lives of their own and an understanding of their friend's innate unpredictability. Maria knows she might have been missing for months, even years without someone assuming the worst. And when they did, would this tie-less short-term woman be remembered at all by the few people she came into contact with on the island where she was last seen? Most likely not. She had wandered into her own entrapment without even realizing what an easy mark she had been.

Her joints ache as she places the coffee cup back down on the table, but her hands no longer shake constantly. She is making progress, and that's good enough for her.

It has only been a week now since she ran blood-soaked from that house and let the warm Caribbean Sea wash away the external traces of what happened to her. But the internal traces are still there, the bruises, cuts, and burns beneath her clothes are still there, and in her mind Maria is still in that house. Perhaps she always will be, the house blending in her psyche with that barely remembered past, blending again with the loss of her parents, blending with the never-ending struggle to live in a world she knows is not built for women as certain and driven as her.

You have to tread water just to stay afloat.

But she would rather be there in her mind, still in the Darién Gap, still in the house, than dead. This will not be the end of her, these people.

She looks back at the thin glass building opposite as people come and go. Maria saw the woman enter this morning, the woman who showed her around the house, the woman with the too-tight chignon. Her name is Lucinda Hooper, and she works in some capacity for a blue-chip wealth management firm. Maria has been watching the building for three days now, from the comfort of the quiet brasserie opposite. Hidden under the safety of awnings and blocked from view by a sculptural outdoor heating unit and understated topiary, she has watched. A book propped up in front of her, to a passing eye she is just a tourist with a new favorite café. She switches locations on the hour and takes up the same view at each.

The woman arrives and leaves at the same time each day, slipping promptly at 6 p.m. into a town car that takes her back to her home, a coral-pink gated house on Millionaire's Row in Notting Hill. A housekeeper appears to let herself in, daily, an hour after Lucinda's departure, and leaves again an hour before Lucinda returns home.

No other visitors have come to the house, as far as Maria has seen, and no one else appears to live there with her, except a small bouncy copper-haired cocker spaniel that she promptly walks for forty-five minutes as soon as she gets home every evening.

Maria's eyes flick back up to the office building as a group of men enter the revolving doors, a woman in the lobby extending a hand to greet them in turn. It isn't Lucinda.

Maria hoped to see her with somebody, to extend her knowledge of who else might be involved in what happened to her out on Gorda, but so far all she has to go on is Lucinda.

And tonight, she will be paying her a home visit.

—

Maria sits in her nondescript silver-gray hire car and waits.

Lucinda arrived home two minutes ago and disappeared into her house to retrieve her dog. Maria watches the town car slide away, not to return to collect Lucinda until eight-thirty tomorrow morning.

Lucinda will reappear from the house in a few minutes with dog in tow, wellies and puffer coat on.

Maria is nervous, of course, but certain of what she has to do. She lets her eyes sweep down the street to reacquaint herself with the lamppost-mounted CCTV cameras dotting the affluent area. She estimates they will catch her approach to Lucinda's side of the street, but where she sits now is not covered by the public cameras, nor are any of the private house entrances.

Lucinda's house has its own private cameras mounted above the gate and door, which appear to activate when the gate sensor is tripped on entry and exit.

Maria has rehearsed the plan in her mind for the last three days. If she keeps her nerve it will work, if there are no surprises it will work. She can't plan for everything, but if she stays present it might all be fine; that other part of her will come alive and save them both.

Again, she has the advantage, the element of surprise. Odd that she has an advantage now, after a lifetime of having no notable advantages at all, of struggling for everything she's received, but then life is like that sometimes, she supposes. Or maybe she only has the advantage now because she has struggled so hard and adapted to it?

She shakes off the thought as a deliveryman suddenly pulls up in the bay two down from her own and leaps from his truck, package in hand, heading to another building.

Maria's hand pauses on the handle of the car. She can't do what she needs to do with this person here, a potential witness. Maria has not factored this in, an unscheduled delivery, an on-street witness. Lucinda is due to exit the building for her dog walk at any moment. She watches the man ring the house buzzer and wait, shifting the weight of the package in his hands as the tone blips on. They are clearly not in. Maria feels her anger rise.

Just try another house, leave it with someone else, she screams in her mind. But he can't hear her and is clearly in no rush. Across the street there is movement. Maria's gaze flies over to catch sight of Lucinda pulling back her large cedar security gate and holding it open for her excitable dog, who yelps and spins in lead-tangling circles as she does so.

"All right, Penny, almost there, sweetie. Come on then," Maria hears her coo as she too pushes through and closes the gate behind them. Her guard down, a softer, more off-duty version of the woman moments before. "Right. Let's go, cutie."

Maria looks back to the delivery driver. He's still there, oblivious to Lucinda's existence and to the fact he has so soundly destroyed Maria's plan. He, having pressed the gate bell, has finally also come to the conclusion that the homeowner is not in and he is now chaotically trying to scribble out a missed-delivery slip while balancing the package with one knee braced against their wall. Work completed, he slots the slip into their mailbox and jogs the package back to his van before slipping in, swigging at a fizzy drink, and speeding off again.

Maria bristles in his disorganized wake. Lucinda is gone. She could follow her on the dog walk but there's no point, because what she needs is in that house. She'll have to wait until Lucinda returns. It isn't a big change to the plan, really, it just feels like one. A snag that has knocked her plan forty-five minutes down the road. But if anything, things might be easier once the light has fallen further. Sure, more people will be home to hear, but witnesses will be less likely to see anything at all. She'll go ahead with the plan, she decides, in spite of the change of order. She just has to wait a little longer.

—

Three-quarters of an hour later, almost to the minute, Lucinda rounds the corner at the far end of the street and Maria takes her cue.

To the casual observer it will look completely unconnected, Lucinda's appearance and Maria slipping from her car and crossing over to Lucinda's side of the street; just two Londoners going about their daily lives.

Maria's face will not show up on any CCTV footage when the police finally get around to checking months after Freya reports her missing and flags her flight to London. Maria's rental car number plate is deliberately out of sight of the cameras, as she intended, her baseball cap down low, her collar up.

For all intents and purposes Maria will never be seen again.