CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

Detective Reyes finally arrives an hour later. I am still resting on the couch when she storms in. She sees me, and her brow furrows into a scowl. She jams a finger at me and says, “You. With me.”

“She can’t walk right now,” Evelyn says. “She’s injured.”

“She doesn’t look injured.”

“I’m fine,” I tell Evelyn.

I do wince a little as I get to my feet, but now I’m only sore. The spasms and cramps are gone. I follow Detective Reyes, giving Evelyn an encouraging smile as she leads me outside to the balcony.

“Close the door behind you.”

I comply, and she turns to me with her arms crossed. “It’s time for the truth, Mary.”

I wait for her to continue, and her scowl deepens. “Sometime today would be nice.”

I realize with some shock that she means for me to tell her the truth. “I’ve been honest with you,” I tell her.

She sighs and rubs her temple. “Okay. We’ll chop this up into bite-size pieces. Question one. You should recognize it because it’s a familiar one. How do you know Lisa Reinhardt?”

I feel a touch of irritation. “I’ve already told you I met her over dinner.”

“How does your partner know Lisa Reinhardt?”

“My part… is this because we reported her kidnapped?”

“See, that’s really interesting. Because her apartment was trashed, and when we show up, the only person there is an Irish guy who says he’s your friend, and that you two showed up and discovered Lisa was kidnapped.”

“Is that not what I just said?”

"The kidnapped part is what interests me. How do you know she was kidnapped? Why not killed? Why not drive away? Or hey, maybe she had a mental breakdown and trashed her own place?"

“There was no blood at the apartment,” I reply. “So she wasn’t killed.”

“She wasn’t killed there . Doesn’t mean she wasn’t killed elsewhere.”

I sigh. “All right. Well, I’m not a detective, but I guessed that she was kidnapped.”

“You’re not a detective, but you’re the first person on the scene when Lisa Reinhardt goes missing. So why were you there if not to detect something?”

I don’t like the way this conversation is going. “Are you insinuating that I am responsible for the crime?”

“Not yet,” she says, “but I’ll be honest even if you won’t. I’m coming damned close to insinuating it.”

My jaw tightens. “Shouldn’t your energies be more focused on finding Celeste Holloway?”

“That’s the real kicker. See, I have you arriving late at night, dropped off by your friend who is not a U.S. citizen and who tells me his work visa is ‘in process.’ The next night, I have Victor Holloway missing, and his studio trashed. Three days later, I have you and this same Irishman showing up at Lisa’s apartment, and wouldn’t you know it, the place is trashed, and Lisa Reinhardt is missing. Then, he stays there and calls me while you come back here and less than an hour later, Celeste Holloway goes missing. So I’m getting the feeling that if I want to find Celeste Holloway, I have to become real good friends with Mary Wilcox and Sean O’Connell.”

“I couldn’t have been responsible for Victor or Celeste,” I remind her. “I was with Celeste when Victor was taken, and I was with the social worker when Celeste ran on her own.”

“So now we know that Victor was taken and Celeste ran off on her own. We know that Lisa was kidnapped. We know an awful lot, don’t we?”

“You’re avoiding the point.”

“No, you are. But since you bring it up, Evelyn Torres has been in some pretty interesting places too. You get Celeste out of the way, and she’s alone to ‘take’ Victor. Then you leave her alone with Celeste, and all of a sudden, Celeste is gone.”

My eyes narrow. "You're trying to make a square peg fit in a round hole. Just because I happened to be nearby when the crimes were committed doesn't mean I committed them. The same goes for Evelyn Torres."

“But you do happen to be nearby, don’t you? In fact, looking back at your history, you happen to be nearby when a lot of crimes are committed. You were pretty close by when Sophie Lacroix murdered Frederick Jensen. Come to think of it, so was Irishman Sean O’Connell. How odd.”

“So we’re somehow to blame for Sophie’s actions?”

“She was a housekeeper too.”

“Evelyn is not the criminal responsible for these kidnappings.”

“Now they’re all kidnappings. Boy, we can’t even stick to a story, can we? And how is it that you know Evelyn is not responsible? Is it perchance because Irishman Sean O’Connell illegally obtained security camera footage from a neighbor and confirmed that she was startled by the sound of his studio window shattering?”

I don’t reply, but the expression on my face must tell Reyes all she needs to know. “Who are you, Mary? What are you doing here?”

“I’m trying to care for a young girl,” I insist. “A young girl who’s suffering and scared.”

“I wish I could believe that,” Reyes replied, “but your work history doesn’t track. You were governess to the Ashford family in New York for about five weeks before you happened to force a confession of murder from Mrs. Cecilia Ashford. The children then moved with their uncle and aunt. You then worked for the Carlton family in England for the same amount of time and broke the lid on a cold case involving a murdered young friend of their adult children. The whole family ended up in trouble for that one except for the two sons, both of whom promptly moved to Japan with their cousin. Then you have a nice incident-free six months with the Tylers before flying to Baltimore and exposing two more cold cases. Immediately following the conclusion of those cases, you leave. What happened to the children you were supposed to care for? Do you even know?”

“The Greenwoods were paying me. When they left, I had no income.”

“Except for the millions of dollars you have in your inheritance.”

I don’t have an answer to that.

“Then we have Frederick Jensen. You left the house once his murderer was caught too. Now the Holloways. I’m sensing a pattern here.”

“What pattern? In the first three cases, the murders occurred before my arrival.”

“I’ll give you that,” Reyes says. “But not in the past two cases. I’ll just focus on this case, though. You arrive, and days later, your employer goes missing. Soon after that, a close business associate of his goes missing and now his daughter’s run away moments before she was going to be removed from the house. Moments after you arrived to prevent that.”

“Once again,” I reply, trying to keep myself calm in the face of these accusations. “You’re trying to fit a square peg into a round hole. This is all coincidental.”

“Hell of a coincidence.”

“But far from proof.”

She doesn’t answer. I hold her gaze. For the moment, I’ve maintained my innocence.

“What happened to your sister, Mary?”

I stiffen. “Excuse me?”

“Your sister, Anne Wilcox. What happened to her?”

I’m no longer able to keep calm. “I fail to see what that has to do with Celeste.”

“I just find you to be a fascinating person,” she says with a touch of contempt. You present yourself as a sensible and proper English gentlewoman, but when I look at your history, there are a lot of holes. Your sister disappears five years before your father dies. You end up inheriting all of the money that would have gone to your sister.”

“Oh, please,” I scoff. “This is ridiculous. I assure you, I would have been quite as happy with a half million dollars as I was with one million.”

“Except that you would have inherited nothing. Your father’s will left everything to Annie up until a week before his own death.”

I stare at her in shock. I wasn’t aware of that. “I didn’t know that. I assumed we would be left with an equal gift.”

"You can see why I might find the timeline suspicious, though. We have you and your sister getting into a fight the night she goes missing, never to be seen again—"

“We didn’t fight! We—”

You feel guilty…

“We argued, but it wasn’t—”

What you did…

“You are completely out of line! I would never have harmed my sister! I don’t need money. I would have been perfectly content without it!”

Reyes’s face remains as cold and hard as stone. “Then you asked the police to close the investigation into her disappearance.”

“I did not! I begged them to keep it open!”

“Then you spend three months in a mental hospital alternating between catatonia and bouts of hysteria where among man other things, you scream, ‘It’s my fault. I’m so sorry, Annie.’”

An image flashes through my mind of pale walls and blurred faces in white gowns crowding me and whispering unintelligibly to themselves. I don’t remember anything she says, but I don’t remember anything about my time in the facility. Only these occasional flashes. “You had no right to obtain my medical records without a court order.”

“Okay. I’ll strike that from the record,” she says sardonically. “But I’m trying to find three innocent people who have now gone missing, and the only thing that’s changed in their lives in over a decade is the arrival of a formal mental patient whose associates drop like flies everywhere she goes and a private investigator who helps her break into one of our victims’ apartments. As you pointed out, it’s a lot of coincidence, but as I pointed out, it’s a hell of a coincidence. A lot of them. More than one. I have to try to figure out who is most likely to have committed these crimes, and from what I can see so far, the most likely culprit is staring me in the face in shocked guilt.”

It takes me a moment to gather my thoughts. I knew Reyes was considering me as a possible suspect, but I didn’t realize how hard she was looking at me. I certainly didn’t expect that she’d dive into my past so thoroughly.

I think of something else and frown. “Where is Sean right now?”

“Sean’s hanging out at the station for a little while. We’re going to follow up on his work visa.”

My eyes widen. “You’re going to deport him?”

“That’s outside of my authority,” Reyes replies. “I just want to know why he’s here. If you think of another reason besides breaking into an innocent woman’s apartment and stealing home security footage, feel free to call me.”

“Perhaps instead of investigating my past and abusing your authority with my friend, you should try to find the three people who have gone missing.”

Reyes gives me an icy smile. “That’s exactly why I’m investigating the two of you.”

I return a stare as frosty as hers. “Am I being detained, Detective?”

She chuckles. “No.”

“Then this conversation is over.”

She lifts her hands slightly. “All right.” She heads inside, stopping at the door to say, “Get some rest, Mary. You look exhausted.”

I stand where I am as she closes the door behind her. My thoughts move to the picture of Annie in the basement and the mural of her in the hidden cove. If Reyes discovers those and compares them to pictures of Annie, then it will only reinforce her belief that I’m behind these kidnappings. I’m caught between a rock and a hard place. On one side, an innocent girl and two others are missing and perhaps dead. On the other side, my own freedom hangs by a thread.

I look out the window again. The tide has risen once more, and the calm waters of Fairy Cove are replaced by the raging might of the dark and cold ocean.