She shook her head, conscious of the tears running down her cheeks. “He’s my nephew,” she whispered. “We have to find him.”
He put his hand on her shoulder. It was a light touch, like Wolvie’s when he would rest his paws on her, knowing she was upset. “We’re trying,” Smolleck said. Then he turned, climbed into his car, and drove away.
The trembling became more intense. Aubrey wrapped her arms around herself and rubbed them. Her teeth chattered, and she went over to the curb and sat on a bollard. If she’d told Smolleck about the note sooner, maybe this tragedy could have been prevented. Jonathan might still be alive, and her mother might not be a suspect. Maybe the FBI could have found Ethan by now.
She wiped the tears away with a rough hand. Just like the compliant child she had always been, Aubrey had listened to her mother about the note, rather than doing what she believed was best.
She took out her phone and touched the speed dial. It went straight to her mother’s voice mail. She left a message. “Call me. Please.”
Shakily, she stood up. She had to find her. She hurried out of the parking lot and headed up the bluff toward her house, trying to convince herself of her mother’s innocence. Mama had been considering giving Jonathan a drug to slow his heart and fake his death, but she would never have murdered him, even to save Ethan.
Then where was she, and why wasn’t she answering her phone?
She slowed a short distance from her house, panting, but not only from exertion. The out-of-control feeling came from a place deep inside.
She had lost her center.
Her mother wasn’t the person she had believed she knew so well. She may have been a college revolutionary. Someone who had been involved with something so terrible that now, many years later, it was likely that her grandson had been kidnapped and her fiancé killed because of her actions. But Aubrey still didn’t know what her mother had done then, or what she was capable of doing now.
Her childhood home loomed in front of her. Faded salmon-colored walls covered with vines, dark-red gabled roof, bougainvillea that hung over the arched windows.
Sleeping Beauty. That’s what her father had always called her. His Sleeping Beauty princess.
Sleeping Beauty had lived hidden away in this house, content to work on her still-life oil paintings, collecting snow globes of scenes that would never change.
Aubrey had been sleepwalking through her life. Unwilling to look beyond what she was told, sensing her questions would somehow alter things. It was time to wake up and confront the truth. Time to learn who her mother really was.
Because too much time had already elapsed, and Ethan was still missing.
CHAPTER 29
Diana put on her dark glasses and staggered toward the red-and-blue lights in front of Jonathan’s building as sirens screamed around her.
Dozens of men and women pulled her along with them—horrified and excited by this intrusion in their routine lunch breaks.
“A jumper,” someone next to her said. “My friend saw him falling.”
“I heard he was pushed,” someone else said.
Her abdomen convulsed. She knew she should run away, but she couldn’t stop herself. She had to see.
Crowds had formed at the edge of the police barricades. Reporters stood near their vans as their cameramen filmed. She caught bits and pieces. Don’t yet know. Suicide or murder. Swarming with FBI agents. High-profile individual.
She pressed through the gawking crowd and got up against a barricade. Everyone was filming with their phones, arms extended in Nazi salutes.
She took in the people in uniforms and suits who filled the small grassy square beneath Jonathan’s balcony. She strained to see what was behind them. Several people were kneeling beside a tarp. The tarp that covered the body.
She looked up. Forty-two stories. People on Jonathan’s balcony. So many people. But she knew none of them was Jonathan.
A scent wafted toward her. Eau Sauvage.
She heard a choking sound.
“Are you okay?” someone beside her asked.
No. Not okay. I’m dying inside. No words came out.
On the other side of the barricade, one of the men in suits was checking out the crowd. He looked familiar. Smolleck.
Quickly, she lowered her head and turned back into the crowd. Can’t stay here. Run away.
I can’t leave him, her heart screamed. I love him. I love him.
Her feet kept moving, weaving through the horde, carrying her away.
The voice in her head quieted the one in her heart.
Not now. Not here. You can grieve for him later.
You’ll have all the time in the world later.
CHAPTER 30
Aubrey didn’t know where she might find her. She only knew her mother had been at Jonathan’s apartment earlier, so that was where she was driving.
Cars streamed past her. People everywhere, but Aubrey had never felt more alone. Her phone rang, startling her. She pulled it out of her handbag and glanced at it. “Unknown caller.”
She answered. “Hello?”
“It’s me,” her mother said in a trembling, barely audible voice. “Meet me at the Circle.” Before Aubrey could ask anything else, her mother had hung up.
Her heart pounded. This was what she’d wanted. To talk to her mother and find out what she’d done before the FBI caught up with her, but she hesitated. The right thing to do was to call Smolleck. But if someone from her mother’s past had been behind Ethan’s kidnapping, her mother was more likely to tell her than the FBI. It was their best chance to get Ethan back.
Aubrey glanced at the phone in her hand. She turned it off. With no GPS in her mother’s old car and the phone off, no one would be able to track her.
No one would find them at the Circle.