J. W. as in Jonathan Woodward, or was that a coincidence?
She left the county website and googled “J. W. Hendrix, Atlanta.” There were a couple of near hits, including Janis Hendrix. She pulled up images of “Janis Hendrix.” The photos were all of Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix, two famous performers from Woodstock, who had died young. She went through the other images. If one of them was Janis Hendrix, she had no way of knowing. She searched every link for Janis Hendrix, but found nothing helpful, so she couldn’t confirm that J. W. Hendrix was Janis Hendrix.
Her research into the time-share was another dead end, but it was very likely a flawed assumption anyway. If Ethan had been in the apartment with her father and Star, Aubrey would never have been invited to come over.
She had wasted almost an hour and was no closer to finding Ethan. Her eyes settled on her still-life paintings. A solitary apple. A vase. A bronze horse in the center of an empty table.
Maybe the problem was that she was looking at each aspect of Ethan’s kidnapping in isolation. She needed to put all the pieces together. So far, she had photos of a woman who had babysat Ethan in LA and who also had appeared at the carnival. Then there was Smolleck and her parents’ interest in Stormdrain, so she assembled the names of people involved with the organization: Steve Robinson, Jeffrey Schwartz, Albert Jacobs, Linda Wilsen, and Gertrude Morgenstern.
Linda Wilsen and Gertrude Morgenstern had been friends of her mother’s. Someone claiming to be Jeffrey Schwartz had gone to the FBI twenty years ago, insisting that the brownstone explosion hadn’t been an accident and that he knew who had blown it up. That had been right around the time her parents’ marriage began to fall apart. Was there a connection?
There was still the big hole in her information. She didn’t know what her parents’ involvement had been in Stormdrain or with the explosion.
She opened her desk drawer and took out her mother’s small box. She studied each photo again, but kept going back to the one with Linda and Gertrude, the two women who had been in the explosion.
Linda had been injured. No one knew what had become of her.
She set the photo down on the desk and pulled up the photos of the babysitter on her computer, but except for eye color, there wasn’t even a remote resemblance to Linda. And of course, her age was all wrong. Linda would now be in her early sixties, and the babysitter was probably twenty years younger than that.
Aubrey looked at the pretty blonde, blue-eyed woman. Even in the photo, she could tell that Linda had been delicate and graceful.
A lot like Star.
Jesus. Could Star be Linda Wilsen?
Linda could have had extensive reconstructive surgery and no longer be recognizable as the Barnard College student in the photo. She could have changed her identity and returned to seek revenge for her friend’s death and her own disfigurement. But why wait so long? Unless she had been planning and waiting for every detail to be perfect.
Aubrey felt a flurry in the pit of her stomach as pieces started fitting together. Star had been responsible for Kevin and her mother’s reconciliation, which would have set up the opportunity for Ethan to visit Mama. Star had hired the babysitter, perhaps to establish a rapport between the babysitter and Ethan so he would leave the carnival with her willingly. And for the last eight years, Star had turned Aubrey’s father against her mother and had been manipulating him.
She needed to call her father now.
She touched his number on her phone and listened to it ring. Three, four, five rings, then it went to voice mail. She grabbed her handbag and car keys and ran down the stairs. Her phone rang as she stepped outside.
Smolleck. She answered. “Hello?”
“Aubrey.” Smolleck’s voice was raw.
Something must have happened with Mama. “What is it? What’s wrong?”
“You were just calling your father.”
“What? How do you know that?”
“I have his phone.”
“Oh,” she said, confused. “Where is he? Is he there?”
“He’s been in a car accident. Actually, he was hit by a car.”
Her legs went weak. “He couldn’t be. I spoke to him a little while ago. He was in the apartment. It’s a mistake.”
“Aubrey?”
She sat down on the grass in the front yard and stared at the deep ruts that had been made by the reporters’ vans. She knew it wasn’t a mistake. “Is he . . .”
“Your father’s in a coma. The ambulance brought him to Mount Sinai Medical Center in Miami Beach.”
A coma. Her father was in a coma. He’d been hit by a car. Had Star tried to kill him when he asked her about the babysitter? Was this Aubrey’s fault?
“Who,” she said. “Who was driving the car?”
“It was hit-and-run,” Smolleck said. He coughed to clear his throat. “But there was an eyewitness who saw the driver.”
Hit-and-run.
Not Star.
“Have you apprehended him?”
“It was a woman,” he said. “She was wearing sunglasses, but she had shoulder-length dark hair and a white blouse.”
Her heart was pounding too hard. It hammered in her ears.
“Aubrey. You need to tell me where your mother is.”
CHAPTER 37
The nurse on the ICU floor told her that her father was in surgery and would be for several more hours. They didn’t know the extent of his injuries, or the prognosis. His wife was very upset and had to leave, the nurse said, and it took Aubrey a minute to realize the nurse meant Star, not Aubrey’s mother.
Her mother may have been the one who tried to kill him.