“Kirsten, you can’t—”
“I can,” Kirsten interrupted. “Thank you for all your help, Alice. Please let me know when Samuel’s funeral arrangements have been made, so I can come pay my respects.” Her tone was crisp and formal, and Alice shrank back as if reprimanded. Jesse felt sorry for the woman but still had no idea what was happening. He clenched his jaw, trying to keep his questions until they got to the car.
Chapter 17
I claimed a table in the back of a coffee shop near Dashiell’s house, Kalista’s Koffee, and then spent the first few minutes trying to reorganize the papers into a more or less chronological timeline of Olivia’s life. I scanned through the early stuff—there wasn’t a lot that Will hadn’t already touched upon. There was, however, a transcript of an interview with Olivia’s husband, Scott Powell.
Interviewer: Mr. Powell, what can you tell me about your marriage to Olivia Richards?
Powell: I really don’t think I should be talking to you. I think you should go. She can’t find out where I am, you see?
Interviewer: Mr. Powell, I promise you, there is no reason for Olivia to ever know that you and I spoke. This is purely for background information regarding a sensitive employment position.
Powell: You mean like with the government or something?
Interviewer: Something of that nature, yes.
Powell: Is it a shrink thing—I mean, a psychiatry job? Because you should know she was asked to leave the program.
Interviewer: Is that how you two met, at graduate school?
Powell: At first, yes. I was getting my doctorate in computer science while she was working on her PhD.
Interviewer: Did anything about her strike you as odd, when you first met?
Powell: No…I mean, except for the fact that she was interested in me. She was—is—gorgeous, you know? So I figured she might just be into my family’s money…
I skipped ahead a few pages, past Scott Powell’s description of their early life together, when he thought she was perfect. I already knew about Olivia’s ability to seem perfect. The investigator Will had hired was pretty good—he was able to get Powell past his fear of being found within a few minutes. Or maybe he’d just realized that Scott Powell was dying to talk to someone about his ex-wife.
Investigator: You said you “woke up” to what she was doing. What did you mean by that?
Powell: It was like…she’d been training me, the whole time we were together. Changing who I was. At first I figured, well, a lot of guys feel like that when they get married. But this wasn’t just, like, buying me new clothes or making me get a haircut. A few months after the honeymoon, she was sort of…isolating me. She cut off my contact with my family, with my friends. She didn’t want me going anywhere without her—I worked from home, even then, so I was expected to be with her twenty-four hours a day, every day. If I tried to resist, she got real quiet, like I’d broken her heart, or she ran guilt trips, or she used…you know.
Investigator: Sex?
Powell: Yeah. It was like she had a box of tools, and she pulled out whichever one she needed to keep me in line…
Ouch. I flicked that page aside. I remembered the box of tools too.
Investigator: So how bad did it get before you asked for a divorce?
Powell: Well, first of all, I didn’t ask for a divorce. I begged her. Begged her. But that was later, after all the fertility testing. When Olivia found out she couldn’t have kids…look, I don’t want to talk about those days.
Investigator: Okay.
Powell: I mean, I wanted kids too, always did, so I said well, let’s adopt. No big deal, I had plenty of money for lawyers or whatever. But Olivia screamed at me; she said her kids needed to have something of her in them or they wouldn’t be hers.
I closed the packet. It was interesting, no doubt, filling in the blanks of Olivia’s inner life, but it wasn’t getting me any closer to finding her. Or to figuring out how she’d been turned into a vampire. I checked my watch: almost noon. What else could I do? I flipped impatiently through the file. Will’s investigator may have been good, but the timeline ended fifteen years ago, when Olivia had gone to work for Dashiell. There was no mention of me or the Old World, much less anything about her final days, when she had presumably planned her “death.”
Her final days.
That set off a bell in my head, but I was still chasing the thought when my phone buzzed on the table. I picked it up. Jesse.
“Hello?” I said absently. Something had been on the tip of my brain-tongue. What was it?
“Death spices?” Jesse yelled. “You decided that I didn’t need to know about death spices?!”
Oops. He had my attention now. I automatically glanced around, even though nobody was going to hear the yelling over the phone. Luckily, Kalista’s was more or less abandoned—everybody had gotten their coffee to go, so they could get back to their weekday jobs. The artsy-looking girl behind the counter raised her eyebrows when she saw me looking around, but I just gave her a brief smile and a thumbs-up. All good here. No refills needed.
I took a deep breath. “Uh, it was need-to-know basis, and you didn’t need to know?” I tried. But I could practically feel him seething on the other end. I couldn’t even blame him.
“Scarlett?” Kirsten’s voice rang out. “You’re on speakerphone; we’re on our way back to LA.”
“Oh, good,” I said, but my voice was limp.