Elizabella’s commentary haunts me: My daddy doesn’t know that man in the kitchen.
I shiver with the feeling of a hundred near misses. I was home every night. Elizabella was home every night with me. To think what could have happened . . .
“There was an incident,” I say. “With the kiln.” I fill her in on what happened. “If the money was in there, it’s gone.”
She turns pale and drops her head into her hands. “God, Veronica.”
“I don’t know how much money we’re talking, but that ash was everywhere. I know I lost at least fifteen grand beneath the thing, let alone what was actually hidden inside of it.”
She looks up at me. “What are we going to do?”
“I can’t unburn it.”
“God, Veronica! What are we going to do?”
“I don’t know. I didn’t know it was there. And if they come looking—if they come looking again, I mean—and I can’t produce it . . .” Or if Micah came to get it the other night, and it’s not here, he can’t repay Diamante.
“Shit.”
“I’ve told the police. Maybe they can help. Maybe they’ll keep us safe.”
“A big gamble, seeing as the police seem to be zeroing in on two suspects,” she says. “Me. And you.”
“Micah had an insurance policy. Two-point-five million, but Guidry said it wouldn’t pay out without a death certificate.”
“Gabby had a life insurance policy, too. But it’s not much. Certainly not enough to cover what he owes.”
“I found some in our safe-deposit box. Fifty grand. I’ve spent some, but it’ll account for something.”
“I have a retirement fund.”
“You spent more time in this house than I have,” I say. “Am I overlooking a hiding place besides the kiln? Unless . . . do you think it’s possible Gabby found any of the money and hid it someplace else?”
“Too late to ask her now, but I doubt it.” She drums her fingertips against the tabletop. “I’m sure she would’ve told me if she’d found even a twenty on the sidewalk, but—”
Natasha pulls a pack of cigarettes from the shadows.
I stare at it, mindlessly massaging the cat’s head.
She takes a smoke from the pack and lights it. “I just . . . I can’t seem to calm down.”
I point to the cigarette. “You quit in college.”
“Well, after the month I’ve had, I’m thinking quitting is overrated.”
The image of the cigarette butt on Christian’s desk haunts me now. Natasha is puffing on its clone.
Could she be the one who’s been spying on me?
I kissed Christian Renwick a few times. Did I ever taste even the slightest hint of cigarette on his lips?
Never.
And the butt in the saucer on his desk. There weren’t any ashes with it. He wasn’t the smoker. He picked it up from my lawn.
He must have known I saw it. And he removed the evidence that someone—a colleague of his?—had been there. But why keep it? Why not throw it away?
He knew too much about the case, but he hadn’t been following me. His nieces, as evidenced by the autograph tree, arrived the day I left home, before I even knew I was coming or where I’d end up.
I stare at Natasha’s cigarette. She was on my doorstep at the Shadowlands. She knew where to find me here in Key West. There was the brown sedan . . . the one that followed me into Wisconsin. Was Natasha smoking on the fairway? Or could she have been in touch with whoever was?
Whoever killed Gabrielle could have threatened Natasha. I think of the questions she asked tonight. Maybe she’s here to gather information . . . for them. Maybe she’s looking for the money, too.
And I just told her I can’t give it to her.
Chapter 56
If Natasha is in on it, I wonder if she’s been telling me the truth. About Gabrielle. About Miriam. Could it be the men after the money are using her to get to me?
I stand and back toward the door, Papa Hemingway in my arms, just as a peal of girlish laughter rings out from inside the house.
Natasha groans. “Would you mind getting them back to bed?” She exhales a ribbon of smoke into the air. “God, I just can’t calm down.”
Silently, because I can’t find voice enough to answer, I nod. I place a trembling hand onto the doorknob, and once I manage to enter, I lock the door behind me to keep Natasha out . . . just in case she’s not on my side. I can’t think straight. I need time to process, time to sort through everything. She showed up at the Shadowlands and then here, but in between she’d disappeared. And she’s been keeping Micah’s secrets for years. Can I trust her?
It’s difficult to hear anything over the pitch of adrenaline ringing in my ears, but I hear a whisper coming from the foyer: “Good girl. You opened the door.”
“No.” I drop the cat.
At first, I don’t see more than a shape lifting my daughter from her feet.
Instantly, I’m by her side, screaming, ripping her from the hands that hold her.
The back door rattles with Natasha’s attempts to turn the knob. She starts pounding on the door when she can’t. “Not Daddy!” Bella huddles in my embrace. “Not Daddy!”
In the shadows in the foyer, the man who held my daughter turns the dead bolt, locking us in. There’s another man standing silently behind him—the shorter of the two agents who came to my house with the feigned news of Micah’s death.
Natasha is outside. Is she with me or against me?
I glance back at her.
But she’s not alone anymore. I recognize the man with a gun to her head: Lincoln.
The faces in Mama’s jewelry hiss and heckle in my mind, and suddenly, I’m a teenager again, seeking safety in a seven-hundred-square-foot apartment.
The man in the foyer steps into the light. I catch a glimpse of silver-blue eyes, and although I’ve never met him, he’s familiar.
I hear the echo of Micah’s warning in my head, words that illustrated his feelings for his father, on the last evening we shared:
Man’s a tyrant. Nicki. No.
“Open the back door.”
I cradle my daughter close. My eyes widen. It’s perfectly clear to me how Bella could have mistaken this man for her father in the dark. Same build, same square jaw. Same blue eyes. I may as well be looking at my husband, twenty years into the future.
“Not Daddy,” Elizabella whispers.
Miriam, suddenly standing at the foot of the staircase, rubs an eye with a knuckle. “Mommy?” Her eyes grow wider when she sees the intruder.
I reach for her. She takes my hand.
My father-in-law leans against the wall opposite me, his frame foreboding in the small space. “If you value her life”—he nods toward the back door—“open the door.”
Still, for a good few seconds, I’m afraid to move.
“Veronica!” Natasha screams.
I inch my way down the hallway and through the kitchen and unlock the door. “Stay with me,” I say to Mimi. I don’t want her anywhere near the gun.
Micah’s father comes into the light. “You,” he says in the midst of a sigh, “must be my daughter-in-law.”
I do my best to nod. “Mick.” I think to divert him with a nice-to-meet-you, to show him we’re family, to hope he recognizes that fact over and above his reasons for being here. But he’s no idiot. He knows I realize he wouldn’t drop in at this hour, with a gun to Natasha’s head, simply to meet me.
The door opens, and Lincoln shoves Natasha inside.
I tighten my grip on her daughter’s hand, but Mimi tears away and runs to her mother anyway.
“Where’s Micah?” I ask.
“That’s the question of the day, isn’t it?” Mick says. “Where can he stay out of trouble?”
Italy, I suppose. Switzerland. Where else did Guidry say the computer records revealed a home search?
“He’s been sighted here on the island.”
“So he’s alive?” I dare to ask.
“A lot of that depends on you,” Mick says. “On whether you’re prepared to tell me what you know. On whether I find him before our business associates do.”