I stared at her, my mouth still open.
She seemed delighted that I was so interested. “Ethan was great fun, though. Knowledgeable about the theater. And tennis. He and Betsy would fly over to England for Wimbledon every year. Remember a few summers ago, when Dad and I had tickets for Centre Court? We talked about how fun it would be if we bumped into the Sinclares there. But the week before, your father insisted on going out jogging, even though it was raining—”
“And he slipped and broke his ankle and you never let him forget it, I know, I know.”
“Well, I just think he should have shown better sense. We had to cancel the whole trip. Nonrefundable flights to London.” She sniffed. “Anyway, we used to see the Sinclares every year at the convention. We still trade Christmas cards.”
My parents must receive a hundred, maybe two hundred, holiday cards each December. They display them from tartan ribbons, tied in bows and trailing down from the spindles of the stairs in their front hall. My brothers and I race each other to read aloud the obnoxiously self-congratulatory family newsletters; we never bother to glance at the cards from Dad’s professional acquaintances.
“You didn’t answer me. How do you know Ethan?” Mom was sensing that something was wrong.
I raised my hand to shush her. “Hang on. This is important. When did you last see him?”
She looked uncomfortable. “It’s been years. We stopped going to all those ABA events when Daddy retired. But . . . but Ethan called the house just last week.”
“He what?”
“Let me think. It was the day I had the girls with me.”
The girls would be Hayley and Keira. Tony’s little girls. Mom counted backward on her fingers. “Last Monday. The twenty-first.”
“What did he want?”
“Caroline, he was just being friendly. Just saying hi. He talked about how he was thinking of following your father’s lead, maybe start easing into retirement himself. He asked about you kids.”
I felt queasy. “Why? Has he ever met us?”
“No, I don’t think so. But why do you have his picture?” She gestured at the coffee table. “And what’s he doing standing there with . . .” Her lip trembled. “I assume that’s her? Your birth mother?”
“Mom. It’s okay.” I moved to wrap my arm around her. “What did you tell him? About me?”
“Only that you’d grown up into a beautiful young woman,” she pleaded. “People ask after each other’s children, Caroline, it’s what parents do. All I said was how proud we are of you, and how well you’ve done teaching at Georgetown. And that . . . that you were going to take some time off. To have an operation.”
I closed my eyes.
That Monday was the day Madame Aubuchon had ordered me to take sabbatical for the rest of the semester. Wasn’t that the night that Will had slept over? I had already met Sinclare by then. But Leland Brett’s follow-up article, confirming my plans to get surgery, hadn’t run until the next day. Tuesday the twenty-second. That Monday it was not yet public knowledge whether the bullet was about to be extracted, or whether it would stay in my neck forever.
Ethan Sinclare had been checking up on me.
? ? ?
“HE KNOWS MY parents, Beamer.” To hell with last names, with police protocol and professional distance. I was too upset. “Sinclare called my mom last week.”
“Back up. What are you talking about? How could he call your mama—”
“Not Sadie Rawson. Frannie. He knows the Cashions.”
“What? You sure?” asked Beamer Beasley down the phone line from Atlanta.
“My mother—my mother Frannie—just recognized him in a photo. She says he called their house last week. He asked about me, Beamer.”
“All right, all right, hang on. Let me conference in Gerry. You can tell us both what happened.”
It took ten minutes to recount my conversation with my mother. When I had finished, Beasley cleared his throat. “Sinclare and your daddy are both lawyers. Trial attorneys, roughly the same age, at the end of successful careers. I suppose it’s not shocking that their paths might have crossed.”
“My thoughts exactly,” said Gerry Fleeman. “Makes sense that they would attend the same conventions.” I had liked the head of the Atlanta Police Department’s Cold Case Squad when he conducted my formal interview over the phone last week. He seemed smart, competent. Now, from six hundred miles away, he was getting on my nerves.
“There must be, I don’t know, half a million litigators in the United States,” I snapped. “It’s not like they’re all buddies, hanging out and smoking cigars together at Ye Olde Litigators’ Club. And to my knowledge, none of the rest of them has been calling my mom in Washington, inquiring after my health. You don’t find that a strange coincidence?”
“Let’s think this through calmly,” said Gerry. “You said your parents originally met Ethan Sinclare because he sat next to your mom at a dinner back in the 1980s. You’re not suggesting . . . what, that he engineered that, are you? As a way of getting to you?”
“I’m suggesting you consider the possibility.”
“Ms. Cashion, that would mean he’d been stalking you for the last thirty years,” scoffed Gerry. “Thirty years! If he means you harm, he’s certainly taken his time about it.”
“Fine, not stalking me, but keeping tabs on me. Keeping tabs on whether I was healthy. Whether I had remembered anything.”
“What, with an annual Christmas card swap? I’m sorry, I just don’t think—”
“It does make a crazy kind of sense,” said Beasley, just when I thought I might scream. “Whoever the killer was, he would have wanted to know whether the sole surviving witness remembered anything. And he couldn’t just call and ask to speak to a little girl. He would have had to go through her adoptive parents.”
“Precisely,” I said.