Photograph, page 2
Shannon Wells Investigations.
That’s my business. It was a long time coming.
Starting out at age twenty-two as a Florida State grad—major in psychology, minor in criminology, summa cum laude—I burned through twelve jobs in six years. Career Number One was as a concierge host helping Orlando convention goers navigate the conference center buildings on International Drive. I got the job not because of my academic record but because I was young and reasonably cute. My hair was long, wavy, and black; my eyes were sapphire blue; my figure was skinny and tall; and all of that made up for my nose being too long and my mouth being a little bit crooked when I smiled.
This was also before the scar.
Look at me now, and that’s the first thing you notice on my face, a long, pale crescent moon stretching from my cheekbone to my lips. My father offered to send me to a plastic surgeon to get it fixed, but I told him I wanted to leave it right where it was. My past can’t be erased with a skin graft, and I don’t want to try.
Anyway, I burned out on the convention biz after a few weeks. Concierge host became night security guard. Night security guard became waitress. Waitress became Maleficent at Hollywood Studios, complete with bloodred lipstick and a really scary set of horns. The gig at Disney turned out to be my longest-ever employment stint at eighteen months. However, I eventually decided to pursue bigger things, so I aced the LSAT with a 174. Then I spent a year at law school before dropping out to fry potato chips at Buc-ees.
Etc., etc., etc. You get the picture.
I was, as my father so nicely put it, a smart cookie who couldn’t seem to get past the raw dough. Of course, my parents getting a divorce and my mother taking thirty Xanax didn’t help my career focus.
Then came my stop for chicken wings two years ago.
That was the night that changed everything.
I was three weeks into my latest job, teaching psychology at a private high school in Jacksonville. I’d stayed late because of a debate competition. It was after ten o’clock, and I hadn’t eaten since breakfast, so on my drive back to I-10, I stopped to get an order of lemon-pepper wings. I ate inside the restaurant, and when I got back out to the parking lot, I found that one of my SUV tires was dead flat.
I was naive.
It never occurred to me that someone had slashed the tire. I never considered the idea that I was being set up.
Not many Uber drivers hung out in the Lackawanna neighborhood late at night on Mondays. When I found one willing to pick me up, he said it would be half an hour before he got there. So I waited. It was after eleven by then, the restaurant was closed, and I had to wait outside. Also, it was hot, I was low on gas, I was tired, and I was pissed. So my brain was busy elsewhere, not focused on the fact that I was suddenly in a vulnerable situation.
Plus, you know, you never think it’s going to happen to you. Until it does.
The man played it cool at first.
He sat in a car in the parking lot six stalls away from me, and I could smell his cigarette smoke. Nobody else was around. The neighborhood had shut down for the night, the employees had gone home, and it was just him and me. When he got out of the car and looked my way, I finally realized I had a problem. You can see it in the eyes. My victim brain went into panic mode, and when you panic, you do stupid things. I walked away down the street, all casual, pretending nothing was wrong when everything was wrong.
He followed me. He wasn’t hiding it now.
I walked. He walked.
I ran. He ran.
But he was a lot bigger than me and a lot faster. He took me down in half a block and dragged me into the trees behind a liquor store. When I screamed, he slashed my face with a knife and gave me the scar I would have for the rest of my life. I didn’t scream again.
And you know what?
That ten minutes of horror wasn’t even the bad part.
You see, I don’t remember the assault at all. I’ve blocked it out. No, the real rapes I remember—rapes, more than one—came after. The police raped me with their blow-by-blow questions of what he did to me and what body parts he touched and why didn’t I remember his face and why didn’t I lock myself in my car. The lab techs raped me with their invasive kits and their fluid samples and the Fritos smell on their breath. The man’s lawyer raped me with his insinuations about why was I in that neighborhood at night and why was my checking account overdrawn and why was my car payment overdue and wouldn’t a hundred bucks from a john in a parking lot come in handy. The judge raped me when he said there wasn’t enough evidence to sustain the charges and directed a verdict of acquittal from the bench.
So I got a scar, and that man went back out on the streets.
And you know what?
That wasn’t the bad part, either.
Five days after the trial, he went out and did it again. This time he cut the woman’s throat, and she died. Thirty-nine years old. Wife and mother of three. If he’d been in jail, she’d still be alive. So I get to spend the rest of my life feeling guilty about that, too.
One positive thing did come out of that night. After it happened, I figured myself out. I baked my raw cookie dough. Fate had shown me who I was and what I wanted to be and what I wanted to do. I’ve been in self-defense classes ever since. I learned to fight. I learned to shoot. You come at me? I will kill you.
I got my private investigator’s license, and I opened Shannon Wells Investigations. My clients are women, all women, only women. If you find my business card on a bulletin board, you’ll see that it says one thing.
When nobody cares about you, I do.
That’s me. That’s Shannon Wells.
But you know what?
I still haven’t gotten to the bad part.
The bad part is, I haven’t slept through the night since the assault. Not once. I close my eyes, and this vision comes to me. I call it a dream, because most people don’t know what I mean when I say it’s a vision. You see, dreams are imaginary, but this is real. This happened. I know it did. I can feel it. I see the man coming for me just like he did that night, his face lost in shadow. He points his gun at me—he points it right at me—and the gun goes off, and I scream. I wake up bathed in sweat and fear. Then it all begins again. Rinse and repeat a dozen times a night.
It’s like I keep living that terrible event over and over, running along a Möbius strip and ending up where I started. I’m caught in an endless loop, forced to see what my conscious mind has erased from my memory. And yet I still don’t understand what my brain is telling me.
Because here’s the thing.
The man who assaulted me did not have a gun.
TWO
Kate Selby didn’t seem impressed by my office. She sat down across from me at the corner table in the tiki bar and whipped off her sunglasses. She didn’t look at me right away. She glanced at Rina, who was dropping off my piña colada, and shook her head to say no when Rina asked if she wanted one, too. She leaned an elbow on the railing and watched the surfers and shell hunters on the beach, and she stroked the tortoiseshell cat that jumped on the railing and rubbed against her. She studied the plastic-coated menu on the table, which listed mai tais and painkillers, plus the usual Florida appetizers like conch fritters and bacon-wrapped scallops.
Then she finally focused on me. Her blue eyes checked me out.
“You’re Shannon Wells?” she asked, as if needing to confirm that this wasn’t all some kind of big joke.
“That’s me.”
“You’re a private investigator?”
“Yes, I am.”
“You’re, like, licensed and all that?”
Nice vote of confidence there, Kate.
“Fully legal,” I assured her, taking a sip of my drink through the straw. “Are you sure you don’t want one of these? They’re really good. Or if you’re hungry, the fish tacos are overpriced, but I love them.”
“No, thank you.”
I waited for Kate to tell me why she was here, but she kept stalling, biting her lip as she fussed with the cat. In the meantime, I tried to figure out why the name Kate Selby meant something to me and whether I knew her from somewhere. But as far as I could tell, this woman was a stranger.
Rina was right that Kate and I were of a similar type, both skinny and tall. Kate was prettier than me, though, I had to admit. She had a pretty little perky nose, with a sharp ridge underneath. Pretty little ears, adorned with metal-and-rhinestone dragonfly earrings that looked homemade. Pretty eyes that didn’t miss much from behind her yellow glasses. Her hair was black, like mine, but she wore it short, with bangs. She wore a flowered, knee-length summer dress, tied with a belt that matched her glasses, and leather thong sandals.
I did what I usually do when I meet someone new. I picked the first three words that came into my head to describe her.
First, creative. I bet she made those earrings herself. Maybe the dress and belt, too. She had an artsy look.
Second, lonely. Hey, it takes one to know one.
And finally, sad. I didn’t know what had happened, but Kate Selby was definitely grieving something or someone.
She was young, just as Rina thought. I pegged her at twenty-five or twenty-six. I’m usually pretty good at ages, and in this case, I was sure I was right. I didn’t know exactly why, but I realized that I knew things about Kate Selby.
“So what can I do for you?” I asked, trying to open the door for her.
Her pretty pink lips pushed into a frown. “I don’t know. Maybe this was a mistake. I’m not sure what I’m doing here.”
“Well, you told Rina it was important. I want to help if I can.”
She gave me the same penetrating look that I’d given her, and I wondered if she was making up adjectives about me in her head. Ironically, lonely and sad would probably top my own list if I were describing myself. But I’m not creative or artsy. No, what I am is determined.
Maybe Kate read the strong-minded look on my face and decided to take a leap of faith with me, because she then said, “It’s about my mother.”
“Okay. What’s going on with your mother, Kate? Why would it involve a private investigator?”
“That’s exactly what I want to know,” she replied.
My piña colada was halfway to my mouth, but I put it down without drinking, and my forehead crinkled with confusion. “I don’t understand.”
“I want to know why my mother hired a private investigator.”
Kate yanked her purse off the high-top chair where she was sitting, and she dug inside the snapped pouch. She pulled out a piece of paper and unfolded it on the table in front of me. I recognized the paper, because it was a printout of an email attachment that bore the name Shannon Wells Investigations in a large, artistic design at the top. Rina designed it, not me.
It was an invoice.
My invoice.
“My mother hired you last year,” Kate went on. “I’d like to know why.”
“Your mother is—”
“Faith Selby. I found this invoice on her computer. All it says in the email is that it’s a bill for investigative services, but it doesn’t say anything about what you did for her. And yet it’s a bill for five thousand dollars. That’s a lot of money. Particularly to hire a private investigator who operates out of a tiki bar on the beach. So, Ms. Wells, I want to know why my mother came to you and what work you did for her that was worth that kind of money.”
“Faith Selby,” I murmured.
“I assume you remember her,” Kate said.
I stared at the invoice on the table.
Oh, yes. I remembered Faith Selby.
It also explained why Kate was familiar to me. It wasn’t just the name. Part of the work I’d done for Faith required me to research her daughter, and the details about Kate sprang back into my head, the way details do with me. She was twenty-five years old. Born in St. Augustine, where Faith lived. She was now a full-time journalist for The Florida Times-Union and a part-time artist who sold metal sculptures at farmers’ markets up and down the east Florida coast.
“Yes, Faith hired me,” I said.
“What did you do for her?”
“You should ask her that.”
“I’m asking you.”
“Well, I can’t talk about it. If someone uses me for investigative work, they expect my discretion. I have to protect the privacy of my clients, even with family members. Now if your mother gives me permission to share the details—”
“My mother is dead,” Kate snapped.
I shut my eyes at those words.
Flashback. My father had phrased it the same cold way after he found my mother’s body on the bathroom floor. He called me from his car outside her apartment building. Your mother is dead.
“I’m sorry,” I told her.
“So you can see why I’m here,” Kate went on. “My mother spent a lot of money on a private investigator last fall, and she never told me anything about it. I’d like to know what you did for her.”
I hesitated before answering.
I wasn’t a doctor or a lawyer, so I had no legal privilege to protect. And my client was dead. If her daughter wanted to know what I’d done for her mother, there was nothing to stop me from telling her. But still I didn’t know if I should say anything. Faith Selby’s request had been so strange that it made me wonder if her desire for privacy would extend beyond the grave. If she’d wanted Kate to know the truth, she would have told her about it herself. Obviously, she hadn’t.
Kate sensed my reluctance and grew frustrated.
“Why can’t you tell me? What difference could it possibly make now?”
“I don’t know. That’s the problem.”
“What do you mean?”
“Your mother came to me with a very unusual request. Maybe if I’d succeeded, I would know whether it’s okay to tell you about it. But I didn’t. I failed.”
“You failed? How?”
“I couldn’t find the information your mother wanted. I investigated just as she asked—I spent several weeks on the job—but I hit a dead end. I gave Faith my report, and she didn’t object or complain. She simply paid me and left. That was it. I never saw her again.”
A flash of despair crossed Kate’s face, as if she were at a dead end, too. She reached across the table and took my hands. “Shannon, please. Are you close to your mother?”
“I was. Incredibly close. She’s gone, too.”
“Then you understand what I’m going through.”
“Yes, I do.”
“My mother left with unfinished business between us. I’m alone now, and I have a lot of questions and no way to get any answers. I need to know what happened. I need to know what she was hiding from me. You’re the only one who can help.”
That sounded like my motto.
When nobody cares about you, I do.
So I decided to tell her. Partly because I liked Kate. We were two daughters who’d lost our mothers, and there’s a special kinship that goes along with that. But I also sensed that there was something more that she wasn’t telling me. Something important. Something about Faith. And I wanted to know what it was. I failed Faith Selby last year, and I’m not the kind of person who takes failure lightly.
Remember? I’m determined.
“Okay,” I said. “Your mother came to me, and she sat in the same chair you’re sitting in right now. She told me her name and where she lived and that she was an accountant and she had a daughter.”
Kate stared at me, holding her breath. “And then?”
“Then she asked me to find out who she really was.”
“Find out who you are?” I asked.
Faith nodded. “That’s right. That’s what I want you to do.”
“Didn’t you just tell me you’re Faith Selby from St. Augustine? That makes my job pretty easy, doesn’t it?”
“Maybe it does.”
“Are you saying that you’re not really Faith Selby from St. Augustine?”
“I’m not saying that at all.”
Faith didn’t smile. She didn’t treat this like a joke, or like a puzzle where she’d offer me clues to get through the maze. Her face was calm and serious. She’d given me the facts I needed to know. Now it was up to me.
I rocked back in my chair and studied the woman across from me, who’d come out of nowhere to offer me five thousand dollars for a job that didn’t make any sense. She had short, unfussy hair, mostly blond but with streaks of darker brown and gray roots peeking out from her messy part. Her face was etched with what my mother would have called worry lines, especially around her dark-brown eyes. She had a rounded nose and chin, both perfectly symmetrical. She was very attractive and probably would have been a stunner when she was younger. Her body was thin, almost to the point of being emaciated, but with breasts so full and high that I wondered if she’d given them some surgical help. She wore a loose white button-down shirt over faded blue jeans, and her legs were long.
Faith Selby.
Loyal.
Fierce.
Scared.
Those were her three words, one of the more unusual combinations of adjectives that had ever popped into my head. But Faith was an unusual woman.
“What else can you tell me about yourself?” I asked.
“What else do you want to know?”
“How old are you?”
Faith took a while to answer, as if she had to assess whether knowing her age would give me an unfair advantage. Then she said, “I’m fifty-one.”
“When’s your birthday?”
“I assume you’ll find a way to get my driver’s license records, so you’ll see it’s listed as October 5.”
That was an interesting answer, and it told me one thing for sure.
Her birthday was not October 5.
“What do you do for a living?”
“I’m an accountant.”
“For a company?”
“No, I work for myself.”
“Are you married?”
“No.”
“Never?”
“Never.”
“So no kids?”
Faith frowned. I wondered if I’d already made her say more than she intended. “Actually, I have a daughter. Kate.”
