What We'll Burn Last, page 15
LEYNA
Saturday, 12:06 p.m.
When Leyna got back to the neighborhood, she placed Goose on the Durans’ doorstep before Olivia could come out to claim him. Then she retrieved her laptop from her car and retreated to her mom’s back patio, the spot farthest from the house where she could still get a decent Wi-Fi signal.
She put her laptop on a patio table and checked her messages and the news. No response from Amaya. No updates on Ellie. Remembering the scent of smoke in the woods, Leyna checked the weather too. A small fire burned north of them, but so far Johnsville was the only area evacuated.
When her mom joined her, Leyna looked up. “I saw Rocky in the woods.”
Her mom’s lips compressed into a thin line. She made no move to sit. “The generator was sabotaged.”
Leyna leaned back in her seat. “What?”
“Someone cut the battery cable.”
“You’re sure it was cut?”
“Of course I’m sure. Fortunately, I was able to fix it. But with everything that’s going on…” Her voice trailed off.
“Did you hear something about Ellie?”
“No. Not Ellie.”
“Then what?”
She waved off the question. “Just an issue with my art broker. I’m dealing with it.”
Leyna closed her laptop. “Did something happen between you and Rocky?”
Her mom pulled her spine erect. A posture of defiance Leyna had witnessed many times. I’m in control of this conversation.
“Why are you asking about Rocky?”
“When I mentioned your name to him, I got the impression you two haven’t been getting along.”
“We get along as well as we ever have.” Her tone dismissive.
Leyna hesitated, then pulled the folded plastic wrapper from her pocket. She placed it on the table for her mom to see. “I found this pinned to the sugar pine with an arrow.”
Leyna didn’t need to tell her mom which sugar pine she meant. Leyna had told her the story when everything about Grace was coming out. The part about falling, anyway.
Meredith picked up the folded piece of plastic but didn’t seem to notice the writing. “Olivia still uses the range.” She grimaced in displeasure. “Her damn dog dropped an arrow in my yard just last month.”
“It wasn’t one of hers.”
“How can you be sure?”
Leyna pulled up the photo on her phone. “This one had a blunted tip. Like the practice arrows Adam used when he was learning to shoot.”
Her mom returned her attention to the plastic wrapper, unfolded it. Her scowl deepened. “‘It’s your fault.’ What the hell does that mean?”
Leyna shrugged.
“Maybe it wasn’t meant for you,” her mom said.
“Maybe.” She didn’t believe that, of course. Who else could it have been intended for when it was pinned to that tree? But then she noticed her mom’s expression. The compressed lips. The shuttered eyes. Those three words—It’s your fault—had rattled her mom as much as they had her.
Leyna stood and exhaled, and a fresh blast of wind stirred the trees, as if she controlled the weather. If only. She would’ve liked to feel in control of something. She was preparing to broach the subject of Grace’s final night again when she felt movement behind her just as her mom’s lips puckered in disapproval.
Must be a Duran.
Leyna turned to find Dominic standing about ten feet back. With the past so fresh in her mind, she saw in him his brother’s nose, thick brows, dark eyes. Those eyes, especially, made her breath catch.
She fell back on her mom’s ploy—distraction. “The generator stopped working.”
Dominic looked past Leyna. “Need help?”
Her mom shook her head. “Already fixed. And it didn’t stop working. It was sabotaged.”
After shooting Dominic a pointed look, her mom stalked off, heading inside. Once she was beyond hearing, Leyna said, “Did you call about the bracelet?”
“They took down our information and asked us to hold on to it.” Dominic held out a plastic bag with the bracelet inside. She took it and put it in her pocket. Her twill joggers were loose enough that she couldn’t feel the sharp edges of the petals. “With this weather, they’re swamped now, but they’ll contact us when they have the resources.”
Leyna held out an offering of her own—the scrap of plastic she’d found stuck to the tree. Dominic raised an eyebrow and gestured toward it.
“‘It’s your fault’?”
Whether or not the message was meant for her, it might as well have been. She forced the words out.
“We fought the night Grace disappeared. That’s why she wasn’t at home. It is my fault, at least partly.”
After saying it aloud, she felt a loosening in her chest.
“Leyna—”
She stopped him with a look. She needed to get it out. Since Grace had gone missing, she’d told the same story: She was asleep. She’d been having some stupid dream that evaporated as soon as she opened her eyes, unaware the world had changed while she slept.
But that wasn’t the truth. She’d seen Grace slip into that damp March darkness. And she’d done nothing to stop her. Worse than nothing.
The events of those last few weeks had played in her head on a near-constant loop every day for sixteen years. She wondered if it was the same for Dominic.
That last day, Grace wanted to be alone with Adam, but Leyna had followed Grace and Adam anyway, despite the soda that cramped in her bladder. She’d started to notice the way he held Grace’s arm too tightly, and his flashes of irritation had grown more frequent. At twelve, she hadn’t been able to put her finger on it, but that day felt different somehow. So when they began walking faster, Leyna jogged to keep up.
It had been raining for days, and that afternoon the air was clean, the earth wet, and foam slicked the base of some pine trees. She breathed in the memory, years removed from the scent of the nearby forest baking in the heat. As she shifted, the leaves on the ground crackled. Different than that day, but near the same trees, the same ground, she’d explored as a child.
Grace and Adam stopped in a familiar clearing—next to a sugar pine that had shed strips of bark after that winter’s frost and a ravine wider than she was tall and deeper still. By then, Leyna was winded, and she really had to pee. Her T-shirt stuck to her skin, and sweat bloomed from her armpits, the cotton straining against her stomach because of a recent growth spurt.
At seeing Leyna—sweating, chest heaving in her too-small T-shirt—Grace laughed. It was a blunt sound, and the flash of her eyes warned that she intended to wound. Recognizing her sister’s irritation, Leyna knew she should leave, but her legs were rubber, her heartbeat a violent knocking, the urgency of her bladder temporarily on pause.
Grace’s perfect eyebrows shot together. “You shouldn’t have come.” Her lips thinned and her hands darted to Leyna’s shoulders, and no matter what Leyna would later tell her mom, Grace meant to push her as hard as she did. It hadn’t been an accident.
The force of that shove sent Leyna several steps back. Her right foot caught the root of the sugar pine, and when her arms shot out for balance, she overcorrected. Gravity tugged her backward, toward the crack in the earth, and she tumbled in and landed hard on her backside at the bottom of the crevasse on a mat of dried brush and bits of rock.
Leyna brushed the phantom needles and gravel from her palms. In her memory movie, she usually fast-forwarded through the next part of the story, but if she was feeling self-destructive, she played it on repeat. Currently, she was in a skipping kind of mood.
Leyna had told Dominic some of it ten years before. Now she told him the rest of it.
“I could’ve saved her.”
Dominic seemed to be waiting for her to say more, so she added, “Mom and Grace were arguing. I didn’t hear what it was about, but it was a night for that.”
There were only two volumes in the Clarke house—maximum and full silence. That night, the volume had been turned all the way up. Too far away for Leyna to hear clearly but loud enough to make her reach for her earplugs and lock her door. Those days, she always locked her door when Adam visited.
After her mom retreated to her own bedroom and after Leyna was sure Adam wasn’t coming back, she slipped out of bed and locked Grace out of the house.
“I didn’t intend to,” she said. “Not at first. I’d gone to the kitchen for something to eat.”
She didn’t tell him how her arm had started to throb and how the shame of what had happened brought heat to her cheeks. But he already knew that part of the story.
“I saw the door leading outside, and I locked it.” In the moment, it felt like a small victory. “Then I locked all the doors and the windows. Grace never mastered how to pick a dead bolt.”
Even now, Leyna could see Grace at the window later that night. She was still tormented by the tapping of her sister’s fingernails on the glass, her voice as she begged to be let inside.
The cloud-cloaked moon had cast anemic light, but her sister’s face had been only inches from the window. Even in the near darkness, Leyna couldn’t pretend she didn’t see.
She tried to pretend anyway, shifting in her bed so she faced the wall.
“Open up, Ley.” Grace never pleaded, and the unfamiliar tone nearly pulled Leyna from her bed.
Grace raised her voice to a more urgent whisper. “The doors are all locked, and I don’t have my key.”
Leyna’s legs tensed and she was considering going to the window even after what Grace had done earlier when the tapping became a pounding. Leyna didn’t need to face her sister to know she was using her fist.
“Come on, Ley.” Her voice hardened with impatience. “It’s fucking freezing out here.”
Leyna burrowed deeper into her comforter until her sister gave up and walked into the woods; Leyna went to the window to watch her go.
Leyna noticed her fingers circling her scar, and she pulled them into a fist. She couldn’t look at Dominic, certain she would see his judgment.
“And you never saw her again?”
She offered a slow shake of her head, and, unable to stand his inevitable disappointment in her, she started walking to her car. He stopped her with a hand on her shoulder.
“You couldn’t have known she’d never come back.”
“It was still a shitty thing to do.” Her voice cracked. She’d left her sister out in the cold, at the mercy of monsters. One monster in particular. But she’d never been able to convince Dominic of that, and she wasn’t about to try again.
Dominic tried to reassure her. “If she’d come back, you would’ve let her in, right?”
He’d obviously forgotten how stubborn she could be. Then again, he’d always had more faith in her than she’d had in herself. When they’d been friends, then lovers, he’d encouraged her to write a mystery novel, explore a career with the forest service, become a baker—Find the thing that makes you happiest, he’d say.
She’d wanted that to be him, but of course it couldn’t be. There were only two things that would ever make her happy, or at least assuage her guilt.
Finding Grace or punishing Adam.
Leyna’s various jobs in retail or as a server—those were just ways to pay the rent. Her college classes, the friends she grabbed drinks with, the men she slept with who weren’t Dominic—those were ways to pass the time between leads. Because for sixteen years, her life’s purpose had been finding out what had happened that night.
Leyna turned to face him. “Of course I would’ve let her in.” She paused. “Eventually.” She wasn’t sure that was true, but she couldn’t bear to give him a different answer, one that might cause his faith in her to fade. Being back here reminded her how much she’d missed it.
“It’s not your fault,” he said, his face so earnest she almost believed him.
She believed what was written on that wrapper more.
“So—where are we going?” he asked.
Leyna started toward the car again. “To search Rocky’s place.”
“He’s going to let you do that?”
She opened the driver-side door and got in. “He won’t be home,” she said. “He told me he had someplace to be.”
“Hmm.” Not yet fully convinced. “Assume you don’t have a key?”
“Nope.”
Dominic slid in beside her. He buckled his seat belt and slung his left arm on the console, careful to take only half the space. “So breaking and entering. Cool.” He slipped on a pair of sunglasses. “Though this is definitely going to make the next Duran family dinner a little awkward.”
CHAPTER 24
MEREDITH
Saturday, 12:08 p.m.
Meredith took the cordless phone into Grace’s bedroom. It was where she liked to go when she was angry. She despised being threatened. The words from the man claiming to be Adam Duran came back to her.
I want to hang the painting over the mantel so everyone who comes into my home can see what she’s done.
Meredith opened the closet that once held Grace’s clothes. Not long after Grace went missing, Meredith had packed up her daughter’s clothing and put the boxes in the garage. Despite everything, she still expected Grace to show up at the house demanding her things.
In the years that followed, she’d turned the closet into a different kind of shrine. This was where she stored her daughter’s portraits.
Most of the time, all the portraits but that year’s were wrapped in plastic and Styrofoam and sealed in boxes, but for the month of Grace’s birthday, Meredith would pick a few to display in Grace’s room. She should’ve packed them away a week ago, but she hadn’t. It seemed wrong to put them back in storage when she hadn’t yet finished the one that would mark Grace’s thirty-third birthday.
Meredith sat on the edge of the bed facing the closet and the wall where three portraits had been hung. Grace at eighteen, twenty-five, and twenty-eight. She put her notepad and pen on the bed next to her and called the courier service first. As expected, they had nothing to tell her.
After she hung up, she checked her phone contacts for a number she’d called only twice before. While Meredith had threatened her art broker’s Braque, Brian would sell his father’s fake leg when it came to high-value commissions. His sweet assistant Katie, however, would be much easier to persuade.
Let’s see if fake Adam’s identity stands up to the same scrutiny my replicas get.
With three pairs of Grace’s icy-blue eyes watching her, Meredith punched the number into the handset and offered a breezy greeting.
“Hi, Katie.” As if they were old friends, the kind of friend you did favors for. She’d met Brian’s assistant only in passing, but Katie had made an impression in her sunflower-yellow blouse, garish green eye shadow, and bright orange braids. Meredith figured she used color to compensate for falling just short of five feet, even in heels. It worked. People noticed her. Unfortunately for Katie, her personality wasn’t nearly as bold. Meredith found herself comparing the assistant to Grace, as she always did with women of that age. The comparison wasn’t favorable to Katie.
“I need some information about a client who approached Brian about a commission. Girl in White in the Woods. I heard you spoke with him today.”
“I’m sorry, Ms. Clarke. Truly. But I’m not allowed to give out that information.”
“Brian’s already talked to me about it. It’s my commission. I just need to confirm the identity, since I must’ve written the name down wrong.”
The assistant paused, then lowered her voice. “What’s the name you have?”
“Adam Duran.”
Katie sighed in apparent relief. She really was a nervous young woman. “Yes, that’s right. That’s the name.”
“But you see, it’s not. I know this for certain.”
“It’s the only name I have.”
“Like I said, it’s the wrong name.” An edge crept into her voice. “You must understand why I’d need to confirm the identity of someone asking about me, especially since they have such sensitive information about my work. About my family.”
“I really am sorry. Would you like to speak to Brian? I can see if he’s available.”
So Katie had finally stolen a backbone from the gallery’s lost and found. Meredith would’ve been impressed if it hadn’t pissed her off.
“No, I don’t want to speak to Brian. I’ve already spoken with Brian, and now I’m calling you. Brian mentioned that when the client called today, he seemed anxious that he hadn’t heard from me.”
“I can confirm he called, but I can’t share the details. I’m sure you understand.” Her voice was annoyingly chipper. “Is there anything else I can help you with, Ms. Clarke?”
“You haven’t yet helped me, Katie.”
The assistant went silent, but she didn’t hang up. She wasn’t the type to disconnect first.
Meredith released her breath and spoke to Brian’s assistant as calmly as she was able. “Listen, Katie, the worst that idiot boss of yours will do is fire you, and you know I’m capable of worse than that. Plus he won’t fire you. Then who would schedule his bathroom breaks?”
For focus, Meredith studied the three portraits of Grace. She’d selected the newer paintings at random, but the first portrait she’d hung because it remained her favorite. It was the truest to the Grace she remembered. Unlike the others, which were interpretations of what Grace might have looked like in later years, this one captured her as she was then. In this first portrait, Meredith hadn’t yet perfected the pale blue of Grace’s eyes, but her skin and hair were exactly right, the same as they’d been when she was sixteen. Meredith had taken artistic license with only a single detail: She’d given Grace a smile, although it had been lost long before she’d gone.
Meredith returned to her friendly voice but with enough of a threat to make Katie wonder at the undertone. “I won’t tell Brian you told me anything. Unless you don’t help me, in which case I’ll tell him I’ll no longer work with him because of you.”
The young woman huffed. “That’s not cool.” Katie sounded a little angry. Good for her.
Saturday, 12:06 p.m.
When Leyna got back to the neighborhood, she placed Goose on the Durans’ doorstep before Olivia could come out to claim him. Then she retrieved her laptop from her car and retreated to her mom’s back patio, the spot farthest from the house where she could still get a decent Wi-Fi signal.
She put her laptop on a patio table and checked her messages and the news. No response from Amaya. No updates on Ellie. Remembering the scent of smoke in the woods, Leyna checked the weather too. A small fire burned north of them, but so far Johnsville was the only area evacuated.
When her mom joined her, Leyna looked up. “I saw Rocky in the woods.”
Her mom’s lips compressed into a thin line. She made no move to sit. “The generator was sabotaged.”
Leyna leaned back in her seat. “What?”
“Someone cut the battery cable.”
“You’re sure it was cut?”
“Of course I’m sure. Fortunately, I was able to fix it. But with everything that’s going on…” Her voice trailed off.
“Did you hear something about Ellie?”
“No. Not Ellie.”
“Then what?”
She waved off the question. “Just an issue with my art broker. I’m dealing with it.”
Leyna closed her laptop. “Did something happen between you and Rocky?”
Her mom pulled her spine erect. A posture of defiance Leyna had witnessed many times. I’m in control of this conversation.
“Why are you asking about Rocky?”
“When I mentioned your name to him, I got the impression you two haven’t been getting along.”
“We get along as well as we ever have.” Her tone dismissive.
Leyna hesitated, then pulled the folded plastic wrapper from her pocket. She placed it on the table for her mom to see. “I found this pinned to the sugar pine with an arrow.”
Leyna didn’t need to tell her mom which sugar pine she meant. Leyna had told her the story when everything about Grace was coming out. The part about falling, anyway.
Meredith picked up the folded piece of plastic but didn’t seem to notice the writing. “Olivia still uses the range.” She grimaced in displeasure. “Her damn dog dropped an arrow in my yard just last month.”
“It wasn’t one of hers.”
“How can you be sure?”
Leyna pulled up the photo on her phone. “This one had a blunted tip. Like the practice arrows Adam used when he was learning to shoot.”
Her mom returned her attention to the plastic wrapper, unfolded it. Her scowl deepened. “‘It’s your fault.’ What the hell does that mean?”
Leyna shrugged.
“Maybe it wasn’t meant for you,” her mom said.
“Maybe.” She didn’t believe that, of course. Who else could it have been intended for when it was pinned to that tree? But then she noticed her mom’s expression. The compressed lips. The shuttered eyes. Those three words—It’s your fault—had rattled her mom as much as they had her.
Leyna stood and exhaled, and a fresh blast of wind stirred the trees, as if she controlled the weather. If only. She would’ve liked to feel in control of something. She was preparing to broach the subject of Grace’s final night again when she felt movement behind her just as her mom’s lips puckered in disapproval.
Must be a Duran.
Leyna turned to find Dominic standing about ten feet back. With the past so fresh in her mind, she saw in him his brother’s nose, thick brows, dark eyes. Those eyes, especially, made her breath catch.
She fell back on her mom’s ploy—distraction. “The generator stopped working.”
Dominic looked past Leyna. “Need help?”
Her mom shook her head. “Already fixed. And it didn’t stop working. It was sabotaged.”
After shooting Dominic a pointed look, her mom stalked off, heading inside. Once she was beyond hearing, Leyna said, “Did you call about the bracelet?”
“They took down our information and asked us to hold on to it.” Dominic held out a plastic bag with the bracelet inside. She took it and put it in her pocket. Her twill joggers were loose enough that she couldn’t feel the sharp edges of the petals. “With this weather, they’re swamped now, but they’ll contact us when they have the resources.”
Leyna held out an offering of her own—the scrap of plastic she’d found stuck to the tree. Dominic raised an eyebrow and gestured toward it.
“‘It’s your fault’?”
Whether or not the message was meant for her, it might as well have been. She forced the words out.
“We fought the night Grace disappeared. That’s why she wasn’t at home. It is my fault, at least partly.”
After saying it aloud, she felt a loosening in her chest.
“Leyna—”
She stopped him with a look. She needed to get it out. Since Grace had gone missing, she’d told the same story: She was asleep. She’d been having some stupid dream that evaporated as soon as she opened her eyes, unaware the world had changed while she slept.
But that wasn’t the truth. She’d seen Grace slip into that damp March darkness. And she’d done nothing to stop her. Worse than nothing.
The events of those last few weeks had played in her head on a near-constant loop every day for sixteen years. She wondered if it was the same for Dominic.
That last day, Grace wanted to be alone with Adam, but Leyna had followed Grace and Adam anyway, despite the soda that cramped in her bladder. She’d started to notice the way he held Grace’s arm too tightly, and his flashes of irritation had grown more frequent. At twelve, she hadn’t been able to put her finger on it, but that day felt different somehow. So when they began walking faster, Leyna jogged to keep up.
It had been raining for days, and that afternoon the air was clean, the earth wet, and foam slicked the base of some pine trees. She breathed in the memory, years removed from the scent of the nearby forest baking in the heat. As she shifted, the leaves on the ground crackled. Different than that day, but near the same trees, the same ground, she’d explored as a child.
Grace and Adam stopped in a familiar clearing—next to a sugar pine that had shed strips of bark after that winter’s frost and a ravine wider than she was tall and deeper still. By then, Leyna was winded, and she really had to pee. Her T-shirt stuck to her skin, and sweat bloomed from her armpits, the cotton straining against her stomach because of a recent growth spurt.
At seeing Leyna—sweating, chest heaving in her too-small T-shirt—Grace laughed. It was a blunt sound, and the flash of her eyes warned that she intended to wound. Recognizing her sister’s irritation, Leyna knew she should leave, but her legs were rubber, her heartbeat a violent knocking, the urgency of her bladder temporarily on pause.
Grace’s perfect eyebrows shot together. “You shouldn’t have come.” Her lips thinned and her hands darted to Leyna’s shoulders, and no matter what Leyna would later tell her mom, Grace meant to push her as hard as she did. It hadn’t been an accident.
The force of that shove sent Leyna several steps back. Her right foot caught the root of the sugar pine, and when her arms shot out for balance, she overcorrected. Gravity tugged her backward, toward the crack in the earth, and she tumbled in and landed hard on her backside at the bottom of the crevasse on a mat of dried brush and bits of rock.
Leyna brushed the phantom needles and gravel from her palms. In her memory movie, she usually fast-forwarded through the next part of the story, but if she was feeling self-destructive, she played it on repeat. Currently, she was in a skipping kind of mood.
Leyna had told Dominic some of it ten years before. Now she told him the rest of it.
“I could’ve saved her.”
Dominic seemed to be waiting for her to say more, so she added, “Mom and Grace were arguing. I didn’t hear what it was about, but it was a night for that.”
There were only two volumes in the Clarke house—maximum and full silence. That night, the volume had been turned all the way up. Too far away for Leyna to hear clearly but loud enough to make her reach for her earplugs and lock her door. Those days, she always locked her door when Adam visited.
After her mom retreated to her own bedroom and after Leyna was sure Adam wasn’t coming back, she slipped out of bed and locked Grace out of the house.
“I didn’t intend to,” she said. “Not at first. I’d gone to the kitchen for something to eat.”
She didn’t tell him how her arm had started to throb and how the shame of what had happened brought heat to her cheeks. But he already knew that part of the story.
“I saw the door leading outside, and I locked it.” In the moment, it felt like a small victory. “Then I locked all the doors and the windows. Grace never mastered how to pick a dead bolt.”
Even now, Leyna could see Grace at the window later that night. She was still tormented by the tapping of her sister’s fingernails on the glass, her voice as she begged to be let inside.
The cloud-cloaked moon had cast anemic light, but her sister’s face had been only inches from the window. Even in the near darkness, Leyna couldn’t pretend she didn’t see.
She tried to pretend anyway, shifting in her bed so she faced the wall.
“Open up, Ley.” Grace never pleaded, and the unfamiliar tone nearly pulled Leyna from her bed.
Grace raised her voice to a more urgent whisper. “The doors are all locked, and I don’t have my key.”
Leyna’s legs tensed and she was considering going to the window even after what Grace had done earlier when the tapping became a pounding. Leyna didn’t need to face her sister to know she was using her fist.
“Come on, Ley.” Her voice hardened with impatience. “It’s fucking freezing out here.”
Leyna burrowed deeper into her comforter until her sister gave up and walked into the woods; Leyna went to the window to watch her go.
Leyna noticed her fingers circling her scar, and she pulled them into a fist. She couldn’t look at Dominic, certain she would see his judgment.
“And you never saw her again?”
She offered a slow shake of her head, and, unable to stand his inevitable disappointment in her, she started walking to her car. He stopped her with a hand on her shoulder.
“You couldn’t have known she’d never come back.”
“It was still a shitty thing to do.” Her voice cracked. She’d left her sister out in the cold, at the mercy of monsters. One monster in particular. But she’d never been able to convince Dominic of that, and she wasn’t about to try again.
Dominic tried to reassure her. “If she’d come back, you would’ve let her in, right?”
He’d obviously forgotten how stubborn she could be. Then again, he’d always had more faith in her than she’d had in herself. When they’d been friends, then lovers, he’d encouraged her to write a mystery novel, explore a career with the forest service, become a baker—Find the thing that makes you happiest, he’d say.
She’d wanted that to be him, but of course it couldn’t be. There were only two things that would ever make her happy, or at least assuage her guilt.
Finding Grace or punishing Adam.
Leyna’s various jobs in retail or as a server—those were just ways to pay the rent. Her college classes, the friends she grabbed drinks with, the men she slept with who weren’t Dominic—those were ways to pass the time between leads. Because for sixteen years, her life’s purpose had been finding out what had happened that night.
Leyna turned to face him. “Of course I would’ve let her in.” She paused. “Eventually.” She wasn’t sure that was true, but she couldn’t bear to give him a different answer, one that might cause his faith in her to fade. Being back here reminded her how much she’d missed it.
“It’s not your fault,” he said, his face so earnest she almost believed him.
She believed what was written on that wrapper more.
“So—where are we going?” he asked.
Leyna started toward the car again. “To search Rocky’s place.”
“He’s going to let you do that?”
She opened the driver-side door and got in. “He won’t be home,” she said. “He told me he had someplace to be.”
“Hmm.” Not yet fully convinced. “Assume you don’t have a key?”
“Nope.”
Dominic slid in beside her. He buckled his seat belt and slung his left arm on the console, careful to take only half the space. “So breaking and entering. Cool.” He slipped on a pair of sunglasses. “Though this is definitely going to make the next Duran family dinner a little awkward.”
CHAPTER 24
MEREDITH
Saturday, 12:08 p.m.
Meredith took the cordless phone into Grace’s bedroom. It was where she liked to go when she was angry. She despised being threatened. The words from the man claiming to be Adam Duran came back to her.
I want to hang the painting over the mantel so everyone who comes into my home can see what she’s done.
Meredith opened the closet that once held Grace’s clothes. Not long after Grace went missing, Meredith had packed up her daughter’s clothing and put the boxes in the garage. Despite everything, she still expected Grace to show up at the house demanding her things.
In the years that followed, she’d turned the closet into a different kind of shrine. This was where she stored her daughter’s portraits.
Most of the time, all the portraits but that year’s were wrapped in plastic and Styrofoam and sealed in boxes, but for the month of Grace’s birthday, Meredith would pick a few to display in Grace’s room. She should’ve packed them away a week ago, but she hadn’t. It seemed wrong to put them back in storage when she hadn’t yet finished the one that would mark Grace’s thirty-third birthday.
Meredith sat on the edge of the bed facing the closet and the wall where three portraits had been hung. Grace at eighteen, twenty-five, and twenty-eight. She put her notepad and pen on the bed next to her and called the courier service first. As expected, they had nothing to tell her.
After she hung up, she checked her phone contacts for a number she’d called only twice before. While Meredith had threatened her art broker’s Braque, Brian would sell his father’s fake leg when it came to high-value commissions. His sweet assistant Katie, however, would be much easier to persuade.
Let’s see if fake Adam’s identity stands up to the same scrutiny my replicas get.
With three pairs of Grace’s icy-blue eyes watching her, Meredith punched the number into the handset and offered a breezy greeting.
“Hi, Katie.” As if they were old friends, the kind of friend you did favors for. She’d met Brian’s assistant only in passing, but Katie had made an impression in her sunflower-yellow blouse, garish green eye shadow, and bright orange braids. Meredith figured she used color to compensate for falling just short of five feet, even in heels. It worked. People noticed her. Unfortunately for Katie, her personality wasn’t nearly as bold. Meredith found herself comparing the assistant to Grace, as she always did with women of that age. The comparison wasn’t favorable to Katie.
“I need some information about a client who approached Brian about a commission. Girl in White in the Woods. I heard you spoke with him today.”
“I’m sorry, Ms. Clarke. Truly. But I’m not allowed to give out that information.”
“Brian’s already talked to me about it. It’s my commission. I just need to confirm the identity, since I must’ve written the name down wrong.”
The assistant paused, then lowered her voice. “What’s the name you have?”
“Adam Duran.”
Katie sighed in apparent relief. She really was a nervous young woman. “Yes, that’s right. That’s the name.”
“But you see, it’s not. I know this for certain.”
“It’s the only name I have.”
“Like I said, it’s the wrong name.” An edge crept into her voice. “You must understand why I’d need to confirm the identity of someone asking about me, especially since they have such sensitive information about my work. About my family.”
“I really am sorry. Would you like to speak to Brian? I can see if he’s available.”
So Katie had finally stolen a backbone from the gallery’s lost and found. Meredith would’ve been impressed if it hadn’t pissed her off.
“No, I don’t want to speak to Brian. I’ve already spoken with Brian, and now I’m calling you. Brian mentioned that when the client called today, he seemed anxious that he hadn’t heard from me.”
“I can confirm he called, but I can’t share the details. I’m sure you understand.” Her voice was annoyingly chipper. “Is there anything else I can help you with, Ms. Clarke?”
“You haven’t yet helped me, Katie.”
The assistant went silent, but she didn’t hang up. She wasn’t the type to disconnect first.
Meredith released her breath and spoke to Brian’s assistant as calmly as she was able. “Listen, Katie, the worst that idiot boss of yours will do is fire you, and you know I’m capable of worse than that. Plus he won’t fire you. Then who would schedule his bathroom breaks?”
For focus, Meredith studied the three portraits of Grace. She’d selected the newer paintings at random, but the first portrait she’d hung because it remained her favorite. It was the truest to the Grace she remembered. Unlike the others, which were interpretations of what Grace might have looked like in later years, this one captured her as she was then. In this first portrait, Meredith hadn’t yet perfected the pale blue of Grace’s eyes, but her skin and hair were exactly right, the same as they’d been when she was sixteen. Meredith had taken artistic license with only a single detail: She’d given Grace a smile, although it had been lost long before she’d gone.
Meredith returned to her friendly voice but with enough of a threat to make Katie wonder at the undertone. “I won’t tell Brian you told me anything. Unless you don’t help me, in which case I’ll tell him I’ll no longer work with him because of you.”
The young woman huffed. “That’s not cool.” Katie sounded a little angry. Good for her.
