Chapter 327 She Speaks Now
ADRIANA
I dismissed the detective with a final reminder about Lucy’s phone and left him with the clear impression that forgetting about it or losing it would be significantly worse for him than finding it.
Then I turned to Tobias.
Hazel took the hint. “I’ll check on the children,” she said, and went.
The room was quiet with just the two of us in it. Tobias sat across from me with the posture of a man who had been through a difficult hour and expected the next several minutes to continue in the same direction.
“You’re still a suspect,” I said.
He looked up.
“Don’t misread what I said in front of the detective. Tim being unlikely to be guilty doesn’t automatically make you innocent. You had a relationship with Lucy — professional, you say. You were in contact with her in the months before her death. And we still only have your word for what that relationship was.” I looked at him directly. “Where were you the day she was killed?”
“Following a lead she gave me,” he said, without hesitation. “She’d found information suggesting Lisa — my son’s mother, the woman I hired Lucy to locate — had been living in a village outside the pack. I spent the day there asking questions. I can give you names, locations, a full account.” He held my gaze. “I came back to my office and found the case file on my desk with the news of her death. I didn’t kill her. Why would I? She was helping me find my son’s mother. She was the most useful person in my life at that moment.”
The answer was too immediate for invention and too specific for performance.
“I’ll verify it,” I said. “But I believe you.”
Something around his eyes shifted.
“Which means,” I continued, “we have no confirmed suspects. Tim didn’t do it. You didn’t do it. The people most obviously positioned to have motive and access have been cleared.” I paused. “Which means we haven’t found the real killer yet.”
“The lover,” Tobias said. “The man Alisha described.”
“If the lover exists.” I stood up. “That’s the question I keep returning to. Sandy says there was no lover. Alisha says there was. One of them is lying and I need to understand why.” I moved toward the door. “I’ll see you when I have something. Don’t go anywhere without telling Hazel first.”
He nodded and left.
In the car on the way home, the evening was settling into the particular quality of early dark, the sky still holding the last of the light in the west while the east had gone a deep blue. Hazel drove and I sat in the back and thought about Lucy.
Two women who both claimed to know her well. Two completely contradictory accounts of who she was. A devoted wife who had no time for anything outside her marriage and her work. A woman who took three margaritas to turn friendly, who had a lover in a honeymoon cabin, who told her best friend about someone called Tobby.
“Hazel,” I said. “Do you believe Alisha?”
Hazel was quiet for a moment. “I believe she believes what she told us. Whether what she believes is true is a different question.”
That was the right framing. Someone had given Alisha a picture of a man with a red crown tattoo. Someone had told her a story about Lucy’s lover. If Alisha genuinely believed it, she wasn’t lying. sShe was repeating something she’d been fed.
“Someone used Alisha,” I said. “The same way someone used the coast guard. Positioned the right information with the right people at the right time.”
“To frame Tim,” Hazel said.
“Yes. And possibly to misdirect anyone who came looking afterward.” I looked out the window. “The picture Alisha gave us. The man with the tattoo. He exists — we know he exists because too many independent sources have described the same person. But the story built around him, the lover narrative, the three margaritas — that might be constructed.” I paused. “I need to see Alisha and Sandy together. Not separately — together, in the same room, where they can’t maintain contradictory versions without confronting each other directly.”
“Tomorrow?” Hazel said.
“Tomorrow,” I said.
I fell asleep in the car without meaning to. Hazel woke me when we reached home.
The house was lit and I could hear voices from the direction of the dining room. I went straight there because the children’s voices were in it and I needed to see them.
The dining room was its usual evening chaos. Elijah junior and Liam were arguing about something with the focused energy of boys who had been at it for a while. Lorain was eating with the serene concentration she brought to meals, apparently impervious to the noise on either side of her. Leo was at the far end helping Lorain with something. Lucien was in the chair that was usually mine, which I noted without commenting.
Lana was in her high chair.
She looked at me when I walked in and opened her mouth and said. “Mama!”
I stopped walking.
“She speaks now?” Elijah said from somewhere to my right.
I didn’t answer him. I went straight to Lana and picked her up and held her against my chest and let her say it again, which she did, twice, with the satisfied emphasis of someone who had found a word that worked and was testing its range.
I didn’t take my usual seat. Lucien was in it and I sat beside the twins instead, bouncing Lana on my knee while she tried to grab Lorain’s hair, which Lorain submitted to with the patience of a saint.
“Adriana.” Elijah’s voice from across the table. “Are you going to keep ignoring me?”
Leo looked at his plate. Lorain looked at the window. The twins didn’t appear to be on this planet.
“I’m not ignoring anyone,” I said pleasantly, and gave Lana a piece of bread to distract her from Lorain’s hair.
Hazel came in and sat down and the meal continued around the silence between Elijah and me, which everyone at the table was aware of and nobody addressed.