Мэри Эндрюс - The Newcomer

Maya giggled and chimed in on her favorite part, wagging her finger at her aunt. “Down came the Good Fairy, and she said, Little Bunny Foo Foo, I don’t wanna see you scoopin’ up the field mice and boppin’ ’em on the head.”

Letty lost count of the number of choruses she repeated until Maya finally drifted back to sleep. When she was sure the child wouldn’t stir, she crept into the bathroom, brushed her teeth, undressed, and crawled back to bed.

She’d opened the windows earlier, and now she heard laughter and music coming from the direction of the pool.

“B-10,” she heard a man’s voice call. “G-59.” She recognized the voice as Joe’s. “O-74.” Ironic, she thought. It was eight o’clock on Sunday night and she, the youngest guest at the Murmuring Surf, was already in bed, while the Murmuring Surf’s elderly regulars were still chowing down on free barbecue and a hot bingo game.

Maya let out a long sigh and threw an arm across Letty’s chest. The child was a whirling dervish while she slept, spinning this way and that, like Tanya that way, Letty thought. In their childhood days they’d frequently shared a bed in whatever mobile home or cheap apartment Terri was renting. Tanya thrashed around in her sleep, what Mimi called “starfishing,” with both arms and legs spread wide across the bed, driving Letty, many nights, to sleep on a sofa, or even on a pallet on the floor.

She gingerly removed the child’s arm and rolled over on her side, facing the window. She was almost asleep when the thought struck her with such intensity she sat bolt upright in the bed. She tiptoed over to the table, picked up her phone, and reread her sister’s arrest report from five years earlier, this time paying closer attention to the date. Tanya had been arrested, here in a unit at the Murmuring Surf, on February 2, 2015. According to Joe DeCurtis, Declan Rooney, her accomplice-slash-boyfriend-slash-husband, was already in the wind.

Tanya’s urgent distress call and subsequent move to New York had come only days later. Early February, and before Valentine’s Day, because Letty remembered feeling sorry for her heartbroken sister and buying her a tiny heart-shaped Whitman’s candy sampler as a joke. How long after that had Letty taken up with Evan? And how soon after that had Tanya announced her “surprise pregnancy”?

Maya had been born seven months later, a tiny but surprisingly healthy preemie with blond curls like her mother’s, and blue eyes, not the same pale blue as Tanya’s, or their mother’s, but eyes that Tanya described as “the deep blue of a mountain lake you wanted to dive naked into.”

Letty scrolled back to the Florida Department of Law Enforcement’s website, punched in payment information, then typed in the name Declan Rooney.

The screen lit up with citations. There were warrants out for Declan Rooney in Palm Beach, Broward, and Dade Counties, for fraud, theft by taking, wire fraud, and more. The only photo she found of Rooney was a booking photo taken in Jacksonville. It showed a man with shoulder-length, dark wavy hair, a square jaw, and a prominent nose. He did have lush, dark eyelashes, but nobody, thought Letty, would ever mistake him for a young Pierce Brosnan. Nobody except Tanya.

She clicked the phone for a screenshot of the booking photo, then put the phone on the nightstand. Maya burrowed into her side and sighed softly in her sleep.

17

“WELL?” EVAN PUSHED THE PLATE with his half-eaten breakfast away.

“Well, what?” Vikki Hill asked. She’d eaten her egg-and-bagel sandwich as soon as it arrived at the table, and now she was sipping coffee.

“What have you found out? That police detective keeps showing up at my door, asking questions about the day Tanya was killed and my past relationship with Letty. Which is nuts—because Letty is the one who killed Tanya and abducted my kid. What’s taking so damn long?”

“They haven’t come out and accused you of killing your ex, right?” Vikki asked.

“Not in so many words, but the implication is there, and I don’t appreciate it,” Evan said. “I don’t understand why they’re not concentrating on finding Letty. And Maya.”

“Seems like Letty Carnahan is off the grid,” Vikki said. “The cops didn’t get any hits from the Amber Alert. Zero. Let me ask you this, Evan. How much do you think Letty knows about your Airbnb business?”

He waved the question aside. “She worked for me, for over a year, but that was ages ago. Letty wasn’t involved in the financial side. She was more like guest relations. Why? What’s that got to do with anything?”

Vikki raised one eyebrow. “Motive? That’s what the cops are looking for.”

“I keep telling that detective, and I’m telling you too, Letty was jealous of Tanya. And she was obsessed with Maya. There’s your motive. Maya.”

“Maybe.” Vikki looked dubious. “How much did Tanya know about your business?”

“More than she goddamn should have,” Evan muttered. He stared at her. “She knew about you. About our … arrangement.”

“What?” She set her mug down, sloshing coffee onto the tabletop. “You never told me that. How could she know?”

“I’m still trying to figure that out. But she did. The day she died, when I was at her apartment, Tanya threatened me. Said she knew I’d bribed an investigator working for the city to look the other way. Concerning the uh, the Astoria thing. And the other properties. She knew about the Hamilton tickets and the Vegas trip.… She knew your name. Hinted that we were having an affair.”

“Shit!” Vikki Hill looked around the diner, then lowered her voice. “You don’t think Tanya actually talked to anybody about our arrangement, do you? I mean, it’s my ass that’s on the line here, Wingfield.”

“Relax, okay? She threatened to go to the IRS, you know, to blab about the different business entities, but there’s no way she would have. I was her meal ticket, and no matter how many threats she made, down deep, she knew that. She was pissed, that’s all, because she knew I had the upper hand.”

“How so?”

“Let’s just say I had the goods on her, and leave it at that. Can we get back to finding Letty and my kid now?”

“I’m working on it,” she said. “You have no idea where she might have gone? Friends or family who might be helping her hide?”

“No.”

“Wonder what she’s doing for money? I called her former boss, but he wasn’t any help. Said she was a good worker, blah, blah, blah. My source at the police department says her bank account hasn’t been touched, not that there’s much there. I’ve got more money under my sofa cushions than she had in her checking account. Could Tanya have given her money?”

He’d been knotting and unknotting a rolled-up paper napkin, but at the mention of money he looked up. “Maybe. Or maybe Letty stole from Tanya, before she took off with Maya.”

“Would Tanya have ready access to cash?”

“She had the child support I paid, and whatever she might have saved on her own from her acting gigs, but Tanya burned through money. She was like a child that way.”

“Was anything missing from her apartment?”

He scowled. “The cops won’t let me in. Even though I own the place. They say it’s a crime scene. I’m supposed to get an inventory of the apartment at some point, but I’m not holding my breath.”

“Do you think Tanya told Letty about our arrangement?”

Evan blotted his lips with what was left of the paper napkin. “Who knows? Find Letty. And then we’ll figure out exactly how much she does or doesn’t know.”

18

ISABELLE SHOVED THE LAUNDRY CART through the swinging doors. Letty stood at a table in the middle of the room, folding an unending mound of towels and sheets.