Harlan Coben - Fool Me Once

“Did she tell you who was on the phone?”

“No.”

“Did you ask?”

“Yes. She said it was nothing...”

“I hear a ‘but.’”

“But it clearly wasn’t nothing.” Eileen shook her head. “How could I not make her tell me? How could I just...? Anyway, she was distracted the rest of lunch. I tried to raise it a few more times, but she just shut me down. Jesus. I should have done more.”

“I don’t know what more you could have done.” Maya thought about it. “The police would have gone through her phone records anyway. They would have looked into all her calls.”

“That’s just it.”

“What?”

“The phone.”

“What about it?”

“It wasn’t hers.”

Maya leaned forward. “Come again?”

“Her normal phone, the one with the case with the kids’ picture on it, was still on the table,” Eileen said. “Claire was carrying a second phone.”

The Burkett servants lived in a complex of small homes on the back edge of the Farnwood estate, just left of the delivery entrance. The homes were all one level and reminded Maya of army barracks. The largest belonged to the Mendezes, Isabella’s family. Isabella’s mother, Rosa, still worked in the main house, though it was hard to say what she did now that all the children were grown.

Maya knocked on Isabella’s door. There was no sign of life, but these were hardworking people. Their hours were insane. Maya was far from a socialist, but she found it ironic how much the Burketts complained about staff and workers, really believing that this country was a meritocracy, when everything had been handed to them because, two generations earlier, a grandfather had found a way to exploit real estate laws. She knew most of the Burketts wouldn’t last a week working their servants’ hours.

Hector’s Dodge Ram pickup pulled in behind her. He parked a good distance from her and stepped out.

“Mrs. Burkett?” He looked scared.

“Where’s Isabella?”

“I think you better leave.”

Maya shook her head. “Not until I talk to Isabella.”

“She isn’t here.”

“Where is she?”

“She went away.”

“Away where?”

Hector shook his head.

“I just want to apologize,” Maya said. “It was all a misunderstanding.”

“I’ll tell her you said that.” He shuffled his weight from one foot to the other. “I think you better leave now.”

“Where is she, Hector?”

“I’m not going to tell you. You really scared her.”

“I need to talk to her. You can stay in the room. Make sure she’s safe or whatever.”

A voice from behind her said, “That’s not going to happen.”

Maya turned and saw Isabella’s mother standing there. She gave Maya a withering glare and said, “Leave.”

“No.”

Her eyes flicked toward her son. “Come inside, Hector.”

Giving wide berth, Hector made his way through the door. With one more glare, Isabella’s mother closed it behind both of them, leaving Maya outside.

She should have been prepared for this.

Back off, Maya told herself. Think it through.

Her cell phone sounded. She checked and saw that the call was from Shane.

“Hey,” she said.

“I looked up that license plate for you,” Shane said without preamble. “Your Buick Verano is leased by a company called WTC Limited.”

WTC. Didn’t ring a bell. “Any idea what that stands for?”

“None. The address is a post office box in Houston, Texas. It looks like some kind of holding company.”

“The kind of thing someone uses when they want to stay anonymous?”

“Yep. If we want to learn more, I’ll need to get a warrant. And to get that, I’d need a reason for looking into this.”

“Just forget it,” she said.

“If you say so.”

“It’s no big deal.”

“Don’t lie to me, Maya. I hate that.”

She didn’t reply.

“When you’re ready to come clean, call me.”

Shane hung up.

Eddie hadn’t changed the locks.

Maya hadn’t been back to Claire’s house — yep, still thinking of it as such — since pulling down Coach Phil’s pants. There were no cars in the driveway. Nobody answered her knock. So she took out the key and let herself in. As she entered the foyer, Eddie’s words floated back down to her.

“Death follows you, Maya...”

Maybe Eddie was right. If that was the case, was it fair to put Daniel and Alexa at risk?

Or, for that matter, Lily?

The boxes with Claire’s stuff still hadn’t been moved. Maya thought about the mysterious spare phone Eileen had seen. It seemed obvious that the phone was the kind of thing you bought when you didn’t want anyone to know who you were calling.

So what had happened to that phone?

If it had been on Claire when she died, the police would have gone through it. Of course, that could very well have happened. They might have recovered it during their investigation and concluded that it was meaningless. But Maya didn’t think so. Shane had contacts with the police. He’d looked into the investigation for her. There was nothing there about a spare phone or any unexplained calls.

Which meant the phone had probably not yet been discovered.

The boxes were unlabeled. Eddie seemed to have done it in a rush, dumping things in a flurry of grief so that clothes were mixed with toiletries, jewelry with papers, shoes with various trinkets. Claire loved cheesy souvenirs. Antiques and true collectibles were deemed too expensive, but Claire always got the snow globe when she visited a new city or tourist attraction. She had a shot glass from Tijuana. She bought a little piggy bank shaped like the Leaning Tower of Pisa. She owned a Princess Di memorial plate, a wiggly Hawaiian hula girl who shook her stuff on a car dashboard, a pair of used Vegas casino dice.

Maya remained stone-faced as she sorted through the goofy tchotchkes that had at one point in their existence made Claire smile. She was in mission mode now. On one level, doing this, sorting through these nothings that her sister had cherished, was intensely painful, and the guilt started seeping in:

Your husband is right. I let death in. I should have been here. I should have protected you...

But on another level — a higher, more important level — this guilt and pain helped. They made her mission more discernible. When you can see the stakes, when you realize the true purpose of your mission, it motivates you. It makes you focus. It makes you push away the distractions. You gain clarity of purpose. You gain strength.

But there was no phone in any of the boxes.

After the last box, she collapsed back onto the floor. Think it through, she told herself. Get into Claire’s head. Her sister had owned a phone she wanted no one to know about. Where would she hide it...?

A memory came to Maya. Claire had been a junior in high school, Maya a sophomore. Claire, in perhaps her one fit of rebellion, had started smoking cigarettes. Dad had a super sensitive nose. He could smell them on her.

Dad was pretty liberal about most things. Being a college professor, he had seen it all and expected experimentation. But cigarettes struck a nerve. His own mother had died a horrible death from lung cancer. Nana had moved into the small spare room toward the end. Maya remembered the sounds mostly, the haunting, horrible wet sucking-gurgling coming from Nana’s room, spending her last few days slowly and agonizingly being choked to death. Maya could barely enter that room after Nana’s death. Death lingered. Its smell had seemingly burrowed into the walls. Worse than that, Maya sometimes was sure that she could still hear the sucking-gurgling sound. She had read somewhere that that sound never fully disappears. It just gets fainter and fainter.