“Don’t kid yourself, baby. People come down her all the time to die. Happens more often than you think.” She shrugged. “People with problems just can’t take it no more. You’d be surprised how many times I’ve found a body.”
I swallowed hard. “There is no body.”
“Yeah, sometimes it happens that way, too,” she said. “I know a couple cases where they never found nothing. It’s real hard on the families. Course this time those divers could get lucky. River’s cold, so it acts like a refrigerator. If she tied something heavy to herself, she’ll sink. She’d be well preserved. Possibility number two is all you get are the bones. They’ll wash up on shore, whatever’s left after the catfish and critters get to her.”
“Please,” I said, “don’t.”
“Sorry, baby.” Her eyes grew soft. “I talked to that detective, same as you. Maybe somebody killed her and made it look like suicide. Could even be one of the homeboys living around here.”
“Living … where?”
“The woods. Where d’you think? I don’t see no hotels, do you? Lots of people set up camps and call it home. Some of these dudes are okay, but some will scare the living crap out of you.” She twirled a finger next to her ear.
“Rebecca had no reason to come here,” I said.
Or did she? I really didn’t know.
“Then there’s the last possibility,” the woman said. “Behind door number three.”
“Which is?”
She let out a stream of dragon smoke. “Maybe she’s fakin’ us all out. Staged the whole thing and ran away somewhere. Sippin’ a latte someplace, laughing her fool head off at all of us.”
Chapter 5
I was most of the way up the one-way gravel road leaving Fletcher’s when a black Lincoln Town Car turned off Canal Road. I waited, but the other car didn’t intend to let me exit. Then I saw the New York license plate: TAI1. Thomas Asher Investments.
I gave in and reversed the Mini, too numb to care about winning a game of chicken. A chauffeur sat behind the wheel of the Lincoln, but I couldn’t make out who the passenger was—or passengers. Possibly Sir Thomas himself. At the bottom of the hill two MPD cruisers backing out of the parking lot boxed in the big car. I scooted around all three of them and zoomed up the drive feeling vindicated.
Of course Horne would question Tommy Asher since the Madison wine cooler vanished when Rebecca did and she was his employee. Once the press got wind of this—Rebecca’s disappearance, her bloody clothes in that rowboat, and the details of the stolen silver intended to be returned to the White House after two centuries—the story would be all over the place in no time. And since Washington leaked worse than a bad sieve and was runner- up for gossip capital of the country after Hollywood, we were probably talking about hours or even minutes.
When I got back to the Willard, a self-possessed woman in a navy pantsuit met me in the lobby, told me she was the day manager, and accompanied me to my suite. The place had been searched and Rebecca’s suitcase and her clothes were gone. It was all nice and legal; the police showed up with a warrant and the hotel cooperated. The manager assured me she’d been present the entire time.
The first thing I did was check the desk. Rebecca’s planner and the book of Alexander Pope’s poems were missing. The dedication and our private names for each other—Little and Big—would have meant nothing to the D.C. police. But maybe some officer had read the crossed-out love poem from Connor and decided the book was relevant to their investigation.
Connor O’Brien, PhD, currently of Wyoming. Had Rebecca picked up the phone and called him, just as she’d called me, luring him to Washington? Had she met him after she retrieved the Madison wine cooler? And if it had been Connor, how long before he became a person of interest to the police? The bitterness and resentment Rebecca had nursed for twelve years had boiled over yesterday. Had she been angry enough to want payback for an old hurt? Then what happened? Nothing good—Rebecca was missing and her bloody clothes had been found in a rowboat.
I fingered Detective Horne’s business card in my jacket pocket. Rebecca wanted me to have that book of poetry and it now seemed important to get it back. As soon as the D.C. police were finished with it, I would explain to Horne that it was mine. I hoped he’d see things my way—though I had my doubts that would happen.
I put the top to the Mini down for the drive home to Atoka, as much for the weather, which had warmed up, as the need to clear my head. A sweet breeze ruffled my hair and the harsh winter sunshine with its pale shadows had vanished, replaced by the slanted golden light of spring.
Though Atoka is only a little more than an hour’s drive from Washington—give or take—coming home is like traveling to another country. I headed west on Route 50, Lee-Jackson Memorial Highway, as the city and its sprawling exurbs receded. After a while the road dwindled to a winding country lane lined with Civil War–era stacked stone walls and post-and-board fences behind which prizewinning Angus cattle and expensive thoroughbreds grazed.
By the time I passed the turnoff for the Snickersville Turnpike, I’d shrugged off Washington like a snake shedding its skin. Out here, Route 50 became Mosby’s Highway in tribute to the Gray Ghost who used to ride through this territory with his band of Partisan Rangers looking for Union soldiers. Dead ahead the Blue Ridge Mountains, with their comforting dowager’s hump profile, appeared on the horizon.
At Middleburg, I slowed to twenty-five, passing a sign for an upcoming point-to-point sponsored by one of the local hunts. Next to that sign hung another of a cheeky red fox in a hacking jacket lounging next to the words RELAX, YOU’RE IN THE VILLAGE.
But as I turned down Atoka Road and saw the vines and the split-rail fence that marked the beginning of my land, the image I’d been trying to push out of my mind for the past few hours came rushing back—Rebecca, floating like a limp doll in the Potomac River. Why hadn’t I insisted on going with her to Georgetown? Maybe if I had, she’d still be alive.
I turned into my driveway as guilt and remorse wormed their unwelcome way inside my head.
Katherine Eastman called my cell phone while I was getting my bags out of the Mini. Kit and I had known each other for twenty-five years, meeting during a kindergarten recess where we’d built an elaborate sand castle that we gleefully stomped flat as soon as it was finished. Our friendship proved more resilient than that castle, and we’d remained best friends ever since. In all that time, I could count our disagreements on the fingers of one hand.
I had a feeling this call was about to trigger one of those rare occasions, especially because Kit was a reporter for the
I shoved open my front door, cradling the phone between my shoulder and my ear as I wrestled with the bags and my cane and said, “Hey.”
“Hey, yourself. Where’ve you been? I’ve got some news.”
“Oh, yeah, what?”
Maybe this wasn’t about Rebecca. Last winter Kit’s fiancé, a detective with the Loudoun County Sheriff’s Department, had been deployed to Afghanistan for a second tour with his reserve unit and Kit finally moved her mother, now descending into the twilight world of Alzheimer’s, into assisted living. Maybe she had something to tell me about Bobby or Faith.
“It’s about your ex-friend Rebecca Natale,” she said. “You won’t believe this. The police found her clothes in a rowboat on the Potomac this morning with blood on them. They’re searching the river for her right now. I thought you’d want to know.”
This wasn’t going to go down well.
“I do know,” I said after a moment. “I’m the one who identified the clothes.”
