It was stifling inside. All the windows were closed. I clicked on the fan. It thrummed to noisy life. I put the setting on high. Wind ruffled edges of papers on his desk. His office was as neat as his closets. I fingered the keys in my hand, thinking.
When he’d shown me in here I’d noticed he kept keys for the filing cabinet in a locked drawer beneath the desk. I slotted the smallest key into the lock of the desk drawer. It clicked over smoothly. Guilt pinged through me, followed by a bite of determination. I opened the drawer.
THE WATCHER
The app for the CCTV cameras alerted the Watcher with a ping—the motion sensor had detected the subject had breached a critical area in the house.
The Watcher reached for the phone, clicked open the app, and watched the live footage being streamed from the Cresswell-Smith house.
Ellie Cresswell-Smith entering her husband’s office.
She must have found a key.
The Watcher zoomed and watched closely as Ellie opened a drawer under the office desk. She was visible through the open office door. Wind from a fan blew her long dark hair. She glanced over her shoulder, looking back into the living room, her eyes large and dark. She was afraid she’d be discovered—she knew she shouldn’t be in there. But she didn’t know about the camera in the wall clock that could see her through the open office door. Nor did she know about the camera in the clock in her studio, or in the digital weather clock beside her bed.
Ellie returned her attention to the drawer and located a small box. She set the box atop the desk and opened it. From the box she removed some keys. She went over to the file cabinet and unlocked the drawers containing files. She riffled through one folder after another, then took a folder out.
The Watcher zoomed yet closer. The label on the file was just visible: AGNES HOLDINGS.
Ellie set the Agnes Holdings file on the desk and opened it. She tensed and quickly bent her head closer as she appeared to scan columns of figures with her finger. She looked up. Sweat gleamed on her face. She returned her attention to the spreadsheets, and stiffened. Her finger paused. Quickly she turned the page and scanned the next sheet. She moved faster and faster, flipping through the pages. She ran both her hands over her hair as if catching her breath, as if trying to comprehend what she’d just seen. She went back to the cabinet and removed another manila file folder. She opened it. A document fell to the floor. She picked it up.
Her whole body went still. Dead stone still. Blood drained from her face.
Hurriedly she began to scramble through the other files, being untidy now as she flipped through them. She found another document that halted her. Holding the document in her hand, she sank slowly onto a chair and covered her mouth with her hand.
THEN
ELLIE
I stared at the rental agreement I’d found for a luxury villa in the Cape Verde islands. In Martin’s name. For two adults. The rental period for a year, with option for renewal. The date of occupation was next month. The wind from the fan chilled my sweat. Goose bumps pricked along my arms.
With the agreement was a folder from a travel agency in Sydney. According to an invoice, Martin had bought two one-way plane tickets to Cape Verde via Singapore, then Frankfurt. The flight from Sydney Airport departed in just over two weeks.
Two weeks?
I glanced at a calendar on the wall. Perhaps he was keeping it as a surprise for me—there was enough time to still tell me that the two of us were going somewhere. But even as my brain sought for an alternate answer, I knew there was only one. This ticket was not for me.
My breathing became shallow. I felt dizzy. Panic clutched my stomach. My mind spun toward thoughts of medication, but I’d given my pills to Willow. And on some deep-down survival level I knew I needed every ounce of clarity to deal with this. Understand it. Comprehend and process this.
Hurriedly I flipped through the other papers . . . I stalled.
He’s mortgaged this house?
To the max. Blood drained from my head. I—we—had paid outright for it. What had he done with the money he’d borrowed on it? We’d closed the sale at $4.56 million. I’d put the money up for it, but we’d purchased the property in our company name. Yet according to these papers, he’d taken out a mortgage on the house in his personal capacity? I read the document more closely—as closely as I could, given that my vision wasn’t registering the details.
The new mortgage agreement included insurance. On my life.
A sick cold leaked into my gut. I glanced up and stared out the window. I didn’t want to think what this could mean.
A crack sounded in the living room.
I froze. Listened.
But nothing more came.
It was probably another branch cracking off one of the gums outside—I’d left the sliding glass door open due to the heat. When the weather got too dry, the gums shed branches as a means of survival. The trees were called widow-makers, I’d learned, because they so often killed people with the sudden dropping of massive limbs.
I glanced over my shoulder through the office door into the living room. I could see the clock. It was almost 3:00 p.m. I had no reason to fear Martin would suddenly walk in. He wasn’t due back for at least another nine days.
Focus.
I returned my attention to the papers and opened a manila envelope with the word CONFIDENTIAL marked on it. Inside was a consultants’ report. Commissioned by Agnes Holdings. It was not the report Martin had shown me. I scanned the summary, my heart beating faster and faster with each sentence. This report had determined that digging canals into the mangrove swamp would lead to
