Ruby shook her head. “I don’t know. But I do know that about three months after you began serving your sentence, Frank and I started receiving emails, asking about you, about our relationship with you, wanting to know if we were still close despite everything.”
“What makes you think the emails and Stella’s disappearance are linked?”
Ruby gave him a glare. “I said no questions.”
“Sorry. Habit.”
Frank rolled his eyes as she continued. “At first, we assumed it was some nutty journalist trying to get an angle no one had tried yet. But then the emails were joined by texts and eventually physical letters.”
Jay shifted forward in his seat. He knew that Ruby’s contact email would have been on the legal record of his trial. Her phone number might be explained by a similar hack, into police records, rather than lawyer’s. But her address had been kept as her grandmother’s plot at the park. The house she and Frank should have moved to had once been Jay’s.
She had watched the process and shook her head before he spoke. “We weren’t at your place anymore. We had moved just after your trial.”
“Was this the sender?” Jay asked, scribbling an email on a notepad by the phone.
Ruby read it and glanced at Frank. They both nodded, and Jay felt his heart sink. “What happened next?”
“The attempts at contact continued for over a year. Sometimes I would think there was someone outside the house at night. After a little more than a year, they all just stopped. The last message claimed that we weren’t who they thought and they apologized and vanished.”
Jay tried hard to think back and felt his already weak stomach lurch. He tried to fight off the assault by the wave of fear-driven nausea.
“I gave Stella a bracelet for her birthday. The same bracelet has now been left as a threat or clue.”
Frank frowned. “I don’t remember Stella saying anything about receiving strange messages though.”
Ruby nodded. “She didn’t. But that doesn’t mean she wasn’t just trying to placate me. She could probably see how unsettled I was.”
“But she didn’t say anything to me either.”
Ruby gave him a pitying look. “You think she’d tell you something that would make you worry?”
Jay heaved a despairing sigh. Ruby was right.
“I stayed out of it, but when Stella went missing, I started to look into things. She had done what she always does, throwing herself into her work,” Ruby continued. “She had been making plans for you, while darting around for Miranda Williams and trying to steer clear of her father’s henchmen. But you probably already know all that.”
Jay met her eyes and tensed automatically for a blow, seeing from her expression that whoever had done this had stayed safe.
“Once I realized you were onto her trail straight away, I came here. I have learned a thing or two from you. If my suspicions that this was all because of you were correct, then perhaps someone would show up to lay the stage. But I came up with nothing.” She threw him a tiny smile that gave him a fragile hope. “I did, however, see Stella’s father meet with his man this morning, while you were still in the mansion.”
Jay nearly fell from the chair as he shifted forward hastily. “And?”
“And it is Gary Peters.”
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
“Gary Peters.” Jay repeated the name once more. Once, a good decade ago now, he had been an apprentice under Gary. Passing him as an investigator was his greatest embarrassment. Gary had been one of the investigators Jay had learned from who had not been willing to simply let him leave when he had outgrown them. Jay had offered each of those investigators the same kind of compromise. They’d take on the same case, work separately, and whoever solved it first would get what they wanted. As Gary’s one had been a touch more public than the others, the burn was greater.
Jay stood and headed for the door.
“Where are you going?”
He glanced back at Ruby. “To find whatever hotel Gary has been put up in.”
She shook her head. “He isn’t here anymore.”
Jay turned back and quelled his impatience. “Then where is he?”
“I don’t know. I just saw Mr. Haraby handing him a plane ticket.”
“Then I’ll find Mr. Haraby and make him speak.”
“He’s probably gone too. Said he was heading back home if Gary needed him.”
Jay flung open the door, swearing under his breath, then glanced back at Ruby and Frank. “Thank you both.”
“We’re staying out of this,” Ruby blurted out, her voice stopping his feet. “I have done all I am willing to.”
Jay opened his mouth, but Frank silenced him. “We’re expecting, Jay. I won’t risk my family and, despite how messed up this might seem to other people, I know you wouldn’t risk us either.”
Jay felt his eyes widen. For one tiny, precious moment, there was nothing but the happy news that his younger sister in all ways but blood was expecting her first child.
Ruby gave him a smile that showed that she too was in that untainted moment.
He nodded and marched back into the room and quickly scribbling down another number. “You have already risked too much. If you think, even the smallest doubt, that you are in trouble, call this number. Tell them the phrase ‘Elliot plays the harp’ and then how to help you. All costs billed to me.”
Ruby took the paper and nodded. “If you can bring Stella back, Jay, I would like to maybe see if you can be my brother again.”
Jay took them in for a moment longer and then left without another word.
***
Dave grinned as he entered the room at the inn but seemed to pick up on his mood with almost inhuman accuracy.
“I take it whatever lead
