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And the page ended. I could hear Lucia’s soft, accented voice echoing in my head.
“What is that?” Liam picked his way across the rubble.
“A draft of a letter.” My voice wavered, then broke. “To us, from Lucia.” I held it up.
He scanned it rapidly and met my gaze, his mouth grim.
“Wow,” he said. “That’s intense. Any clue what she was talking about?”
“None,” I said. “But it was just a first draft. Of a letter to the three of us.”
“Right.” He paused, thoughtfully. “But if this is the draft ...”
“Then where the hell is the finished version?” I finished.
We stared at each other. I wanted to grab his arm, to steady myself. The ground beneath my feet had become the thinnest crust of apparent normality, and beneath it churned an abyss of dangerous, shifting possibilities.
“Why didn’t we find the finished letter?” I asked. “Why?”
He pondered that. “Could she have mailed it to you? Could it still be on its way?”
“Eight days have gone by,” I said. “It takes two, four at most, for a letter to get to the city. This was an extremely important letter. She was putting a lot of thought into it. Writing and rewriting it. This did not get forgotten or lost in the mail. No way.”
He finished the thought. “You think it got lost in some more sinister way.”
“After what this thing did to my marriage’?” I quoted softly. “What thing? What marriage? What the hell is this thing that she’s talking about?”
“Maybe it’s what she installed the safe for,” Liam suggested.
I glanced up at him, freshly startled. “Safe? What safe?”
His eyes widened. “She didn’t tell you about that?”
My blank face answered his question, and he whistled silently. “A few weeks ago, she hired me to install a hidden safe in her upstairs closet. That’s how we met in the first place. I’m so sorry I didn’t say anything. I assumed you knew about it.”
The woman from the forensics team came into the kitchen and frowned at me. “Miss, I asked you not to touch anything,” she scolded.
“I found something important.” I held out the letter. “The investigating officer needs to see it. Please, be on the lookout for more possible pages of this letter, okay?”
The woman snatched the sheet of paper out of my fingers with her latex-gloved hand and tucked it into a plastic envelope. “I’ll bring it to her attention. And since you can’t keep your hands to yourself, could you please wait outside until we’re finished?”
She sternly herded the two of us out onto the front porch. We looked at each other, eyes still full of awed wonder. Too boggled to be embarrassed by the scolding.
“I want to look at that safe,” I said. “Not that I could open it. I don’t have the combination. I don’t imagine you…?”
He shook his head. “No. Lucia had to choose the combination herself.”
I chewed my lip. “I wish I had a copy of that letter. God knows when they’ll let me see it. I need to show it to Nell and Vivi.”
“One second.” Liam went to his truck and pulled a sheet of paper from the dashboard. He plucked a pencil from his shirt and began to scribble against the hood of his truck.
He handed it to me. It was the text of Lucia’s letter, transcribed in a bold, angular cursive script. “It’s not word for word, but that’s the gist of it,” he said.
“That’s incredible! What, do you have a photographic memory?”
“Not really. In an hour, I wouldn’t be able to write more than a rough paraphrase. And it has to really interest me. Otherwise, I don’t retain a damn thing.”
I broke eye contact and busied myself by folding the paper into a neat little square. “Well, thanks for being so interested. I, um … appreciate that.”