Page 26

Before the Colt Gordon scandal, the worst thing that ever happened to me was Dad’s death.

Mom came to get me from my kindergarten class, and then I sat in my bedroom, waiting for the phone call that would tell us it was all a mistake.

How could he be killed by a drunk driver in the middle of the day?

The answer was three-martini lunches, but I’d been five years old, and confident in my knowledge of the world, which stated that adults drank after dark.

I only had to wait for him to come home and set this whole misunderstanding straight.

Dad did not come home.

That mistake didn’t keep me from doing the exact same thing post-scandal. Mom found me with Nylah in my dorm room, holed up, waiting for the world to realize it had made a mistake.

I will not do that again. While I’m certainly hoping the police will realize they’ve made a mistake, I do plan to hole up in a hotel room, but only so I have a quiet place to dig for answers.

I dye my hair in a single-occupant bathroom.

Then I take the subway to a part of Queens that Nylah and I accidentally ended up in during our first week at Juilliard.

I remember her joking about the rooming houses that rent by the hour, w eek or month.

I find one of those places and walk in. A middle-aged woman sits at the desk, her eyes glued to Netflix.

When she asks for a credit card, I say, nervously, “My, uh, husband holds on to it. For safekeeping. I forgot to get it from him.”

Her gaze flicks to my face and then my arms. She’s looking for track marks, signs that I might be a difficult guest. Then she takes in my dark sunglasses and nods, accepting my story.

Not the part about forgetting my credit card.

That nod says she understands an older story, one that says I’m running away from the kind of husband who doesn’t let his wife have her own credit cards.

“Can I pay cash?” I ask. “I’ll only be here a few days. My sister’s coming from Idaho to get me.”

She quotes me a weekly rate, and I pay it. Then I retreat to my new room and take out Isabella’s phone.

In the twenty-four hours before her death, Isabella had no fewer than a dozen text conversations. Most of them are business. She’d been texting with cowriters and others involved in a production. Two more seem to be friends. The “Hey, I’m in NYC for a few days. Lunch?” type of message.

There’s one from Karla, who knows about Isabella’s plan with me.

She approves, while warning that Isabella needs to remember I have a new life, and she should do nothing to jeopardize that.

My heart lifts a little reading that. Karla understood, and if Isabella had lived, Karla might have proved a valuable ally in my fight for privacy.

Could she be an ally now? No. Colt is still her client, and we are right back where we were fourteen years ago. Even if Karla didn’t think I killed Isabella, her priority is the family.

Isabella’s shortest text conversation is with Jamison.

It’s a simple “Call me” from her to him, sent at 8:03 last night.

When I flip back in the thread, there’s a lot of “Call me” and “Just checking in!” from Isabella with a one-or-two-word response from Jamison.

Not unlike my mom when I’d been away at Juilliard, a parent nudging her busy child for a call.

A quick check of her phone logs shows he did call after receiving that nudge, and they’d talked for half an hour.

By contrast, the longest text thread is from her other child. Tiana lives in New York. When she learned Isabella was coming, she offered her the spare room with a joke that she was the only twenty-four-year-old Manhattanite with a spare bedroom.

My heart aches, seeing those texts and recognizing the girl I’d known. It hurts worse, realizing she’d spit nails if she knew I was reading her private correspondence with her mother. And I wouldn’t blame her one bit.

I shouldn’t read these texts, but I cannot help it.

A story unfolds here. A story I love. A different mother-daughter relationship that is as good as my own.

This is mother and daughter as adult friends who flit in and out of each other’s lives, grabbing cocktails and, I’m sure, talking deep into the night as we all had in that massive bed in the penthouse suite.

The suite where Isabella died last night.

I have to pause there to collect myself. Then I keep reading.

Another answer comes soon, one that has me flinching again.

Tiana: Bess just called. She told me who you’re meeting today, Mom.

Isabella: She shouldn’t have done that. She seems to forget who pays her very well for discretion.

Tiana: She’s worried about you.

Isabella: If I’m overworking myself or overstuffing my schedule, then as my PA she has every right to tell me so. I would prefer she didn’t take an interest in my personal life, but I understand she might. She should not, however, be tattling on me to her ex-girlfriend.

Ex-girlfriend? Oh. She means Tiana. So the woman I met yesterday, Bess, is Isabella’s PA and Tiana’s ex. That explains the cold shoulder the young woman gave me.

Tiana: Does Dad know?

Isabella: I informed him today. I would prefer not to talk about that.

I fast-forward through texts I can read later. Then come ones from late yesterday afternoon after I’d left Isabella’s suite.

Isabella: Lucy just left. We need to talk.

Tiana: Why? So you can feed me whatever BS she fed you?

Isabella: Lucy explained. She didn’t defend. She didn’t excuse. She just explained. You need to hear that explanation. You need to see her, too.

Tiana: Oh, hell, no. Trust me, Mom, you do not want me within fifty feet of that bitch. I will tell Lucy Callahan exactly what I think of her.

Isabella: I don’t think she’d have a problem with that. I’m meeting her for lunch tomorrow, and I hope you’ll join us.

Tiana: Lunch? What game’s she playing?

Isabella: No game. I want to go public with our story, and I would like you to be part of that.

Tiana’s answer is a torrent of punctuation marks, comic-book profanity, to which Isabella says she’ll call and they can discuss it.

There are no texts from Tiana after that.

So Tiana knew about my proposed lunch with Isabella. She knew about her mother’s plan for us to go public. I will not consider the possibility that Tiana killed Isabella, but if she knew – and was furious about it – who else did she tell?

I open the next text thread. There’s no name attached, so I assume it must be business. It only takes a few messages for me to realize my mistake.

Sender: I’d like to be there with you for this. I can be in NYC in a couple of hours.

Isabella: I can handle this.

Sender: I know you can. I just don’t think you need to be alone while you do it. I’ll get a room at the Baccarat, and if you want to talk, I’m here. If not, that’s cool, too.

The conversation goes on from there. It’s all very circumspect, but there’s enough in the careful and sincere texts to tell me this is no mere friend. Isabella has a lover.

I skim down to texts sent yesterday evening.

Isabella: You’re in NYC, aren’t you? Damn it, didn’t I say I could handle this?

Sender: Yes, and that’s why I’m staying four blocks away with no intention of seeing you until you’ve worked this through with Lucy.

He uses my name as if he knows me. Which means they’ve discussed me often enough that he feels as if he does.

Sender: How did the meeting go? Better than you imagined? Or worse?

Isabella: Both.

Sender: LOL So I was right, wasn’t I? She didn’t throw herself into your arms for a good cry, all your differences washed away in a sea of tears and shared suffering.

Isabella: She told me the full story.

Sender: Was it anywhere close to what I guessed?

Isabella: You’re enjoying this way too much. Jerk.

Sender: Jerk? Oh, come on, Izzy, you can do better than that. Aren’t you a writer or something?

The thread ends there, and the call log shows she called him and they spoke for an hour.

I search the phone for some clue to the mystery lover’s identity. Isabella is careful, though. There is a phone number and nothing more. I make a note of the number, as I do with all the pertinent information I find in case I need to ditch the phone for good.

The texts suggest he’d guessed what happened between Colt and me. That could be useful.

And if pulling him into this exposes their affair?

I will avoid that if I can, but if the choice is one between “expose Isabella’s affair” and “go to prison for life,” there’s no question of which I’ll choose.

I brace myself to move on to the thread I’ve been avoiding.

Colt.

Deep breath and… I pause, finger over the phone.

Where’s Colt’s thread?

I’d seen it this morning when I’d skimmed the text threads before dumping the SIM. I can still feel the visceral blow of seeing his name. Now, though, I realize I haven’t seen it since I opened the message app. There was a thread earlier… and now there is not.

Someone deleted Colt’s thread before I removed the SIM card.

No, not someone. The person who has Isabella’s tablet or another connected device. The killer who is framing me for murder.

All of these threads could have been deleted, yet only one was.

The one belonging to the killer?

Part of me would love to think so, but again, I’m not convinced it’s that simple. Did Colt’s thread contain a clue? Or was the killer in the process of deleting them all when I removed the SIM card?

I don’t know the answer here. I only know that I wish to hell I’d read that thread while I still could.

I set the phone aside and stare at the dingy wall of my hotel room, as if a sign will appear to point me toward Isabella’s killer. All I got from the cell phone was an uncomfortably intrusive look into her personal life.