Page 17 of Last Seen Alive

“I’ll give you the short version. Claire and I met through a dating app. Her best friend and a friend of mine had the same hare-brained idea to set up accounts for us and then dared us to go on a date.”

“When was this?” she asked.

“I was thirty. I’m thirty-seven now. So seven years ago. Thereabouts.”

“And that was here in Prince William County?”

“Yeah, Dumfries specifically. She’s from there originally, and so am I.”

It was embarrassing that Amanda hadn’t known that much. It was also surprising that they hadn’t met when they were younger.

He went on. “Anyway, we thought the night was going to be an epic disaster, but we hit it off. We fell hard.”

It was strange for Amanda to hear Logan talk like this because the man she knew was much more guarded. That may be due to Claire.

Logan continued. “We got married about three months after we met.”

“Three months?”

“I was a little more impulsive when I was younger. Anyway, pretty much right after we got married, Claire got this job offer in Nebraska.”

“What did she do?”

“She procured artwork for the wealthy—paintings, sculpture, all kinds of things—and she was great at it too. Someone up there supposedly wanted her full time to help build their collection.”

Amanda nodded, not sure what response she’d expected, but it hadn’t been that one.

“Claire went on ahead of me, while I sorted out our affairs here. Then, I followed about a week later. We were happy there for two-and-a-half years. Then she was gone. Just like that.” He snapped his fingers.

“No letter or anything? No sign of what went wrong?”

“A letter, yes. But it was more for her than me.”

“What did it say?” Amanda inched forward on her chair.

“The gist? She wasn’t the woman I thought she was, and that she was sorry to hurt me this way.”

“You didn’t hold on to this letter, did you?”

“Wishing I had, but I was pissed off at the time. I tossed it into the fireplace and watched the ashes fly.”

There went a possible clue—literally up in smoke. Amanda let the words from Claire’s letter sink in and slumped back.Wasn’t the woman he thought she was.Assumed ID, carried around an unregistered firearm, nonexistent online. It would seem she certainly had things to hide.

Logan went on. “And it gets better. The client she supposedly carted us across the country for didn’t even exist. After Claire disappeared, I looked him up and got nowhere. One PI found a man with that name sometime later, but he’d never seen or heard of Claire.”

“Huh.” Add that tidbit to the list of the unexplained when it came to Claire.

“I was speechless at the time too.”

“She must have made money somehow or you would have noticed, right? I assume she contributed to the household income.”

“She did, but we held separate accounts.”

“She obviously had secrets she wanted to hide. Do you have any idea what they might have been?”

“Nope. I still haven’t figured them out, and it’s not like I haven’t given it a lot of thought over the years.”

She imagined he would have been borderline obsessed. In his place, she would be. “Do you think she was afraid of something… someone?” It could explain Claire’s lack of an online presence as it had occurred to her before.