Page 123 of Nobody's Fool

“Yes.”

“Yet you ended up taking a private flight there at, what, three, four in the morning.”

“Earlier,” he says quickly. Too quickly. And something starts niggling at the base of my skull.

“Why?”

“I told you. I stayed around in case there was any danger from Y2K. Once that danger had passed, I decided to join Talia.”

I stand there and let the moment weigh on us. We all feel it. Something isn’t adding up.

“Did you know Talia was meeting Ricci?”

He swallows hard. “No,” he says. “I had no idea.”

“It must have been devastating.”

He lowers his head. Talia steps forward.

“Forget what I said before,” she tells me. “Leave us alone.”

“Do you want to fill me in?” Marty asks.

“Not yet.”

Marty shifts the car into drive. “Back home then?”

“Can we make a stop first?”

“Where?”

“The cemetery.”

“The one you were just at?”

“Yep.”

Marty seems puzzled by the request, but he honors it.

The cemetery is a mile away from the Belmonds’ estate. Marty parks and I tell him to wait, that I won’t be long. I get out. The car door echoes when I close it. I weave my way through the tombstones until I find the freshly repacked earth. I didn’t have a chance to do this at the funeral. It wasn’t my place, what with the family asking for and getting privacy. There have been no obituaries in the paper.The funeral arrangements were kept confidential. Her murder was a news story, of course, but not as big a one as you might imagine. The world is so easily distracted by shiny new stories. We are in a constant whirlwind of scroll. Everything is a blur. Nothing is worthy of our attention for more than a day, two at the most anymore, and if the Belmond family doesn’t feed the story—if nothing new happens—it will vanish from that scroll.

But I don’t want that for her.

I don’t mean in terms of the public. I don’t care about that, and I suspect Victoria would relish the privacy. I mean in terms of me. Her death means something to me. She meant something to me. It might not have been true love, like with Molly, but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t something special and unique. We connected. You might think what she did to me in Spain was unforgivable or you might think she was a victim of horrible circumstances or you might land in the middle. I don’t care about any of that. Right now, I am thinking about that first dance in Spain and twenty-two years later, being with her when she gasped her final breath in New York City. So I want to acknowledge all that. That she mattered to me too. I want to pay my respects. I want to do right by her.

By us.

So I sit on the grass next to the freshly packed dirt. I reach out and put my hand on top of where her remains lie. I am sorting through it all, for her sake, and I realize that everyone connected to this is lying to me. I don’t know why yet. But I’m not fully buying the story about why Archie Belmond ended up in Chicago. I think about the Belmonds, all of them, and I think about how the trajectory of their lives changed that New Year’s Eve, and somehow, I don’t think it’s only because of the obvious.

A theory is starting to form. It’s an ugly one. But my mind can’t help but go there. I remember Sherlock’s axiom, the one I put on that blackboard the very first day of class:

It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data. Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts.

But there is a caveat to this. As long as you keep an open mind, it doesn’t hurt to test whatever theory you’ve come up with. I’m not new to this case. In a sense, I’ve been working on it for twenty-two years. So now, in memory of the woman buried beneath me, the one who suffered and scraped and fought and made a good life for herself only for some worthless piece of shit to snuff it out, I am going to find the truth.

Or that is what I am telling myself.

Because she didn’t ask me to find the truth, did she? She made it clear what she wanted from me.