Page 57

The waiting room of the police building was windowless, outfitted with large-format tile floors and thinly padded upholstered chairs.

Shivering in the blasting air conditioning, I desperately searched for anything about Andie’s demise on my phone while the police prepared the interview rooms. But I couldn’t even remember her last name, much less the when or where of the car crash that had supposedly taken her life.

Though it wasn’t exactly a crash, was it? The car had gone off a bridge, Tyson had said.

Which meant that just because she was assumed dead didn’t mean she was.

Perhaps her body hadn’t been recovered. Perhaps there was no body.

Perhaps she’d used the accident—if it even was an accident—to disappear and start a new life.

How, I wasn’t sure. But it was possible, and she’d surely made some shady contacts through Ian’s drug dealing business.

My memory of Andie’s face was hazy after all these years, but there was a possibility I had an image of her stored in the depths of my iCloud.

Grateful for the free Wi-Fi in the station, I pulled up my account and scrolled back to the summer I was twenty-one.

There I was with Rosa, our faces fuller, eyes brighter.

There was my mom, her favorite turquoise scarf tied around her head.

And so many pictures of Tyson, tan and fit, his arms around me.

As I flipped through the Fourth of July pictures, I spotted Ian in the background, smoking a joint.

And there she was. Andie, approaching him, looking just past camera.

Electricity crackled inside me as I zoomed in, studying the structure of her face.

She was pale, dark-haired, and waiflike, with bangs that fell into her eyes, whereas Jennifer was tan and blond and curvy, and her nose and cheeks had certainly been altered, but the resemblance was unmistakable, confirming my hunch.

Holy shit. Jennifer was Andie.

Officer Gauthier appeared with a small plastic bin. “We will need your phones until you have been interviewed.”

I locked my phone and obediently deposited it in the bin, my head spinning as Gauthier informed us that they’d be doing individual interviews in two rooms. We were not to speak to one another while we waited, nor were we allowed to return to the waiting room once we’d been questioned.

A small television mounted next to the security camera in the corner played a series of French soccer games as the group slowly dwindled over three long hours, until only Laurent, Rémy, Gisèle, and I were still waiting beneath the buzzing fluorescent lights.

“What is your plan when you leave here?” Laurent asked me, his voice low, mouth barely moving in deference to the security camera.

“I don’t know,” I whispered. I was desperate to tell him my suspicion about Jennifer, but we hadn’t had a moment alone since this morning.

“You can stay with me if you like.”

I couldn’t deny the rush of affection I felt for him as I accepted his offer. “That would be great, thank you.” I dropped an elbow to my knee and my head to my hand, so that the security camera wouldn’t record my mouth moving. “Are you guys going back to the house?” I asked Gisèle.

She copied my posture. “Samira and I are returning to the boat,” she said. “Allison’s going to the hotel where the rest of the staff is staying.”

“Cody and Jennifer?” I asked. My two remaining suspects, one of whom had killed Tyson—if it hadn’t been the two of them together.

“They’ll be at the house, I think.”

A police officer appeared in the door to the hallway. “Gisèle Breydel and Laurent Auguste?”

Rémy sighed. “We’ll be here.”

Laurent squeezed my hand. “Text me when you’re finished and I’ll come get you.”

Another thirty minutes went by before the handsome Officer Gauthier appeared once more in the doorway.

“Mr. Durand, you are with me,” he said to Rémy as we followed him through the door into a short hallway off which were two doors.

“Ms. Collet, you are in there”—he indicated the room across the hall, where Officer Lambert waited with a female officer.

As I entered, the female officer rose, closing the door behind me. Even with her face bare of makeup and her dark hair pulled back in a ponytail, she looked like an actress playing a cop on television. But her attitude was all business.

“Legs wide,” she said gruffly.

I complied as she patted me down, then took a seat in the chair across from her and Officer Lambert. “This is Officer Trudeau, and I am Officer Lambert,” he said.

“I remember.” I smiled, forcing friendliness though I was sweating with apprehension. “We met yesterday.”

He nodded, evaluating me with sharp eyes. “Your children are Benjamin and Alexander Collet, yes?”

I nodded, shivering. Why did they have to keep it so cold in here?

“Please, say it aloud for the tape,” he instructed.

I cleared my throat. “Yes.”

“And the father of Benjamin and Alexander Collet is Tyson Dale?” Lambert asked.

“Yes,” I said. Adding quickly, “But he was never involved with the children.”

While Lambert asked the questions, Trudeau jotted things down in her notebook, observing me as if she knew something I didn’t. It was unnerving.

“Did you ask him for money?” Lambert pressed.

“No.”

He evaluated me with hawklike eyes. “He owns a billion-dollar company, and you reported an income of ninety-two thousand dollars last year.” So they’d done their research, and fast. “Why did you not ask him for money?”

“Because the choice to have the boys was mine alone,” I said, turning my palms up to show I had nothing to hide. “I don’t want his money. I never did. But someone else here does. Someone was blackmailing him.”

The two officers exchanged a glance as I took the blackmail note from my pocket and slid it across the table. Lambert picked it up and studied it, his brow furrowing.

“You found the money he intended to pay them off with in Gisèle’s room. But it wasn’t her.” I waited until they returned their focus to me to go on. “I have reason to believe it was Jennifer.”

Lambert swished his mustache. “Explain, please.”

I took a breath, wiping my palms on my jeans.

“I’m nearly certain she was the girlfriend of a guy named Ian Kelley, who lived in a trailer on Tyson’s parents’ property the summer we…

conceived my children. She looked different then, and went by a different name, spoke with a different accent even, but she believed Tyson was responsible for Ian’s death. ”

Both officers kept their composure, but I could tell this was news to them. “His death?” Lambert asked.

“He disappeared. He was a drug addict and dealer, so it wasn’t terribly surprising, unfortunately. His remains were recently recovered in the Everglades.”

Lambert frowned. “And you believe Jennifer was his girlfriend?”

I nodded. “I didn’t see it at first, because her appearance is so altered. Not to mention that we weren’t close, and it’s been over ten years since I last saw her. But she has a scar on her stomach. I was there with her when it happened. And once you see the resemblance, you can’t unsee it.”

“Does Cody know this?”

Did he? I wasn’t sure. He’d spent even less time than I had with her back then, and she was an entirely different person now.

It wasn’t just the physical alterations; she’d transformed her whole personality.

Gone was the surly, drugged-out Australian trailer park girl, replaced by a bubbly, sober American Barbie.

It wasn’t until I saw the scar—which I now realized she intentionally kept covered—that I put two and two together.

Cody had seen it, obviously. But he hadn’t been there the night of the fire, hadn’t kept pressure on her wound until the paramedics arrived.

He was aware she’d been injured that night, but he might well not have known exactly what wounds she sustained, certainly hadn’t seen the damage.

Sure, it was possible that she and Cody had reconnected after all these years and kept her true identity from Tyson.

But it was more probable that she’d targeted Cody to get close to Tyson to exact her revenge.

In which case, half a million was definitely not her end goal.

She would have increased her demand when she and Tyson met, and she told him about the keys in the lining of Ian’s shoe.

Because even though the keys found with the foot hadn’t been in the news, she knew about them.

She’d been the one to tell me, all those years ago.

She probably didn’t even know whether the keys were still with the shoe, but she knew Tyson well enough to know he’d respond to the threat, however vague it was.

Or had she decided to scrap the whole blackmail scheme in favor of inflicting the ultimate vengeance?

Either way, it was a shockingly risky plan for a single mom. I couldn’t imagine putting my children’s fate on the line for—well, anything.

Wait a minute…. Her son was my boys’ age, thin with dark hair, from what I remembered of the picture she showed me. Could he be Ian’s son?

Holy hell.

I hadn’t noticed that Andie—Jennifer—was pregnant when I ran into her at Goodwill, the last time I ever saw her—but she’d been in baggy sweats, and I’d ended up in an ambulance, so I might have missed it.

Her kid must be Ian’s son, which would explain why Jennifer was still set on revenge all these years later.

“She wants revenge,” I said, my confidence growing. “It has to be her. Andie was her name back then.” I closed my eyes, attempting to pull her full name from the depths of my memory, but too much time had gone by. “If you look up the police records around Ian’s disappearance—”

But I seemed to have lost the officers’ attention. Trudeau scribbled in her notebook as Lambert pushed a clear plastic evidence bag across the table to me.

“Are you guys listening?” I asked desperately. “I’m telling you, I’m almost certain Jennifer killed Tyson.”

Lambert raised his formidable brow. “Ms. Collet, I must remind you that you are a suspect in this case, not a detective.” I blanched, alarm bells ringing in my head as I realized they didn’t believe me. He tapped the document inside the evidence bag. “What is this?”

I turned my attention to the bag, my heart going to my throat as I saw what it was. “It’s a DNA test showing that Tyson is Benjamin and Alexander’s father.”

“Yes,” Lambert agreed. “And do you know where we found this?”

“I’m guessing Tyson’s lawyer gave it to you?”

“There was a copy with the will he sent over, but no. This”—he tapped it—“is the copy we found in your suitcase this morning.”

Shit. How had I missed that? I gaped at him, my head spinning. “I don’t know where that paper came from. I’ve never seen it before. It’s not mine, I swear.”

“Ms. Collet, it was found hidden in your suitcase.”

I wanted to protest, but when I tried to speak, nothing came out.

“You were using it to get money out of your children’s biological father. And when he wouldn’t give it to you, you murdered him.”

“No!” I choked out. “Someone is trying to set me up! And whoever it is pushed me off the boat last night, nearly killing me.”

“You say this, but you were the one who turned off the cameras before you went overboard,” he said.

“No,” I protested, “I didn’t. I swear.” My brain spun back to watching Jennifer enter my room on the security camera.

“It has to be Jennifer. She came in my room last night when I wasn’t there.

There’s footage of her entering my room on the security cameras.

She must have planted that in my suitcase. ”

I just needed to prove it before they came up with enough “evidence” to arrest me. The thought made me go weak with fear.

“Yes, Jennifer told us you asked to speak to her last night, but when she went to your room, you weren’t there.”

“That’s not true!”

Panic rose in my chest. The idea of being a suspect had been abstract before.

There was always a voice in the back of my head reassuring me that everything would be fine in the end because I was innocent; there would never be any evidence I’d murdered Tyson because I hadn’t.

But if someone—Jennifer, or Andie—was actively plotting against me, that changed everything.

This was a high-profile murder case on an island with a murder rate of zero, where high net worth tourists came to feel safe.

These guys were under enormous pressure to tie this up, and I was a convenient scapegoat.

A suspect to throw in jail to placate the masses who would be demanding answers.

Even if they never had enough evidence to convict me, I could spend months—years—in jail while they figured that out. I couldn’t let that happen.

I rose, trembling. “Am I free to go?”

“We have a few more questions.”

“I didn’t blackmail or kill Tyson. Someone is setting me up, and I need to prove my innocence before you lock me up for a crime I didn’t commit, or they succeed in killing me. So if I’m not under arrest, I need to leave. Now.”

Lambert held up his hands. “As you wish.”

I felt the world crashing down around me as I turned on my heel and swung the door open.