“I thought he’d taken the rent money and run,” I interrupted, in case Alex was about to say I’d threatened to kill Joey. Which I probably had. “I’d lost my boyfriend, and then the apartment because of him. And then my job because ofthat.”
“And she had a show,” Alex said.
“That slime you just arrested barely let me grab a handful of my own underwear,” I said. “I was dragging everything I owned around in a garbage bag on Wednesday afternoon. So did I want to see Joey right that minute? No. Alex wasn’t wrong about that.”
Aycock nodded, looking between us and settling, finally, on Alex. “Have you miraculously remembered anything else about that day, sir?”
He was still hot for Alex. I stared at the tabletop, thinking about that security video footage. I needed to delete it, immediately.
“Anything odd?” Aycock said. “Unexpected?”
Unexpected.
“My mother showed up,” I said.
Alex flinched.
Detective Aycock turned to me. “That’s unusual?”
“It is, actually. But then she disappeared. Like, for real? Her wife and daughter don’t know where she is. Her other daughter,” I added, when I caught Aycock’s squinting eye, trying to keep score. “My half sister. Who I didn’t know about. Until this week.”
Aycock got out his notebook, asked for Marisa’s name and the Youngs’ address, jotted some notes. I watched his hand moving across the paper. When it stopped, I could feel the weight of his attention on me.
Look, I’m used to attention, but this had a different quality.
He said, “Why didn’t you mention this before?”
“I didn’t think it could have anything to do with Joey,” I said.
“She went missing from her home?”
“From the pub,” Alex said.
Aycock closed his notebook, looking between us as though he’d ratherwewent missing right now. “From the pub. Is that right?”
“No,” I said. “She…”
But I wasn’t supposed to have the footage I was relying on. What did I know and how could I know it? Finally, I had it. “She left the pub. Her friend spoke to her on the street. Edith Maxwell, you can ask her. She’ll tell you.”
He flipped the notebook open again. “You both spoke to Mrs. Young, when she was at the pub on Wednesday night?”
“She talked to me,” Alex said. “I didn’t talk to her.”
“Yes,” I jumped in to snare Aycock’s attention away from Alex. I didn’t like the way the cop was eyeballing him. “But… my motherand I weren’t what you’d call close,” I said. “She’d never met Joey. Her disappearance couldn’t possibly be connected… could it?”
“I’ll figure that out. If you think of anything else that couldn’t possibly be connected to Mr. Hartnett’s death, Miss Devine,” the detective said, “could you please let me decide that?”
Alex was staring off toward the window. No help at all.
“Um, the pub was broken into this morning?” I said. “Maybe… that?”
The detective gazed at me now with half-lowered eyelids. “Any dead bodies dumped there? Any moremothersgo missing?”
“Ah,” I said. “No. And nothing missing from the pub that I could see. Just some kids messing around, probably. I already cleaned up most of the damage in the storeroom.”
He started to say something, thought better of it, tried again. “You already cleaned it. Is it a crime scene? Or isn’t it?”
“It’s not kids,” Alex piped up. “It’s people looking for the treasure.”
