“It might concern us.”
“Why would you leave a note saying that in your own house, unless...?” Her voice wavered. She went to pull off a glove. He touched her hand.
“Leave them on. Just a precaution.”
She nodded, tiny wrinkles webbing out from her pursed lips. The envelope wasn’t sealed. She pulled out a twice-folded sheet of thick notepaper. It trembled as she read.
She looked up at him, wide-eyed.
“A suicide note.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
SAMIRAFELTJAMIE’Shands grip her shoulders as she read the note aloud. “‘I’m sorry, I’m in over my head and I can’t bear to live like this anymore. You won’t find my body—no one should have to deal with that. Charlotte Liu.’ It’s dated three days ago. Three days.” By the time Samira had left Tuscany it was already too late.
“Do you think it’s legit?”
“I don’t know. Why would she have asked me to come here and not waited for me? But...the postcard was delayed. She couldn’t have been sure I’d receive it. Could she have given up? Maybe there was no evidence, maybe it was just a call for help for a woman who was planning to...”
“Is it her handwriting?” Jamie’s voice remained calm.
“Honestly, I can’t remember ever seeing her handwriting. We texted or messaged.” She pictured the postcard, with its loopedIs and old-fashioned lowercaseSs. “But I think it’s the same writing as the postcard. Oh God, not Charlotte, too.”
Jamie slid his hands to her upper arms. “It seems too much of a coincidence that she would kill herself right now. She had a raison d’être. Maybe she’s just gone into hiding.”
Samira looked up, blinking. A child’s drawing was taped to the fridge—purple house, rolling green hills, yellow field dotted with red poppies, blue sky... As she stared, it blurred. “Awo, maybe that’s it.”
Jamie squeezed her arms and released her, then opened a drawer in the kitchen cabinet, followed by another. “Let’s look around, see if we can figure anything out, see if we can find this evidence. You’ve been here before—does anything look out of place?”
“It’s been a couple of years but it looks much the same down here.” She starting flicking through notices and bills on a pinboard. Two years. Before Latif died, before her life imploded, before Jamie. She’d come to London with her parents for the funeral of a duke. While they’d paid diplomatic calls one afternoon, she’d begged off to play “Cosmos” with Charlotte. They’d giggled like they were back at university.
“I’m not seeing any handwriting,” Jamie said.
“She’d do everything on a screen—shopping lists, to-do lists, diary... I’ll be surprised if we even find a pen.”
Jamie slid the last drawer closed. “There’s some printer paper here but otherwise no stationery at all. So where’s the pen she wrote the note with?”
Samira examined the top of the note. “And this—it’s not printer paper. It was ripped from a pad. Where’s the pad? Where’s the packet of envelopes? You don’t just buy one envelope—you can’t. And why a note on paper, anyway, left where no one would find it for who knows how long? This is Charlotte. She’d be more likely to post on social media.”
“Maybe she has. Unless she didn’t want anybody to find it for a day or so.”
“So she’d schedule it in advance.”
“You can do that?”
“Really? Where have you been the last...?”
He raised his eyebrows.
“Oh. Don’t answer that. We need to check her social med—”
A door slammed. She froze, tension trickling up her chest. Footsteps, voices. Jamie flattened against the wall beside the front window and peered out. “Just the neighbors leaving,” he whispered.
Upstairs, Samira found a box with a few highlighters and pens—colored, sparkly, for birthday cards, maybe—but nothing that matched the ink on the note. No notepaper. No envelopes. No thick dossier of evidence.
The staircase clanged as Jamie climbed it. “This woman sure is a minimalist. I guess you’d have to be, to live in a shoebox.”
He got down on hands and knees and peered under the bed. “Did she play baseball?”
