We made our way to the kitchen, and I opened the refrigerator door. “Take anything you want. I’ll be right back.”
I found Giovanni in the study. He glanced up when I entered and smiled.
“Well,” he said, leaning back, “did you find the boy?”
“I did.”
“Is he all right?”
“He will be.”
I filled Giovanni in on the latest, and when I finished, he crossed his arms.
“You made the right decision bringing him here. No one will touch him while he’s in this house.”
I smiled. “I knew you’d say that.”
He brushed past me into the hall, like he’d switched into host mode, peeking into the kitchen where Logan sat at the table.
“Let’s get him into the shower and find him a change of clothes,” I said. “Then we’ll feed him. He’s so skinny, if a stiff breeze came along, it would knock him right over.”
While Giovanni grabbed a few things out of the closet, I led Logan to the guest room and showed him how to use the en-suite shower. Giovanni brought in several clothing options, which were oversized but would work for tonight.
We left him to get cleaned up, following the aroma of Giovanni’s spaghetti carbonara back to the kitchen. Logan joined us several minutes later, looking nervous, his hands clasped together, eyes darting around like he was about to be interrogated.
Which, to be fair, he would be.
But not yet.
Giovanni set a bowl of pasta in front of him, and I said, “Why don’t we eat dinner first and then talk after?”
Logan nodded, and when we joined him at the table, I guided the conversation elsewhere. Talking about Giovanni’s day, instead of Logan’s, seemed to help him relax.
Once dinner was finished, Logan and I moved to the den.
“Logan,” I began, “I don’t want to overwhelm you, but I still feel like I am trying to put together all the parts of the story. If you’re up for it, I’d appreciate it if you could start at the beginning. Why did you run? And what do you know about Anne and about what happened to Audrey and why?”
He drew in a breath, holding it for a moment. “It all started at the cabin. Audrey loved hanging out there. If she and her mother argued, she’d go there to cool off. That’s not to say they had a bad relationship. It was just normal mother-daughter stuff.”
I crossed one leg over the other. “You said it all started at the cabin. I’m guessing something happened one day when she was there?”
“Yeah, she found that locket. It was stuck between a couple of planks on the floor next to the bed. She wouldn’t have ever seen it, except she pulled the bed out one day to sweep behind it, and that’s when she made her first discovery.”
“I’m guessing there was a second discovery?”
“I’ll get to that in a minute. After she found the locket, she showed it to me. At first, we didn’t think much of it. But then she started searching the internet, and that’s how we learned about Anne.”
“What did she find out?”
He rubbed his forehead. “She came across some old articles about a woman named Anne Fontaine who’d disappeared from here. She also found a photo of a missing persons flyer, and in it, Anne was wearing the locket.”
“And Audrey made the connection.”
“Yeah, but it went way beyond that,” he said. “Audrey became obsessed with what happened to Anne. I told her she needed to drop it, and she’d told me she’d let it go, but she didn’t. She kept digging, looking for information on anyone who lived in Cambria back then. She thought someone local might have killed Anne. Someone who still lives here now.”
“What else did Audrey find out?” I asked.
He paused, then said, “One night we were at a party, and she was acting a lot different than usual.”
