“No, no, summer weddings are not cursed.” The woman’s eyes dart back and forth, making sure we’re alone on the tiny dance floor surrounded by empty tables and chairs. “We’ve had nothing but happy couples! Well…except for one.”
Elodie sits at the edge of a nearby chair, leaning forward excitedly. “Really?”
The woman looks nervous now. “I shouldn’t—”
“Please?” I take a less pushy approach, sitting across the table from Elodie. “We’ve bickered so much about when to have the wedding. Maybe I’ll feel better if you tell me that the summer is a bad idea.”
“They never actually booked the wedding,” the woman says, holding her palms up as though warding off an attack. Her voice lowers to a hush as she joins us at the table, and there we perch like a trio of gossiping schoolchildren. The exact sort of clique my daughter abhors.
“But they asked for a tour of the place when they stayed here. They were from England, and apparently the young lady had her heart set on the beach. The man was a real charmer. I don’t know what they did for a living—something with computers maybe. I got the impression they had a lot of cash.” She swipes one hand over the other, miming a stack of bills.
“What happened?” Elodie asks, truly rapt. Elodie is wearing a lot of jewelry, and none of it looks like the costume stuff I have on my dresser. I can tell she’s still thinking about the engagement ring she saw on Bertram’s hard drive.
“Well, they stayed for a few days, and they were all lovey-dovey holding hands on the beach and ordering our couple’s dinners—that’s lobster for two. And then one night, I was closing up late after showing the dining hall to some CEO looking to host his retirement luncheon here. I heard this awful shouting coming from one of the rooms. The young woman stormed out of here in tears. Nearly knocked me off my feet when she bowled into me. The next day, both of them had checked out.”
Elodie’s face falls. “That’s it?” she asks. There’s more tension than that at a PTA meeting.
But the coordinator’s nervous yet pointed silence tells us that is not, in fact, everything.
I reach out and put my hand over hers. She flinches. “What is it?” I ask.
She frowns. “A week later, I’d forgotten all about it. Lovers’ spats aren’t the only things going on around here, and it was an especially busy time for me. But then the police showed up. Apparently, the young lady’s family had reported her missing when she stopped returning their calls.”
Elodie is already glancing at her phone, no doubt looking for a hit on any news articles now that we have this new information. She moves faster than the speed of gossip.
“Oh no,” I say. My tone doesn’t express the rush that goes through me. It’s the satisfying thrill I feel when I’ve just had a breakthrough. I’m amazed by Elodie’s easy ability to pry gossip out of a stranger. This is going to be more fun than I thought. “But surely it was just a misunderstanding. They found her eventually?”
“Don’t know,” the coordinator says. “The police neverfollowed up.” She stands, clearly flustered. “If you’ll excuse me, I—I’ve already said too much. Please, you ladies help yourselves to looking through the venue again. Here’s my card if you’d like to book your event. We’d be glad to host your reception.”
She’s out of there as fast as if she’d seen a ghost. I scoot my chair closer to Elodie’s and look at her phone. “Anything?” I ask.
“I’m using my VPN to search British headlines, since nothing is coming up here,” Elodie says. I’m annoyed with myself for not thinking to do this when I was doing my own research last night. But still, there’s nothing. Not a police report. Not a “Have you seen me?” Facebook post. There is nothing at all besides the same blurry paparazzi photo we’ve both already seen.
I think back on Bertram’s irritating charm. The way he made me want to believe his softhearted lonely genius act. His kindness when he thought I was just a bumbling new journalist on the brink of getting fired.
But the evidence is there. Or rather, the evidence isnotthere.
“He made it go away,” I say. “With all his money, he must have some resources. Someone who made this all disappear for him.”
“ ‘Old data,’ ” Elodie says, shuddering as she recalls the name of the file with Annie’s photos. “That’s all people are to him.”
“We’ll have to go back there,” I say. “I can say I misplaced something.”
“Are you crazy?” Elodie hisses. “He’s dangerous.”
This isn’t a conversation to have in a place where thewalls have ears, so I drag her to her feet and we make our way back to the car.
“I’ve worked with murderers before,” I say, warming my hands as the heat blasts through the vents in the dashboard. “I just put a woman away for murdering her husband back in the eighties.”
“That was you?” Elodie says. “I followed that case. There was a whole podcast about it.”
“Granted, she was sloppy,” I say. “It wasn’t hard to prove. The police at the time just didn’t think a PTA mom would be capable of such a thing, so they never really investigated it.”
“But you weren’t alone with her, in her apartment, with nobody to hear you scream,” Elodie presses. “And she wasn’t a billionaire with cronies to bury your body for her.”
I bat my eyelashes adoringly at her. “Aw, El. I didn’t know you cared.”
“I don’t,” she says as I throw the car into drive. “But if you end up buried in pieces in the Long Island Sound, it’s going to fall back on me. Mr. X seems to really like you.”
