Fool Me Once(31)

“Death follows you, Maya . . .”

Maybe Eddie was right. If that was the case, was it fair to put Daniel and Alexa at risk?

Or, for that matter, Lily?

The boxes with Claire’s stuff still hadn’t been moved. Maya thought about the mysterious spare phone Eileen had seen. It seemed obvious that the phone was the kind of thing you bought when you didn’t want anyone to know who you were calling.

So what had happened to that phone?

If it had been on Claire when she died, the police would have gone through it. Of course, that could very well have happened. They might have recovered it during their investigation and concluded that it was meaningless. But Maya didn’t think so. Shane had contacts with the police. He’d looked into the investigation for her. There was nothing there about a spare phone or any unexplained calls.

Which meant the phone had probably not yet been discovered.

The boxes were unlabeled. Eddie seemed to have done it in a rush, dumping things in a flurry of grief so that clothes were mixed with toiletries, jewelry with papers, shoes with various trinkets. Claire loved cheesy souvenirs. Antiques and true collectibles were deemed too expensive, but Claire always got the snow globe when she visited a new city or tourist attraction. She had a shot glass from Tijuana. She bought a little piggy bank shaped like the Leaning Tower of Pisa. She owned a Princess Di memorial plate, a wiggly Hawaiian hula girl who shook her stuff on a car dashboard, a pair of used Vegas casino dice.

Maya remained stone-faced as she sorted through the goofy tchotchkes that had at one point in their existence made Claire smile. She was in mission mode now. On one level, doing this, sorting through these nothings that her sister had cherished, was intensely painful, and the guilt started seeping in: Your husband is right. I let death in. I should have been here. I should have protected you . . .

But on another level—a higher, more important level—this guilt and pain helped. They made her mission more discernible. When you can see the stakes, when you realize the true purpose of your mission, it motivates you. It makes you focus. It makes you push away the distractions. You gain clarity of purpose. You gain strength.

But there was no phone in any of the boxes.

After the last box, she collapsed back onto the floor. Think it through, she told herself. Get into Claire’s head. Her sister had owned a phone she wanted no one to know about. Where would she hide it . . . ?

A memory came to Maya. Claire had been a junior in high school, Maya a sophomore. Claire, in perhaps her one fit of rebellion, had started smoking cigarettes. Dad had a super sensitive nose. He could smell them on her.

Dad was pretty liberal about most things. Being a college professor, he had seen it all and expected experimentation. But cigarettes struck a nerve. His own mother had died a horrible death from lung cancer. Nana had moved into the small spare room toward the end. Maya remembered the sounds mostly, the haunting, horrible wet sucking-gurgling coming from Nana’s room, spending her last few days slowly and agonizingly being choked to death. Maya could barely enter that room after Nana’s death. Death lingered. Its smell had seemingly burrowed into the walls. Worse than that, Maya sometimes was sure that she could still hear the sucking-gurgling sound. She had read somewhere that that sound never fully disappears. It just gets fainter and fainter.

Like the sounds of helicopter rotors. Like the sound of gunfire. Like the screams of death.

Maybe, Maya thought now, in that terrible room . . . maybe that was where death first started to follow her.

Maya stayed on the floor and closed her eyes. She tried to slow down her breathing and keep the sounds at a distance.

The memory nudged her again: Dad hated cigarettes.

Right, okay. Claire started smoking, and Dad would freak out. He started searching Claire’s bedroom at night, finding the cigarettes, and throwing small tantrums. The smoking stage didn’t last long. But while it did, Claire finally thought of a hiding place their father would never look.

Maya’s eyes lit up.

She quickly stood and hurried toward the living room. The old trunk—ironically, Nana’s old trunk—was there. Claire had used it as a coffee table. There were family photos on top. Maya started taking them off and putting them on the floor. Most of the photos were of Daniel and Alexa, but there was one of Eddie and Claire from the wedding. Maya stopped and stared at them. Both looked so damned young and hopeful and happy and mostly unsuspecting. These two had no idea what life had in store for them, but then again, no one does, do they?

The inside of the trunk was used to store tablecloths and linens. Maya removed them and started feeling her way along the bottom.

“My father brought the trunk over from Kiev,” Nana had told them during a visit when they were little, years before the cancer choked her to death, when Nana was spry and healthy, when she would take them swimming or teach them tennis. “See this?”

The two little girls bent close.

“He built it himself. It’s a secret compartment.”

“Why was it a secret, Nana?” Claire had asked.

“So he could hide his mother’s jewelry and cash. Every stranger is a potential thief. Remember that. You two girls. When you’re older. You will always have each other. But never leave your valuables where others can find them.”

Maya’s finger found the small seam. She dug down, heard the click, and slid back the secret panel. Then, just as she had done as a child, she bent close and looked inside.