Fool Me Once(69)

Watching her. Wow. Talk about sounding paranoid.

She and Eileen set up the Chinese in the formal dining room, far away from the possibly prying eye of the nanny cam. Maya filled her in on what she’d seen on the nanny cam, on Isabella . . . and then she stopped with the confessional because she was being stupid.

Fact: Eileen had brought that nanny cam into her house.

Maya tried to let that go, but the suspicion buzzed in her ear. She could quiet it, but it wouldn’t go away, not completely.

“What are you going to do,” Maya asked, “about Robby?”

“I gave copies of the photographs to my attorney. He said without proof there’s nothing I can do. I made sure the Wi-Fi setting was completely off. There’s a company that’s going to come in and make sure my network is secure.”

That sounded like a pretty good plan.

Half an hour later, after she had walked Eileen to her car, Maya called Shane. “I need another favor.”

“You can’t see,” Shane said, “but I’m sighing theatrically.”

“I need someone we trust to come in and sweep my place for bugs.”

She explained about Eileen and the hacked nanny cam.

“Do you know if yours was hacked?” he asked.

“No. Do you have someone who can help me?”

“I do. But I have to be honest. This is all sounding a little . . .”

“Paranoid?” she finished for him.

“Yeah, maybe.”

“Were you the one who called Dr. Wu?”

“Maya?”

“What?”

“You’re not okay.”

She said nothing.

“Maya?”

“I know,” she said.

“Nothing wrong with needing help.”

“I need to get through this first.”

“Get through what exactly?”

“Please, Shane.”

There was a brief pause. Then: “I’m sighing again.”

“Theatrically?”

“Is there any other way? I’ll come by with some guys and sweep your place in the morning.” He cleared his throat. “You armed, Maya?”

“What do you think?”

“Rhetorical question,” he said. “I’ll see you in the morning.”

Shane ended the call. Maya wasn’t quite ready yet for another horror-filled night of flashbacks. Instead, she turned her attention toward Claire’s trip to Philadelphia.

Lily was still asleep. Maya knew that she should wake her daughter and change her out of the clothes she’d worn all day and give her a bath and put her in clean pajamas. The “good” moms would insist on that, of course, and for a moment, Maya could also see their disapproving gazes. But those other moms weren’t carrying a gun and dealing with murder, were they? They didn’t even get that blood-soaked worlds like hers lived side by side with theirs, neighbor to neighbor; that while they worried about arts and crafts and after-school activities and karate classes and enrichment programs, the family next door was dealing with death and terror.

Was someone watching her?

There was not much she could do about that right now. There were other things, important things, that had to be dealt with right away, so she put the paranoia in a box and broke out her laptop. If her house was indeed bugged—and that still seemed like overkill to her—they could also have tapped into her Wi-Fi. To be on the ridiculously safe side, she changed her home network’s name and password and used a VPN—virtual private network—to browse.

That would probably be enough, but who knew?

She got back online and started searching for the name “Andrew Burkett.” Not unexpectedly, there were several—a college professor, a car salesman, a graduate student. She tried adding in other key words and searching back in time. A few articles on Andrew’s death began to pop up. A large local newspaper covered it thusly: YOUNG BURKETT SCION DROWNS OFF YACHT

Buzzwords. “Yacht,” not “boat.” And, of course, “scion.” They had used the same term with Joe. “Scion”—the rich even get their own name for a descendant. She scrolled through the articles. No one knew exactly where in the Atlantic Ocean Andrew had fallen off, but that night, the family yacht, Lucky Girl, had sailed across the midway point between the port of embarkation, Savannah, Georgia, and the destination port of Hamilton, on the island of Bermuda. That covered a lot of ocean.

According to the news reports, Andrew Burkett was last seen going out on the upper deck of the Lucky Girl at 1:00 A.M. on October 24 after a long night of partying with “family members and classmates.” He was reported missing at 6:00 A.M. Joe had mentioned that three of their soccer teammates from Franklin Biddle had been on board, along with his sister, Caroline. Neither Burkett parent had been on board. Judith and Joseph, along with young Neil, had been waiting for them at a deluxe hotel in Bermuda. Their caretakers on the trip had been the fairly extensive cruise staff—and, whoa, one name listed in the article was Rosa Mendez, Isabella’s mother, who was mostly “in charge of young Caroline.”

Maya reread the relevant sections. She mulled them over for a few moments before continuing.

Andrew’s body was discovered the day after he was reported missing. The cause of death in later pieces was listed as drowning. Neither foul play nor suicide was ever mentioned.