Our Little Secret(29)
“The May Ball wasn’t the last you ever saw or heard from Freddy Montgomery?” This question feels weighted: Novak’s holding his breath.
“Is that what you have there? The letters Freddy wrote me after?”
“Can you generalize what most of these letters were about?”
“Why?” I wait for a beat. “They’re right there. You’ve read them.”
“I suspect he wrote you more than what I have here.” Novak thrums the ten or so letters with his fingernail. “You can tell me this isn’t a love story, but I think Freddy Montgomery might beg to differ.”
I feel myself blushing. “They’re not love letters. Not really.”
“Who wrote the first one?” He’s looking me in the eye a lot since he returned.
“Me. I wrote to say sorry for being a crappy friend.” Why is he so interested in Freddy?
Novak eases a fatter letter from the file, takes his time unfolding it.
“Dear Angela,” he begins. “Most certainly you are welcome at my place next weekend—I think by now we can both assume the invite’s ongoing.” Novak stops reading. “What’s he talking about?”
“His apartment. In New York. He has a nice apartment there.”
“I thought he was British.”
“Sometimes British people decide not to live in Britain.”
The muscle in Detective Novak’s jaw tightens. “We know he’s big in chemical weaponry. Biochemistry made him rich.”
“You’ve done your Googling. Yes, he’s a millionaire. He can buy apartments wherever he wants.”
He goes back to reading out loud. “I’d invite you to a ‘work do’ I have on the Saturday, only it’ll be filled with dreadful bores who’ll spend the evening quoting opinions they’ve read in The New York Times, trying to pretend they’re their own.” Novak stops. “What is it about you two that you think you’re smarter than everyone else?” Novak tosses the letter back to the table, where it spins for a second on the chrome. “Haven’t you ever met your match?”
“Not so far.” Novak’s eyes bore into my face. “Detective, you can’t seriously think Freddy’s involved in this. He barely knows Saskia.”
“He hates her, though, by default.” Novak stabs the bottom of the letter on the table. “What does this mean? Good luck navigating the unimaginative people.”
“He always signs off with that. Cross-reference the other letters, if you haven’t already.” I glance up at the window. “Freddy understands me.”
“How much imagination does it take to orchestrate a homicide, do you think, Angela? Surely there’s a lot of planning.”
“I wouldn’t know.”
“Did you two come up with a plan to show the world how clever you could be? Get us all running in circles?” He folds the letter and eases it back into its envelope. “Whoever took Saskia did it carefully. There’s no sign of struggle at her house, no blood spatter and, so far, no trace of a body.”
“That’s what I’m telling you. She’s fine! She’s just wandered off.”
“She’s a mother, Angela. They tend not to do that.”
I shrug. “You said people did all kinds of things. You said you’d seen all sorts.”
“Somebody’s taken her. This is a crime with forethought, with intelligent planning.”
“It really might not be.”
“Freddy Montgomery is a brilliant man with a background in chemical violence and a reputation as being cutthroat when it comes to business.”
“Oh, please.”
“How else do you think he became a millionaire so fast?”
“His dad gave him a massive leg up. He’s got nothing to do with Saskia.”
“We’ve asked around. Word on the street is he’s meaner than you think. At the very least, I’d say he’s an interesting resource.”
I feel heat blotch at my neck. “Freddy didn’t do anything. Just find Saskia already, would you? And leave us all alone.”
chapter
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12
When I first got home from Oxford a week later, Mom told me my room had been converted into a studio for her music lessons; she was learning to play the harp. All of my possessions were in boxes in the basement.
“Feel free to unpack everything again, darling; it’s so lovely to have you back.”
I moved into the basement. I piled the boxes of brochures and memorabilia my dad had collected from Boston museums and made myself a bed. I used actual books as a box spring, standing them four-high and eight-abreast at each corner of the tired old mattress with another column in the middle for support. I set out the boundaries of my land in the darkness of that basement, stacking empty wooden wine crates to shoulder height to create a border. I could work on my laptop down there even though the signal was weak. And once I’d fooled them into thinking my marks were good, my parents left me alone, for the most part.
Saskia, on the other hand, was everywhere I went that summer. The first week I got back to Cove, I ended up sitting behind her and HP in the movie theater. (We were a town that only got one movie a month so everyone turned out for it the first Saturday.) They were just three rows ahead of me, sharing a kid-sized popcorn and a bottle of water. All I thought about was how their saliva mixed. She wore a thin leather headband with a small flower at the right temple and her shirt was cut to show the tops of her shoulders. I couldn’t tell you anything about the movie.