And Now She's Gone(76)
“Yes, she is,” the woman hissed. “She misses me. That’s why—” Her lips clamped.
Gray’s belly jumped. “That’s why what?”
Tea dropped her head.
“When was the last time you saw Isabel?”
“The last Sunday in May.”
“And the last time you talked to her? Not a text or a phone call. Talked to her in person?”
“The last Sunday in May.”
“So you don’t know one hundred percent that it was Isabel who answered the questions or even told you to send those pictures? You’ve only communicated with her via text message?”
Tea said, “Yes,” then dropped her head. Her hands were shaking now, and tears plopped from her cheeks and pebbled on the table.
“And the dog?”
“I don’t know.”
“She ever mention him in the text messages?”
“No, but she’d never hurt that stupid dog.”
“Where did she go back in December?”
Tea shook her head.
“Okay, I’m calling the po—”
“Las Vegas.”
“And in March?”
“Las Vegas.”
“Why?”
Tea waited and waited—minutes, hours, days, it seemed. Finally: “Don’t know.” She dabbed a napkin at her wet nose.
Softer now, Gray asked, “What else do you know?”
Tea dabbed the napkin at her eyes. “She told me that she needed a safe place to set up her new life away from Ian. She’s going to Belize.… That’s how she’s going to use Ian’s money, to start a new life away from him.”
Clarissa had confirmed that Isabel hadn’t flown down yet, at least under her name.
Tea glared at Gray. “And she’s buying a ticket for me, too.”
“I wouldn’t go. She has a policy on you, which means she may be planning to—”
“He was beating her.” There was fight in those words. Heat, too. All in. Last stand.
“No, Tea,” Gray said. “She was blackmailing him about him and Trinity Bianchi having sex at the hospital, about him falsifying her worker’s comp papers at UCLA about—”
“I saw the bruises. Ian knew where to hit her so that it wouldn’t—”
“No. She faked those to make you believe—”
“No. He beat her, and she begged me to help her escape. So, that Monday, I drove her to the bus station in my friend’s truck, cuz my car wouldn’t start, and now she’s safe.”
The young woman stood from the table. “I don’t care what you say. I saved my best friend from dying. And now she’s never coming back.”
41
Gray retreated to the parking lot as Tea shuffled to the women’s restroom.
Not only had the young woman lied, she’d shown herself as gullible.
Did she believe that Isabel was a victim in every situation she’d found herself in?
Isabel had picked a ripe one, and the word “palooka” again floated in Gray’s mind, although …
Could Isabel be innocent in some of this?
Which parts, though?
The living dead part? Caught up in a whirlwind of cons and fraud, the missing woman just might have found herself buried beneath the shadow of a windmill or beneath a soft mound of cedar shavings and pine needles.
Maybe.
It was fifteen minutes after five o’clock, and Gray secretly followed Tea Christopher out of the mall parking lot. The city had been roasted alive; there was not a single drop of moisture in the air. Everything—cars, people, buildings—had been baked until their colors had faded. Los Angeles smelled like tar, fire, barbecue ribs, and weed. Gray stayed four cars behind the young woman as they drove south on Crenshaw Boulevard, crowded now with vendors hawking T-shirts and bundles of incense, crowded with winos on bikes, on foot, weaving in and out of traffic while clutching brown paper bags.
After passing blue landmark signs with “Inglewood” in vertical white letters, Tea—and then Gray—turned left onto Seventy-Seventh Street and into a neighborhood of Spanish-style bungalows with pristine lawns.
Tea zoomed through a traffic circle in the middle of the neighborhood, nearly clipping a teenager on his skateboard.
“What’s the hurry, Tea?” Gray asked. But then, in her giant truck, she took that circle at half the speed and nearly hit a jogger.
Up ahead, the green Altima rolled past a stop sign and kept speeding east on Seventy-Seventh. Black folks, standing on lawns glistening with sprinkler water, talked to neighbors, tended to rosebushes, stopped to shake their heads as Tea Christopher raced past.
Another traffic circle, but this time the green Altima navigated through it as though it were made of ice and TNT. The car slowed until it U-turned and parked on the opposite side of the street, in front of a white house with a red ceramic-tile roof.
Gray passed that house as Tea bustled from the curb and past its gates. Gray also made a U-turn but parked two houses back. The old man watering the lawn of that house waved at Gray as though he knew her. She waved back at him and ached with the memories of Summerlin.
Mr. Anthony—he owned a candy store in downtown Vegas and always brought her bags of sweets. Lorraine and Phil always wore matching tracksuits and were always drinking glasses of rosé and bringing over leftover sandwiches from parties they regularly hosted. Chris, Maud, and Shannon—their houses looked exactly alike except for Maud’s plastic flamingoes, Shannon’s bird feeders, and Chris’s UNLV Rebels flag hanging over his front door.