My Wife Is Missing(71)

Unlike Natalie, Sarah had an appetite. She had no trouble putting away a taco. Bits of lettuce and tomato squeezed out the back as the shell cracked between her pearly white teeth. She chewed, swallowed, downing a sip of water before she spoke.

“I usually do a deep dive on the subjects of all my investigations,” she said. “I know that Michael wasn’t my focus here, that I got involved to safeguard the company, but I admit I was intrigued. I figured I’d do a little more digging into Michael’s life just out of … well, morbid curiosity, really.”

Sarah tapped her hand against the table in a rhythmic pattern like a steady drumbeat. Natalie had a thud of her own going on inside her chest. She couldn’t imagine what a deep dive into Michael’s life might have revealed, but clearly it was something of consequence, enough to make Sarah anxious about presenting her findings.

“I started with the present, Michael’s employment history, current address, that sort of thing. I was looking for bankruptcy filings, criminal records, maybe unusual property transactions, something that would give me insight into his character.”

“And did you find anything?” asked Tina.

“Not exactly. But I sort of hit a brick wall.”

“A brick wall? How so?” Natalie’s voice carried notes of her trepidation.

“Usually I can go back pretty far, all the way to childhood,” said Sarah. “If you give me an hour, I’ll tell you the first car you owned, what street you lived on when you were in grade school, that sort of thing.”

“That’s a wee bit unsettling,” said Tina, who’d finally found the stomach for a few bites of her food.

Sarah nodded emphatically. “And that’s a common reaction to just how much information is available about each and every one of us. But with Michael, I didn’t find anything about him that predated his nineteenth birthday. Not a single bit of information.”

“What does that mean?” asked Natalie. She’d wrangled her napkin into a tight corkscrew.

“It means that from a document trail standpoint, Michael came into this world as a teenager. It’s more than bizarre, and it suggests something you might not like to hear—unless of course it’s something you already know and my worries are misplaced.”

“And what’s that?” Natalie asked quietly.

“That your husband, Michael Hart, wasn’t always Michael Hart.”

Natalie met Sarah’s gaze head-on. She searched her eyes, but they were flat, revealing nothing. She looked to the corners of her mouth for a slight uptick of a smile, but her face was grim. There was no levity to be found in Sarah’s expression, leaving Natalie to conclude she wasn’t joking.

“What do you mean by that?” Natalie asked.

Sarah scratched the back of her head, pursing her lips together.

“Ah, damn, this is hard for me to say.” Sarah winced to show her discomfort. “I like getting the bad guys, but I sure don’t like giving bad news to good people.”

“What bad news?”

Natalie held back the urge to lurch to her feet. Instead, she corked her fear while holding a breath.

“Usually in these cases, at least the few times I’ve run into this problem, I find out the subject of my investigation legally changed their name. Now, you’d think I could get the original name—the one they were given at birth—easily enough, but I can’t.”

“Is it hard to do? Change your name?” Tina asked.

Sarah shook her head.

“No, people do it all the time,” she said. “Marriage, divorce, there’s a host of reasons for doing it. And unless it was sealed, there should be a public record of any official name change, but that doesn’t make it easy for me to find.”

“What would you need to know?” asked Natalie, who sat frozen across from Sarah, staring at her.

“For starters, I’d need to know the county where Michael resided when he changed his name.”

“That should be easy enough. He’s from Charleston, South Carolina,” Natalie said.

“Is he?” Sarah retorted.

Natalie paled.

“You think Michael lied about where he grew up?”

“Why not?” asked Sarah. “Have you been to Charleston with Michael? Seen his hometown? Have you hung out with friends of his from high school? Ever looked at his high school yearbook?”

Darkness swelled up in Natalie. She shook her head. It was a no to all.

“I’ve seen family photos, though,” she said, her voice lacking confidence.

“Any of those pictures make it clear that he was in Charleston, South Carolina, when they were taken?” Sarah asked.

Natalie thought hard before shaking her head again.

“He didn’t have many photos. It’s not like men to keep family albums and keepsakes, memory books, that sort of thing. When we got together he bragged about using milk crates for bookshelves, because he could turn them over and technically he’d be ready to move. He didn’t own much, didn’t bring much to the marriage other than himself.”

“You know what his mother and father look like?”

“Sure,” said Natalie. “I’ve seen photos of them, but we never met. His father ran off when he was young and his mother died from cancer before we got together.”