Chapter Ten
Margo
London
Margo couldn’t sleep.
The alarm clock blinked back at her, the red numbers taunting her.
It was just after two in the morning.
Each time she tried to close her eyes, the image of Mr. Thornton dying flashed before her.
The police had to have notified his family by now.
He’d never married or had children, but he had an older sister who lived in Wales and who he talked to frequently.
She would be devastated. Anyone who had known him would be stunned.
He was one of the kindest men she had ever known, and the idea that he had been attacked so brutally in his own shop, that the killer had possibly been there at the same time she was…
Margo climbed out of bed, heart pounding, and walked down the long hallway of her flat, checking the front door once more.
It was locked, just as it had been two hours ago when she tried to go to sleep the first time. She’d even dragged one of her dining room chairs under the doorknob as an additional security precaution, and it rested there, unmoved.
When she’d called Bea and told her about Mr. Thornton’s murder, Bea had offered for Margo to come stay the night at her flat, but all Margo had wanted was a shower, a fresh change of clothes, and the comfort of her own bed.
Her old clothes sat at the bottom of her building’s rubbish chute.
Now she regretted the decision to be alone.
Her flat looked a lot less inviting at two a.m. than it had earlier in the evening.
Margo padded over to her little dining table and sank down in the remaining chair, her laptop open with the scarce research she had found on A Time for Forgetting .
The flash drive Mr. Thornton had pressed into her hand before he died rested in her computer.
She’d told herself that there was no harm in looking at the information that Mr. Thornton had found, that she wasn’t doing it because Luke was involved or because once she sank her teeth into something, it was very hard to let go.
Tomorrow she would return the fee the client had already paid her.
And she was going to turn the flash drive over to the police.
And she wasn’t more than just a little sucked in by this whole thing.
The flash drive provided some interesting background on A Time for Forgetting , although it hadn’t contained the name of the person who’d asked him about the book in the first place as she’d hoped it would.
The publisher was Reston Brothers Publishing.
It had been a small publisher in Boston for about thirty years from the end of the nineteenth century to the beginning of the twentieth.
The publishers, a Henry Reston and his brother John, had long since passed away, but their obituaries were available online and Margo had tracked their various grandchildren via a somewhat sketchy people search website that may or may not be accurate.
Margo checked her email again, waiting to see if any of the Restons from Boston that she had reached out to on social media had responded.
Nothing so far.
She’d told herself that there was no harm in doing this—after all, it wasn’t like sleep was coming. If she was going to be awake at this hour, better to be productive than spend the time rehashing her conversation with Luke—or thinking about those horrible moments when she found Mr. Thornton.
If Mr. Thornton had been murdered because of A Time for Forgetting , then she couldn’t ignore the fact that she was at least partially responsible for dragging him into this.
It was a long shot that Henry or John Reston’s grandchildren would know anything about a book that their grandfathers had published over one hundred and twenty years ago, but at this point long shots were all she had.
Mr. Thornton’s research hadn’t yielded anything else about A Time for Forgetting , which must have frustrated him to no end, considering she doubted he’d encountered many books that left him stymied.
What was so special about this one? What was it about A Time for Forgetting that made it worth killing for?
But at the end of the day, what made anything valuable? How badly someone wanted it.
It was the cornerstone of her business after all. She operated in a secondary market where prices were set by an item’s history, by its rarity, and by the lengths to which someone would go to obtain it.
Mr. Thornton’s research on Eva Fuentes had been a little more productive.
She was a Cuban teacher, and Eva had traveled to Harvard in the summer of 1900 as part of a large delegation of teachers from Cuba.
It was the largest cultural exchange of its kind at the time or since, and while there was plenty of information available about the summer school, there weren’t additional details about Eva Fuentes that Margo could find.
It answered some of the mystery at least—perhaps why Eva had chosen a publisher in Boston for A Time for Forgetting .
Still—there were more questions than answers.
Her email pinged with an incoming message alert.
She scanned the sender’s name.
Oliver Reston.
Subject line: Your message
Oliver Reston, born January 3, 1948, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, according to the genealogy website where she’d found him.
He was the son of Henry Reston’s youngest son.
Oliver Reston had appeared to be a Reston family genealogy buff, and she’d tracked his social media handle all over various message boards and websites where he passionately researched the Reston family legacy.
He had been her greatest hope for a response.
She opened the email, reading through the message he’d written.
Ms. Reynolds,
Thank you for your email. I am indeed the grandson of Henry Reston.
He and his brother ran a publishing house in Boston at the beginning of the twentieth century.
They published several hundred titles before they were forced to close the business when they went off to fight in the Great War.
My grandfather and his eldest brother were killed fighting.
I’m not familiar with A Time for Forgetting , but we’ve donated some of my grandfather’s papers relating to his publishing business to the local public library.
I’m visiting my granddaughter in Omaha for the next week, but when I return to Boston I will check his records to see if there’s any information on A Time for Forgetting and will let you know if I find anything.
Yours,
Oliver Reston
There was no mention of anyone else reaching out to him about the book, which made her wonder why she was the only one pursuing this line of inquiry. Had someone else already contacted him and he’d declined to mention it? Or was tracking the publisher a pointless endeavor?
She sent a quick email thanking him for his reply. She briefly considered asking him if anyone else had contacted him, but considering what had happened to Mr. Thornton, she figured the less he was involved, the better.
The other piece of information Mr. Thornton had gathered was equally interesting.
He’d provided the name of a Cuban woman in London—Natalia Evans—who ran a website that from Mr. Thornton’s notes and her own observations was geared toward recovering items belonging to exiled Cubans.
After a bit of research, Margo couldn’t resist filling out the contact form on Natalia’s website.
She didn’t specifically say what it was about—just that it was regarding a book—and she questioned what she was doing several times before finally clicking “send.”
Late-night Internet indecision was turning out to be the theme for the evening.
Margo’s fingers hovered over her keyboard, pulling up one of the social media sites she’d used to look up Henry Reston’s descendants.
It wasn’t the first time, and she feared it wouldn’t be the last as she typed Luke’s name into the search bar.
His profile came up instantly in the results, the algorithm no doubt recognizing her propensity to search for him even if it had been months since the last time she’d done so.
She tried not to think of him too much, not to allow herself these slips, these moments when she would let him back into her life albeit briefly. After seeing him with his girlfriend tonight, she couldn’t help but wonder if he’d changed his profile pic.
He hadn’t.
It was still Luke solo, on a climbing trip in Wales, his face turned away from the camera, so it was hard to make out his features.
Given his job, he used social media sporadically at best, the privacy controls locked down so tightly that she could see little else.
It was probably for the best, considering she’d removed him from her friends list when they were going through their divorce to avoid moments of weakness like this one.
The clock on her laptop taunted her.
It was three in the morning.
She had to sleep if she had any hope of being productive tomorrow.
Margo closed the browser window, leaving her past firmly behind her where it belonged, and walked over to the front door, checking the flat’s locks once more.
The chair was still in place where she’d left it, everything unchanged.
She didn’t have an alarm, but maybe an email to her landlord asking about one needed to be next on her to-do list.
Margo left the lamp in the living room on, not quite ready to face her flat in total darkness.
The moon was obscured tonight, no stars in sight, and London was eerily quiet.
When she’d found the flat during her divorce from Luke, she’d been grateful for the central location as well as the fact that it was neatly tucked away in a residential neighborhood, limiting the amount of street noise she heard every night.
Now she wished for a little more activity, anything to make her feel like she wasn’t quite so alone.
She stared out the window. There was no one in sight, the street filled with her neighbors’ cars.
A light flickered in a parked car.
The controls on the dash? A mobile phone?
Margo peeled the curtain back.
Her heart pounded.