Chapter Ten #3
“I don’t know if it was related or not,” Margo added. “I’ve been on edge since I found Mr. Thornton’s body, and now, I’m worried about Bea. I talked to her yesterday, and she never mentioned that she was going to work from home today. You know how she is—”
“I know. I’ll go by her flat myself and check things out if you want.”
“Are you sure? I feel bad dragging you into this.”
“I care about Bea, too. It’s no trouble.” Luke raked his hand through his hair. “I was worried. This can’t be a coincidence.”
“No, I don’t think it’s a coincidence, either.
I started doing some research last night on Eva Fuentes and A Time for Forgetting .
” Margo hesitated for a beat. At this point, it seemed like the best course of action was to include Luke.
“Before he died, Mr. Thornton gave me a flash drive. It had his notes on the book—and Eva.”
“You didn’t tell me that last night.”
“No, I didn’t. I wanted to see what was on it.”
“Or you were deciding whether or not you were going to trust me?”
“It isn’t about trusting you. It’s about my business. Protecting my reputation, which includes being discreet.”
“I know how much your business means to you. And I understand the need for discretion.” He frowned. “But Margo, this situation is out of control. You can trust me.”
After the divorce, she’d started seeing the therapist she probably should have been seeing after her parents’ divorce as a kid, and one of the things she’d learned about herself was that she tended to try to manage everything on her own, that she was hesitant to let others in, to ask for help, to trust someone else.
I’m not surprised, given your childhood.
You didn’t have the stability you needed when you were young, so it’s understandable that you would believe that you can only rely on yourself.
But no one can shoulder everything, Margo, no matter how capable they are.
Eventually, life will wear them down. It’s not a sign of weakness to ask someone for help, to trust someone to carry some of that responsibility , her therapist had advised.
It had been too late for her to rectify the mistakes she’d made with Luke, but she’d taken the words to heart.
It wasn’t easy—and she still struggled to fight her impulses—but she tried.
“What was on the flash drive?” Luke asked.
“Not as much as I’d hoped.”
She told him what she’d discovered about Eva Fuentes and Reston Brothers Publishing.
“There was also a mention of a website that tracks stolen and missing Cuban property. When Cuban families fled Cuba after the revolution in 1959, their property was seized by Fidel Castro’s government.
Some pieces of artwork and books have later come up for sale and the families have disputed the ownership.
There are some major pieces worth a lot of money that are being contested.
There’s a Cuban woman here in London—Natalia Evans—who has been tracking the items. Mr. Thornton had tried reaching out to her to see if she’d heard of A Time for Forgetting . ”
“Was he successful?”
“His notes didn’t say. It’s a long shot, but right now it seems like there’s little to go on. I sent her an email through the contact form on her website, but I haven’t heard anything.”
“Do you think your client is responsible for this?” Luke asked, glancing back at the office door.
“I don’t know. I tried to fire them last night,” she admitted finally. “Maybe they didn’t take it well?” She met his gaze. “And your client? Have you had a chance to talk to them yet?”
Luke nodded. “She’s in Scotland. I’m going to see her.”
“Scotland?”
“I thought about doing it over the phone, but I want to see her in person, get a feel for the situation given its gravity.”
“Do you think she could be behind all of this?”
“Honestly? I would be surprised. She said she had a family connection. She’s a restaurant owner in Edinburgh. She owns a Spanish restaurant with her husband near the Royal Mile.”
“What’s the name of the restaurant?” Margo asked.
He hesitated for a moment. “The Red Bull. Her name is Adriana Josephs.”
Finally.
Margo searched for both “Adriana Josephs” and “The Red Bull” on her phone.
Adriana’s bio was on the restaurant’s website.
It said that she was of Cuban descent. She was born in Madrid.
She’d studied architecture at the University of Madrid and met her husband there when he was studying Spanish cuisine.
They married and moved to his hometown of Edinburgh, where they opened a Spanish restaurant that had apparently become quite successful.
“Hardly seems like the website of a criminal mastermind,” she admitted.
“I agree. Surveillance is expensive. Hiring people to commit crimes can be expensive. I don’t get the impression that she has those kinds of deep pockets.”
Margo’s mobile rang.
Her heart pounded. “Maybe that’s Bea.”
Her assistant’s name flashed on her phone screen.
“It is.”
Relief crossed Luke’s face.
“Bea, are you okay?” Margo asked after she answered the call.
“I am,” Bea replied. “I’m so sorry. I just got all your messages; I was in a yoga class, and I had my phone off.”
Confusion filled her. She tried not to micromanage Bea’s schedule, and the nature of their industry meant they often didn’t keep traditional office hours, but it was completely unlike Bea to blow off work and not at least tell her.
“What happened?” Bea asked.
“Someone broke into the office. When I got here, it was completely trashed. The police are here now.”
“What?!? I’m so sorry. Are you okay?”
“I’m fine. I was just worried about you—when I got here and you weren’t here, I was afraid something had happened.”
“I’m sorry that I scared you. When I got your email telling me to take the day off, I decided to go to yoga this morning.”
“Wait. What email?”
“The one you sent me last night.”
Margo’s heart pounded. “I didn’t send you an email last night.”
“What’s wrong?” Luke mouthed.
“Bea, can you forward me that email?”
“Of course. I thought it was you; your name was on it.”
“I didn’t send you an email. It sounds like someone wanted the office to be empty this morning.
Okay, listen, now I do want you to take some time off.
There’s not a lot going on right now anyway.
Maybe go see your parents for a few days.
” Bea’s parents had moved to the coast of Spain in their retirement.
“Going forward, let’s not do anything unless we talk to each other over the phone, since it sounds like our email is compromised. ”
“Alright. I’m worried about you, though. Is there anything I can do to help?”
“One thing—I need to return the client’s money. There’s no way I’m going to stay on this case. Things are getting too out of control.”
“Done.”
“Thanks, Bea. Besides that, I’m okay for now, but I’ll keep in touch,” Margo added. “And listen—the past few days, I’ve noticed someone following me. Be careful.”
“You, too.”
Margo ended the call, and immediately pulled up her email. There it was, Bea had just forwarded the message that it looked like Margo had sent.
She handed the phone to Luke.
“Bea’s fine. She was at a yoga class. She said that she got an email from me telling her to take the day off. She forwarded it; obviously, I didn’t send the message.”
Luke scanned her phone. “This was sent at three in the morning. Isn’t that about the time that you saw the car parked outside your flat?”
“Yes.”
He handed the phone back to her. “I wonder if they hacked your Wi-Fi to get into your accounts. Or maybe they just cloned your email. I don’t know. But it looks like they wanted to make sure Bea was out of the office.”
“It seems like it. Maybe they didn’t want to hurt her. Maybe they didn’t mean for things to go as far as they did with Mr. Thornton. At the same time, though, they didn’t do anything to make sure I wasn’t in the office. Seems to me that means they knew where I was already.”
Margo’s phone rang again, surprise filling her as she read the name on the caller ID.
“It’s Natalia Evans,” she told Luke. “The woman who maintains a database on lost and stolen Cuban items.”
Margo answered the call, hesitating for a moment before she placed it on speaker so Luke could hear, too.
“Hello,” Margo answered.
“Good morning, my name is Natalia Evans, and I received a message from you on my website’s contact form.”
Margo glanced over at Luke—despite their divorce, she knew him, trusted him more than she trusted any other person on this earth.
He could handle himself better than anyone she knew, and she had no doubt that she was safe with him.
And even though they were divorced, even though she no longer had a place in his life, there was a part of her that would always worry about him, always care about him.
After what had happened to Mr. Thornton, how would she bear it if Luke continued investigating this book and something happened to him? Maybe the best thing was to team up.
Margo reiterated the information she had given Natalia on the contact form—that she had been hired by a client to find a lost novel written by a Cuban author and that she had found Natalia’s website and was wondering if she might have heard of the book.
“I’m not familiar with the title,” Natalia replied, “but I can certainly go through my records and see if anyone has reported it missing. I can let you know what I find. If you’re available today, we could meet. I live in Knightsbridge if that’s not too far for you.”
“It’s not at all. I can be there soon. I’m very interested in the work you do. Any background information you could give me on the book would be wonderful. We believe that there was a copy of the book that was lost during the revolution.”
“Well, you’ve come to the right place, then. I’ve made a mission out of trying to track down lost or stolen items.”
Natalia gave Margo the address of the flat and said to come around at noon before she disconnected the call.
“I thought you weren’t going to work on this anymore,” Luke said. “Not after everything that has happened. Margo, your office was broken into, your friend was killed—”
“I know what the stakes are. But my friend was killed. Because of something I asked him to investigate. And now you’re involved in this.”
“What does that mean?”
“I can’t—are you going to tell your client you’re done looking for the book for her?”
He didn’t respond.
“That’s what I thought,” Margo replied.
“So, you’re—what—worried about me?”
“I don’t want to see something happen to you because of this,” she answered, neatly sidestepping the question and the awkward emotions it evoked.
“I’m coming with you to see Natalia.”
“Okay.”
“What happens after we talk with Natalia?” Luke asked. “Are you going to put yourself in danger over this?”
Margo glanced back at her office. “?‘Put myself in danger’? I think I’m already there, and whoever is looking for A Time for Forgetting isn’t going to know whether I’ve decided to stop looking for it or not.
It’s not like they’re going to come up and ask me.
They’re going to keep searching for it. Up until now, I’ve been playing catch-up.
I want—need—to understand what’s going on. For Mr. Thornton and for myself.”
And for you , Margo added silently.
Luke studied her for a moment. He sighed. “I guess we’re going to Knightsbridge, then.”