Chapter 12
CHAPTER TWELVE
“You weren’t going to tell me, were you?”
Roma felt a sharp pinch on her shoulder, and she twisted in her seat to swat at Daisy. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Her friend took the seat across from her and sipped her blue frozen daiquiri. “Yes, you do; you chose not to tell me that you were coming here because you knew I’d tell you it was stupid.”
Looking around Shar’s garden, Roma sighed and shrugged. “I mean, what else was I going to do? Sit at home and paint my nails?”
Daisy rolled her eyes and looked pointedly at the house. “Yes! You know that they’re friends. I told you, and you’ve seen it yourself!”
“I know…” Slurping loudly at the last dregs of her own daiquiri, Roma abandoned the finished glass next to the two other empty ones.
“So?” Daisy asked, sounding exasperated. “What on Earth would make you come to Shar’s party a week after her close friend’s insane hit woman kidnaps you?”
She sat up and pressed a finger to her lips. “Shh! First of all, that isn’t common knowledge. And second of all, Shar doesn’t seem to know, either. She included me in the group confirmation text like she always does, and I was hoping we could, you know…before it becomes common knowledge.”
The words slipped from her lips slowly, and her tongue felt cold. She glared at the empty glasses in front of her. There was a small chance she had underestimated how much rum was in them.
“How is it not common knowledge?” Daisy asked, throwing her hands in the air. “It’s only the most exciting thing that’s ever happened on this country club of an island.”
“That’s a really good question,” Roma said.
“And it’s not one I can answer. This whole time, I’ve just been glad that there hasn’t been a public or media fuss about Matthias’s disappearance, but now that there's been zero—and I mean zero—coverage on it or on what just happened to me? I’m starting to think it’s more suspicious than a relief. ”
Truth be told, she had been thinking that for a while now, but she hadn’t quite known how to say it out loud without sounding like some kind of ambulance chaser.
“And that makes you want to snoop around Shar’s house?” Daisy asked incredulously.
When she put it that way, it sounded much worse than what Roma had actually been thinking, which was simply that she probably wouldn’t get another chance once the news broke properly and she was considered persona non grata.
“I just don’t want to miss something because Shar decides that I’m social poison—” Cut off by Daisy’s derisive snort, Roma pressed her lips into a thin line and glared past her friend. She didn’t need this; she needed support!
“Okay, I’m sorry. I’m just more concerned about you becoming persona non vivus!” Daisy waved her off. “Now, come on, this is our chance; Shar is about to give her thank-you speech.”
Setting down her half-finished drink on the table, Daisy extended her hand to help Roma up from her seat after trying and failing a few times to stand on her own. Laughing at herself, Roma took the offered hand.
“I definitely didn’t think that there was so much rum in those blue drinks.”
“I can see that,” Daisy said sarcastically. “Are you sure you want to?—”
“Yes! Onward,” Roma insisted.
As they made their way across the yard, something Daisy had said nagged at her.
“You called Harper her best friend’s hit woman. I thought you said they were friends?”
This time, Daisy shot her a look. “Keep your voice down! And yeah, I did, but she’d been friends with Petria much longer.
From what I understand, she and Petria had a big influence on her.
I never put two and two together before, but Shar used to talk about a friend of theirs they helped get back on the right track, who would do anything to repay them for getting her out of a really bad situation.
She was a teenager when they started helping her.
I thought it was like a big sister mentorship thing, but… ”
Daisy kept talking, but Roma wasn’t listening; her ears shut off when she was deep in thought. It took her all the way through the house and down the hall for the realization to hit. That’s why it hadn’t made sense to her before—because Harper wasn’t there for herself.
“Harper didn’t do this,” she said suddenly, stopping as Daisy tried the garage door handle.
“What?” Daisy asked, spinning to look at her. “It definitely was! She was literally the one who kidnapped you!”
“No, not that. Matthias,” Roma whispered softly.
“I was confused about why she was asking me what I knew instead of just getting rid of me. She cared more about what I knew about it. If it was her, then she’d know what happened.
I think she was doing what I was doing—trying to figure out what happened to Matthias. ”
With every word she spoke, she became more and more sure that she had figured out…well, something. Daisy looked mostly confused, but she could see that her friend was thinking hard about it, so she held back on saying anything else.
“But then why was she here back in February? Why did she follow him?”
“She’d do anything for Petria, right? So, what if she wasn’t following him to hurt him, but rather following him to protect him?”
“Well, she didn’t do a very good job,” Daisy commented.
“No, but that would help explain why she would be so keen to figure it out. Maybe right her wrong?”
“Okay, but doesn’t that just lead us back to where we started—pretty sure a bad person did it, but no real idea who or why?”
It made sense, though, even if it was technically a loss of progress.
Furrowing her brow, Daisy looked over Roma’s shoulder and pulled her into the garage. “Come on, we’re wasting time. But…maybe. I guess I can see it.”
Inside the three-car garage was Shar’s yellow monstrosity, a very boring but expensive black sedan that her husband drove, and a space where she genuinely believed they were about to find Matthias’s car.
“Dang it,” she said. “I really thought…”
“Me too,” Daisy said. “But, I mean, I guess she’d be stupid to keep it here, right?”
She didn’t know what to say, but she felt like crying, which made her even more upset. She didn’t want to cry about this; she just wanted one win! Was that seriously too much to ask?
“I mean… I guess? But that doesn’t explain how she got it out of here without it getting recorded at the gate.”
Roma moved through the garage as if she expected to find the town car by considering the space from a different angle.
“My next best bet is a holiday home,” Daisy said. “Just park it in a garage somewhere left empty for the season and…”
Somewhere in her mind, Roma realized that Daisy had probably drifted off because she noticed Roma had stopped paying attention, but something about the boxes in the corner felt strange. They were brand new, perfect—like they’d just arrived from a factory that morning.
“Is Shar moving soon?” she asked.
“Not as far as I know,” Daisy replied.
“So what’s with all the boxes?”
The two women shared a look before heading straight for the neatly stacked pile.
Roma pulled open the untaped lid of the closest one. Snorting, she gestured to the box, which was filled almost to the top with a random assortment of car parts. “Really?”
Stepping to the side, she opened the next one to reveal a leather bucket seat that had been slashed with a sharp knife.
The headrest was torn off, and the rest of the box was once again filled with random parts—a wing mirror, a loom of wiring, and the dirty cap of something in the engine bay that Roma couldn’t identify.
Daisy was scrolling through her phone with an excited look on her face. “Oh, this is it! She had two moving vans come here in the three weeks after he went missing! She must be moving it out piece by piece.”
“That is fricken’ genius,” Roma breathed.
It answered one question but asked so many more.
The first, and possibly most urgent issue was how to close the boxes so Shar wouldn’t suspect anything until they had a chance to tell the police what they knew.
Roma hadn’t exactly forgiven Detective Isaac for his nonsense, but the kindness he showed her after her ordeal with Harper at least restored some of her faith in his humanity.
“Roma—” Daisy said, but Roma cut her off.
“We have to put it back and tell Detective Isaac,” she said, turning to look at her friend.
The three frozen daiquiris had definitely affected her more than she wanted, but something about Daisy’s face made her feel suddenly sober as a judge.
“What?” she asked, not trusting her voice to work if she tried to speak normally.
Daisy’s eyes welled with tears, and she looked devastated. “We need to do something because…”
The way Daisy’s voice strangled at the end made her heart drop, and she snatched the phone from Daisy’s outstretched hand. Somehow, what she read both sobered her up the rest of the way and made her dizzy.
Breaking News: Billionaire Matthias Walsh Found Dead in Remote Seaside Home.