Chapter Twenty-Seven #2
This whole time they had tried to understand what it was about A Time for Forgetting that made people willing to kill for it. Natalia just gave her a million reasons—
It still didn’t make sense, though.
“How do you know they were still even in Cuba? What if the books were taken out of the country?”
“How would she have gotten them out of Cuba without anyone realizing? It would have been difficult. Besides, the police had an inside man, someone who worked with her at the library, knew her habits, knew her well. He said that she never would have risked damaging the books and the circle of people she could rely on was incredibly small. She didn’t have a way to get the books out of Cuba. ”
“How did you get involved? You wouldn’t have been alive back then.”
Just keep her talking. Keep her talking until help comes.
“The military officer was my father,” Natalia answered.
“He was never the same after she tried to kill him. He told me the story when I was growing up. You don’t know what it was like in Cuba.
He had a promising military career, and she stole all of that from him when she attacked him.
He was never the same after his injuries. ”
“So, it’s not just about money for you, is it?
It’s personal. Your website, tracking stolen Cuban property, it’s all a lie.
Everything you told us that day in your apartment was a lie.
The things about your parents, about your family?
This whole time you were working for the people you professed to hate. ”
“A cover,” Natalia corrected. “One that has served me very well. I collect information. Pass it on to the right people. The website was the perfect way to help me reach exile circles, to get people to trust me.”
“And you betrayed their trust.”
Natalia shrugged.
“We have the screenshots from Adriana Josephs’s message board conversations, the usernames she corresponded with—I bet we’ll find you behind one of those, won’t we?”
“I wanted to see who was tracking the book,” Natalia said.
“But how did you know to have him follow me?”
“He wasn’t following you; he was following Greer. He was asking questions about the book. When I realized you were searching for the book for him, you became interesting.”
“And you had him kill Mr. Thornton.”
“I didn’t have him do anything. He made a mistake there. Sometimes the people you hire don’t do the job they’re paid to do. He was just supposed to get information about the book. He got sloppy and made this business far more complicated than it needed to be.”
“Why now? Why after all this time?” Margo thought back to all the events that had led up to this, to the rumors she’d heard, to Bennett’s concerns that someone else was searching for this book. “Was it the whispers that the book was coming up for auction?”
Natalia smiled. “Who do you think started those rumors?”
It took her a moment—
How would you draw out someone you were searching for?
“That’s not A Time for Forgetting in the auction house, is it?”
“No, it’s not. What easier way to get what I wanted than to pretend I was Pilar Castillo, that I had A Time for Forgetting ?
Adriana Josephs gave me the idea actually, indirectly, when she started searching for it on those message boards.
She was the one who started this whole business when she started asking about it online.
I remembered the story my father had told me.
No one alive had seen the book, so it was easy enough to fake. ”
“And Pilar Castillo?”
“She disappeared after that night with my father. She never returned to her apartment. Never returned to the library where she worked. There was no record of her in Cuba, no record of her leaving. It was like she became a ghost.”
“If she’s even still alive,” Margo mused, doing the math in her head. “Did you think to draw her out, too, when you put the fake book up for auction?”
There was no chance for Natalia to answer her. The sound of sirens filled the air, low and insistent, somewhere on the street outside.
It was London, so those sirens could have been for anyone, but it offered the chance Margo needed—
Natalia turned to the side, her attention drawn to the sound of the sirens.
How far away was help? Was it coming at all?
She had one chance.
In the time since they had started talking, Natalia had approached her, closing the distance between them sentence by sentence, reveal by reveal.
Margo lurched forward, crashing into Natalia.
Pain splintered into Margo’s body as she landed on top of Natalia.
A siren wailed in the distance.
Margo kicked out with her free leg, connecting with Natalia’s stomach.
Natalia shrieked, and then she reached up, bringing the gun down on Margo’s temple.
An explosion of pain assailed her, her vision blurring as dark spots floated in front of her.
A crash sounded behind her, darkness closing in on her, and then she heard footsteps and shouts, police officers bursting into the room.
She could feel herself drifting in and out of consciousness, the sensation of her head splitting open overcoming her.
Someone took her hand, Luke’s voice in her ears.
“Stay with me. You’re safe now.”
Margo’s eyes fluttered open. Luke leaned over her.
“It was Natalia Evans this whole time,” Margo murmured as he lifted her up off the ground. “She’s responsible for Mr. Thornton’s death. The copy of A Time for Forgetting is a fake. Natalia was pretending to be Pilar Castillo.”
As Luke carried her out of the flat, Margo’s gaze met Natalia’s across the room when the police slipped handcuffs onto her wrists.