It was a believable performance, but conversely, Will had once believed that Vincent was a happily married man with a wife he appreciated, even if they didn’t appear to share a passionate love. Today, however, he’d heard a disturbing offhandedness in Vincent’s voice when he spoke of Jemima, as if she was no more than an unwanted piece of furniture.
Which opened up a whole other can of worms. “Does Jemima know?”
Vincent wiped away his tears and struggled to his feet. “No, of course not.”
He had the confidence of philandering men everywhere, and just like them, he was probably wrong. Though, when you factored in how well Vincent had insulated his family from the locals, it was possible that Jemima had no idea. But if she had worked out the truth…
“I’ll need to speak to Jemima at some point,” Will said.
Vincent’s face turned to flint. “You’ll have to get through my lawyers first.”
“That’s how much you love Miriama?” Will asked softly. “Enough to block me from talking to someone who might know what’s happened to her?”
“Miriama left me. She chose Dominic de Souza.” The words were like ice. “She’ll still choose him when she comes back. I’m not going to lose my wife, too.”
There it was, the rage. Deep and black and violent. The kind of rage that came from passionate love. “Do you know where Miriama is, Vincent?”
“Go to hell, you bastard.”
Will didn’t stop the other man when he got into his car and sped off down the drive, away from the house. Right now, he had nothing with which to further push Vincent.
That didn’t mean he was about to give up.
Starting his own vehicle after a short delay but not turning on his headlights, he followed Vincent. As it was, the covert surveillance ended up a bust: Vincent parked in front of the pub.
Going around to the back of the local drinking hole, Will managed to get hold of the manager, a great bearded man who was a well-known hunter and who’d spent hours searching for Miriama. When Will asked him to keep an eye on Vincent and to let him know if the other man said or did anything out of the ordinary, the manager stared at him with hard eyes.
But his response wasn’t the stonewalling Will had expected, wasn’t the town protecting one of their own against an outsider. “I saw the way he looked at her,” the other man said, twisting a tea towel in his nicked and scarred hands. “Also saw the way she looked back. Miri’s too good for the likes of him and I’m glad the girl was smart enough to see that. Using her, that’s what he was doing.”
“Did you know,” Will said, “or did you suspect only?”
“Didn’t know for sure. Was hoping I was wrong.” He slapped the tea towel over his shoulder, his black T-shirt branded with the fading emblem of a metal band. “Her thing with the doctor? That’s got a real future—he’s a townie but he respects little Miri enough to want her to be his wife.”
“So his plan to propose is open knowledge?”
A faint smile. “Mattie isn’t too good at keeping happy secrets. She whispered it around when the doctor asked her to sneak away one of Miri’s rings so that he could have the engagement ring made the right size.” Smile fading, he folded his arms over muscle gone to hard fat. “I’ll keep an eye on the rich boy, don’t worry.”
“Don’t do anything,” Will warned. “He’s not the only one I’m looking at.”
“When you know for certain, you sure as hell better drive whoever it is out of here before I get my hands on them. But Vincent’s safe for now.”
The journal sat heavy against Will’s heart as he drove off after that exchange.
He knew he wouldn’t be getting any sleep tonight.
Before he returned home, however, he’d do a sweep of the town, make sure no trouble lurked in the shadows.
Though the air was clear of the scent of rain, the cloud-heavy sky held no stars, no moon, and it felt to Will as if the entire town was suffocating under a blanket of darkness. Miriama’s disappearance had stained Golden Cove’s heart. Nothing would scrub away that stain until they found her or discovered what had happened to her.
Spotting a huddle on one particular corner, he came to a stop by the curb and rolled down his window.
41
“You should all be at home,” he said to the teenagers loitering outside the closed fire station.
Kyle Baker flicked off some ash from his cigarette. “We were just discussing Miriama. Thinking about what else we could do, where we could search.” Insolence in his eyes but pious worry in his tone. Kyle was putting on a show for his fans, and, interestingly, many of those fans were younger than him.
“That’s a good thing,” Will said, “but, if anything happens to any of you, it’ll make a bad situation even worse.” He wasn’t surprised to see a number of faces familiar to him from the other night—in a place this small, “hanging out” was a popular nighttime activity for the underage crowd. “The town can’t afford to squander its resources right now. I need you to follow the rules so I don’t have to worry about that and can focus on finding Miriama.”
One of the girls bit down on her lower lip. “Sorry,” she said softly. “It’s just that we’re so worried about Miriama and Kyle said maybe we could meet up and come up with some ideas.”
Kyle shot the girl a narrow-eyed look that she didn’t notice but Will did. He made sure his own eyes caught Kyle’s on the return journey, the message in them clear: anything happened to that girl and Will would come for Kyle.
Shrugging her off as unimportant, Kyle took another drag of his cigarette. “You’re absolutely right.” He slid back into his golden boy persona without missing a beat. “We’ll all go home. But we want to join in the search tomorrow.”
“The search has been suspended.” When he’d spoken to—then sober—Nikau on the drive back to Golden Cove, he’d agreed with the other man’s call that there was nothing and nowhere left to search.
“Do you think she’s dead?” Kyle asked, eyes devoid of empathy mocking Will.
“For Matilda’s sake, and the sake of everyone else who loves Miriama, I hope not.”
His words made several of the teenage girls tear up, the boys nearest them taking the opportunity to put their arms around the girls’ shoulders. “Claire, Mika,” he said, “hop in. I’ll give you a lift home.” The sisters lived the farthest away. “Kyle, I know I can trust you to see the others home safely.”
The nineteen-year-old stilled, realizing too late that he’d been led into a trap. “Of course,” he said at last and Will knew he’d keep his word. Kyle Baker might be a psychopath, but he was a psychopath who liked being the top dog in teenage circles in town.
Nodding good-bye to the other kids, Will turned his SUV in the direction of Claire and Mika’s home. They were quiet on the ride but thanked him when he dropped them off. Will, however, wasn’t done. He spent the next ten minutes getting in touch with the adults in charge of the other teenagers and alerting them their kids should be home within the next quarter hour.