Page 46 of Dying to Meet You
“Magnificent. And so cozy.” Fry snorts.
When I glance at Beatrice, her face is full of rage.
Fry moves toward the door but doesn’t open it. He runs a hand over the carvings in the oak. It’s almost a caress.
I want to yank the door open and kick him through it.
Then, finally, the two cops leave, tossing meaningless pleasantries our way until Beatrice finally closes the door behind them. She leans back on the door and closes her eyes. “What the hell was that?” Her eyes spring open. “We have to talk.”
She marches past me, heading back to the office. I follow and immediately collapse into my chair. Beatrice takes the seat that Detective Riley vacated only minutes ago.
“Buddy, are you okay?” Beatrice asks.
Not even close. It’s just hitting me that I lied to the cops a second time. But what the hell was my daughter’s medallion doing in that car?
Beatrice stares at me, waiting for an answer.
“Honestly, I’m tired of that question,” I mutter. “Not that it’s off base.”
“Hey, I get it.” She folds her hands in her lap. “But that was really intense.”
Intense doesn’t even begin to cover it. I grab my phone and open the FriendFinder app to check on Natalie. It’s a relief to see her avatar at the high school where she’s supposed to be, but I won’t be able to take a full breath until I figure out if that really was her medallion in Tim’s car.
“Why did Tim have those photos?” Beatrice asks. “Did hestealthem from you?”
A queasy feeling washes through me. “He must have? I have no idea why.”
“Yikes.” She blows out a breath. “Hank would lose his ever-loving mind if he knew the cops were asking about stolen photos of the family’s records on a dead guy’s phone.”
I feel bleak. “Do we have to tell him about it?”
She makes a thoughtful face. “Why do youthinkTim took them? If you had to guess.”
“There’s no reasonable excuse. But he liked hearing about the history of the house. That’s all I can figure.”
But then there’s the fact of his adoption...
“What kind of questions did he ask you about the mansion?” she presses.
“Architecture questions. How gasoliers work. Where slate roof tiles come from.” None of it was very suspicious. “Why the servants’ entrances are always a few steps up or down from the other rooms in the house.” That’s because the servants’ wing had four stories to the mansion’s three. Apparently, commoners don’t need high ceilings. “He was a little obsessed.”
“But you don’t know why?”
I shake my head.
Beatrice rolls her neck in an uncharacteristic show of stress. “First that weird story in the coffee shop. And now this.”
“I know,” I say lamely. “But if he betrayed my trust, I don’t know if we’ll ever understand why.”
She frowns. “Why do you think the police are so obsessed with your phone?”
I pick up the incriminating device and turn it over in my hands, so that I don’t have to look her in the eyes. “They’re right about one thing,” I say in a voice that’s almost too low to hear. “I did check Tim’s location the week after he dumped me. More than a few times. I was just trying to understand what happened.”
When I lift my chin, Beatrice wears an expression of shocked disbelief. “You followed him everywhere he went?”
“No.” I give my head a firm shake. “I didn’t watch him every minute of the day. I wasn’t that bad. But the night after he broke it off, I saw him on the map. He’d gone out to dinner at his favorite first-date place. I was upset.”
She blinks. “And then?”
