Fool Me Once

Giving wide berth, Hector made his way through the door. With one more glare, Isabella’s mother closed it behind both of them, leaving Maya outside.

She should have been prepared for this.

Back off, Maya told herself. Think it through.

Her cell phone sounded. She checked and saw that the call was from Shane.

“Hey,” she said.

“I looked up that license plate for you,” Shane said without preamble. “Your Buick Verano is leased by a company called WTC Limited.”

WTC. Didn’t ring a bell. “Any idea what that stands for?”

“None. The address is a post office box in Houston, Texas. It looks like some kind of holding company.”

“The kind of thing someone uses when they want to stay anonymous?”

“Yep. If we want to learn more, I’ll need to get a warrant. And to get that, I’d need a reason for looking into this.”

“Just forget it,” she said.

“If you say so.”

“It’s no big deal.”

“Don’t lie to me, Maya. I hate that.”

She didn’t reply.

“When you’re ready to come clean, call me.”

Shane hung up.

* * *

Eddie hadn’t changed the locks.

Maya hadn’t been back to Claire’s house-yep, still thinking of it as such-since pulling down Coach Phil’s pants. There were no cars in the driveway. Nobody answered her knock. So she took out the key and let herself in. As she entered the foyer, Eddie’s words floated back down to her.

“Death follows you, Maya…”

Maybe Eddie was right. If that was the case, was it fair to put Daniel and Alexa at risk?

Or, for that matter, Lily?

The boxes with Claire’s stuff still hadn’t been moved. Maya thought about the mysterious spare phone Eileen had seen. It seemed obvious that the phone was the kind of thing you bought when you didn’t want anyone to know who you were calling.

So what had happened to that phone?

If it had been on Claire when she died, the police would have gone through it. Of course, that could very well have happened. They might have recovered it during their investigation and concluded that it was meaningless. But Maya didn’t think so. Shane had contacts with the police. He’d looked into the investigation for her. There was nothing there about a spare phone or any unexplained calls.

Which meant the phone had probably not yet been discovered.

The boxes were unlabeled. Eddie seemed to have done it in a rush, dumping things in a flurry of grief so that clothes were mixed with toiletries, jewelry with papers, shoes with various trinkets. Claire loved cheesy souvenirs. Antiques and true collectibles were deemed too expensive, but Claire always got the snow globe when she visited a new city or tourist attraction. She had a shot glass from Tijuana. She bought a little piggy bank shaped like the Leaning Tower of Pisa. She owned a Princess Di memorial plate, a wiggly Hawaiian hula girl who shook her stuff on a car dashboard, a pair of used Vegas casino dice.

Maya remained stone-faced as she sorted through the goofy tchotchkes that had at one point in their existence made Claire smile. She was in mission mode now. On one level, doing this, sorting through these nothings that her sister had cherished, was intensely painful, and the guilt started seeping in:

Your husband is right. I let death in. I should have been here. I should have protected you…

But on another level-a higher, more important level-this guilt and pain helped. They made her mission more discernible. When you can see the stakes, when you realize the true purpose of your mission, it motivates you. It makes you focus. It makes you push away the distractions. You gain clarity of purpose. You gain strength.

But there was no phone in any of the boxes.

After the last box, she collapsed back onto the floor. Think it through, she told herself. Get into Claire’s head. Her sister had owned a phone she wanted no one to know about. Where would she hide it…?

A memory came to Maya. Claire had been a junior in high school, Maya a sophomore. Claire, in perhaps her one fit of rebellion, had started smoking cigarettes. Dad had a super sensitive nose. He could smell them on her.

Dad was pretty liberal about most things. Being a college professor, he had seen it all and expected experimentation. But cigarettes struck a nerve. His own mother had died a horrible death from lung cancer. Nana had moved into the small spare room toward the end. Maya remembered the sounds mostly, the haunting, horrible wet sucking-gurgling coming from Nana’s room, spending her last few days slowly and agonizingly being choked to death. Maya could barely enter that room after Nana’s death. Death lingered. Its smell had seemingly burrowed into the walls. Worse than that, Maya sometimes was sure that she could still hear the sucking-gurgling sound. She had read somewhere that that sound never fully disappears. It just gets fainter and fainter.

Like the sounds of helicopter rotors. Like the sound of gunfire. Like the screams of death.