Midnight Betrayal

by Leigh, Melinda

  He rounded the car and climbed into the driver’s seat. She shifted her legs and crossed her ankles. Her skirt rode a few inches past her knees. His glance drifted sideways, and he was rewarded with a flash of pale thigh.

  How could a scant two inches of skin make him drool? He saw a lot more than that every night of the week. Half the women who came into the bar wore skirts a scant inch shy of indecent, and he was hung up on Louisa’s hot librarian getup.

  Louisa looked at him expectantly. He ripped his gaze off her legs. What had she asked him? Oh, yeah. Heath.

  “Sleep texting?” He started the engine. “That’s just lame. If he was awake enough to text her, he was awake enough to snatch her.”

  “I’d love to get a look at the texts he sent.”

  Conor waited for traffic to clear. He checked his rearview mirror as he pulled into traffic. A big sedan pulled away from the curb right behind him. He went around the next block.

  “What are you doing?” she asked.

  “I think we’re being followed.”

  Louisa turned her head to look out the back window. “The dark-blue sedan?”

  “Yes.” Conor made a right onto South Street. “Cops.”

  “How do you know?”

  He glanced in the rearview mirror. The sedan dropped back, letting a couple of cars get between them. “I just do.”

  A few minutes later he pulled to the curb in front of the museum. “Let me know if you hear from Isa.”

  “I will.” Louisa got out of the car and went inside.

  Conor drove toward home, and his police escort stayed a few cars behind him. The bar didn’t open for hours. He stopped for his gym clothes. The heavy bag was the best place to vent all his frustrations. The unmarked car crept along at the curb as Conor walked to the gym. How would the police ever find Zoe if they wasted limited manpower babysitting him instead of expanding the investigation to include someone who might actually be guilty?

  14

  Louisa settled at her desk to catch up on messages, return e-mails, and check on the shipment of a sword and scabbard she’d purchased at auction the week before. She also put a call in to Zoe’s mentor, Xavier English, in case he had any insight on Zoe’s behavior. Professor English wasn’t in, and she left a message. Then she reviewed the details for the fund-raiser scheduled for Saturday and checked on the progress of the renovations in the exhibit space. She needed to fill one of the new glass cases for the event.

  When she returned to her office, April was pressing a crumpled tissue to her eye.

  Louisa’s heart stammered. “What happened?”

  “Zoe’s father called.” April handed Louisa a pink message slip. “He wants you to call him back.”

  Louisa’s vision blurred with moisture as she closed her door. She dialed Mr. Finch with shaky fingers. How could the Finches possibly cope with their daughter being missing?

  “Dr. Hancock. Thank you for returning my call.” Mr. Finch’s voice was strained.

  “Is there anything I can do for you?” Louisa asked.

  “My wife and I would like to talk to you.” Over the phone line, the sound of a woman crying filled the background.

  “Of course.”

  Zoe had mentioned her parents lived close to the city.

  “Is there any way you could come here?” he asked. “We don’t want to be far from our phone.”

  “I understand.” Louisa input their address into her phone and allowed the GPS to calculate directions. “I can be there in about forty-five minutes.”

  “Thank you.”

  Louisa took her purse from her desk. She didn’t have time for another extended lunch hour, but how could she turn Mr. Finch down? His daughter was missing.

  She slipped out without seeing her boss. Ten minutes later, she pulled out of her parking garage and turned her BMW toward the Ben Franklin Bridge, battling lunchtime traffic up Broad Street, and followed I-676 across the bridge.

  Forty minutes later, she turned into a driveway marked by a rusted mailbox.

  The Finches were rural poor. On the edge of a farming community, their one-story house occupied a large tract of weedy land. The roof sagged, wire fencing corralled a dozen goats, and peeling pickets protected a tidy vegetable garden. In a city-block-size cleared area behind the house, the brown remains of plants lined up in neat rows. Six cows grazed in a small, weedy pasture next to a listing barn and a scattering of ragged outbuildings.

  She parked the car in a dirt rectangle next to a rusty pickup truck. Louisa opened her door and stepped out. Her heels sank in the sandy soil. A clucking sound came from the rear of the house. Chickens? Walking on her toes, she picked her way to the cracked concrete walkway that led up to the front stoop.

  The door opened. The Finches stood side by side, presenting a solid front of grief.

  “Please come in.” Mrs. Finch clutched a tissue in her fist. She pressed it to her nose and sniffed.

  Mr. Finch, a short, balding man in his sixties, put an arm around his wife’s shoulders and ushered them into a formal living room. A flowered couch and two blue chairs surrounded a coffee table covered with papers.

  Pictures of the smiling, young Zoe were everywhere. Louisa leaned over the piano and scanned a row of school pictures. She had no trouble picking Zoe out of the crowd. She was years younger and inches shorter than all of her classmates, just as Louisa had been through most of her school years.

  The Finches perched on the worn couch. On his knee, Zoe’s dad held his wife’s hand between his palms. Though sick about the reason, Louisa envied the unity that emanated from the couple.

  “We want to thank you for caring enough to look for Zoe, Dr. Hancock,” Mr. Finch said. “Dr. Cusack mentioned it was you who raised the alarm about Zoe being missing.”

  “Please, call me Louisa.” She took one of the chairs on the opposite side of the coffee table. She leaned forward and folded her hands in her lap. “Have you heard anything from the police?”

  A flash of anger brightened Zoe’s father’s bleak, brown eyes. “We’re frustrated with the police. They say they have a suspect, but they won’t arrest him. If they don’t have enough evidence, how do they know it’s him? I don’t understand why they aren’t leaning on Heath Yeager.” He picked up a paper and handed it to her. “What if this bartender isn’t the right person? It’s as if they’re more concerned with a possible trial than they are with finding her before . . .”

  He inhaled sharply, as if the thought of his daughter’s unknown fate stole his breath.

  Louisa scanned a printout of Zoe’s texts. All were from the night of her disappearance, and all flowed one way: from Heath’s number to Zoe’s.

  U FUCKING BITCH

  WHR R U?

  DON’T U DARE SAY ANYTHING

  U CAN’T HIDE FROM ME

  I’LL FIND YOU

  Louisa set the paper down. Heath’s texts painted a more damaging picture than he’d led her to believe. Why were the police so convinced of Conor’s guilt when they had threatening texts from Heath to Zoe?

  “How can they ignore all this”—Mr. Finch waved his hand at the list of texts—“because his friends say he was with them? Of course they would lie for their buddy.”

  Louisa read the texts again. Heath’s messages went beyond what she’d imagined. Had Zoe been afraid of Heath? Is that why she didn’t text him back? “Maybe she was afraid to go back to her apartment alone.” Louisa reached up to her necklace and rolled a pearl between her fingertips. “Did she talk to you about Heath?”

  Mrs. Finch sniffed. “She mentioned him, but she never brought him home. We never met him.”

  “Did she bring other kids home to meet you?” Louisa asked.

  “No.” Mrs. Finch stared at her clasped hands. “She didn’t come home unless school was out. She helped out with chores when she lived here,
but farming wasn’t for her. We were so hoping that she’d finally found a place where she fit in. Somewhere she would be happy.”

  “Zoe was desperate to have a social life. She never had many friends.” Mr. Finch rubbed his wife’s hand, as if her fingers were cold and he was trying to warm them.

  “It must have been hard on her, being so smart, so different from the other kids.” Louisa knew exactly how that felt.

  Mr. Finch nodded. “We had her late in life. We never thought we’d have a child, let alone be gifted with one as special as Zoe. By the time she was three, she’d taught herself to read. We knew she was different from other kids. The school here couldn’t accommodate her, so we took out a second mortgage to send her to private school. But even there, she was in classes with kids so much older than her. Socially, she was always an outsider.”

  Mrs. Finch dabbed her eye with the crumpled tissue. “She was excited when he asked her out. She hadn’t been out on many dates. I was worried, but I thought the university was so nice. All the kids seemed to have good manners. I worried about strangers hurting her. I never thought I’d have to worry about her friends.”

  “Now we know better.” Mr. Finch’s lips compressed with despair. “We’ve researched all the statistics. Most girls are harmed by people they know, not strangers. Did her boyfriend hang around the museum?”

  “No, I’d never seen him before,” Louisa answered. “Have you met any of Zoe’s other friends?”

  Mr. Finch’s head bobbed in a tight, strained nod. “Her roommate, Isa. We’ve seen her a couple of times when we stopped by to visit Zoe. Frankly, we were going to ask you the same thing.”

  Louisa sighed. “I’m afraid not. Has she mentioned anyone else to you lately? Any difficulties with her courses? Any problems with other students?”

  “No,” Mr. Finch said quietly. “She seemed excited about her classes. She loves the museum and was very pleased to be working with you.”

  Louisa swallowed a lump of sadness. “She’s a terrific student.” She didn’t want to believe that Zoe would never bounce into her office again.

  “I thought she’d finally found somewhere she belonged, a place where she could find other people like her. She was supposed to make friends and have a normal life.” A sob slipped past Mrs. Finch’s tight lips. “She wasn’t supposed to—”

  Her control broke. Her shoulders shook, and tears streamed down her face. Her husband turned her into his chest and rubbed her back. The look he cast over his wife’s shoulder was full of anger and sorrow. “Please let us know if you can think of anyone else that Zoe spent time with. The police act like there’s no point in even trying. They won’t say it, but I can tell they’re convinced she’s dead, but I can’t believe it. I keep thinking that I’d feel different if she was gone. That I’d know. That something inside of me would have died right along with her.”

  “I’ll call you if I learn anything.” Louisa stood. She let herself out, leaving Zoe’s parents alone with their grief and fear. On the drive back to Philadelphia, she turned up the volume on the stereo and tried to drown out all her thoughts, but one question refused to be silenced. Was Zoe still alive?

  Back at work, her butt didn’t spend two minutes in her desk chair before her phone rang with a summons to Cusack’s office. She reported with none of her usual nervousness. The discussion with Zoe’s parents had changed her perspective.

  “Where have you been?” Cusack rose as she entered his office, his ingrained manners unaffected by his obvious irritation.

  “Zoe’s parents called me.” She eased into the chair facing his desk.

  Cusack smoothed his tie as he sank into his seat. “And?”

  “And they asked me to come to their house.”

  His entire face sagged with a frown. “So you just left?”

  “Yes. I took a long lunch hour. I’ll be sure to stay later this evening. I won’t fall behind.”

  “You could have asked me.”

  “What would your answer have been?”

  “I would have said no.”

  “So you would have preferred I refuse Zoe’s parents?”

  Cusack leaned back in his chair and crossed his arms over his chest. “This is a matter for the police. I would prefer you to leave the investigation to them.”

  “The Finches called me,” Louisa clarified. “I didn’t initiate the contact, but I also didn’t have the heart to say no. They’re heartbroken. I work hard for this museum. I put in many extra hours. I fulfill my responsibilities and more.” Her teeth clamped together with frustration.

  They both knew he’d taken advantage of the situation at the Maine museum. She was doing a full curator’s job at half the salary.

  “Louisa, you are missing the point.” Exasperation sharpened his clipped accent. “You cannot drive off without letting anyone know where you are.”

  “No matter how much I love working here, I can’t put my career ahead of Zoe’s life.” Louisa lifted her chin and prepared to be fired.

  “I wouldn’t ask you to put your job ahead of Zoe.” Cusack crossed his arms over his chest. “But two museum employees have disappeared. I do not want you to be number three.”

  Oh. Could Cusack have been worried about her?

  “The museum can’t take any more scandal.” Of course. He was only protecting the museum. “You need to stay out of the investigation.”

  “I can’t.” Louisa met his gaze.

  “Why not?”

  “Because I’m not giving up on Zoe. She’s been missing for thirty-eight hours.”

  Conor begged off the dinner rush to pick Louisa up after work. He texted her and waited a half block from the museum. She climbed into the car.

  “How was your day?”

  She rested her head against the passenger window. “I went to see Zoe’s parents on my lunch hour. Her father showed me the texts Heath sent to Zoe Monday night.” She summed up her meeting with the Finches. “Why aren’t the police investigating Heath?”

  “We don’t know that they aren’t.” Conor scraped a hand down his chin. “But I think we need some background information on Heath.”

  He glanced sideways. Her face was drawn and tired. The encounter with the Finches had clearly taken a lot out of her. If she’d spent her lunch hour driving, then she hadn’t eaten. “I have a late night. How about stopping for a sandwich and coffee?”

  “OK,” she answered, distracted.

  He found a lucky spot at the curb, parked, and swiped his credit card at the parking meter kiosk. They walked a block down Eighteenth Street and ducked into a café.

  Conor chose a dark, high-backed booth in the back for privacy. The bistro café catered mainly to the lunch crowd. Half the tables were empty. The waitress arrived, and Conor ordered coffee and a club sandwich.

  Louisa asked for green tea.

  When the waitress left, she told him about her heartbreaking visit to the Finches’ house. He reached across the table and took her hand. “You were like Zoe, weren’t you? Ahead of your class, separate from the other kids?”

  “Yes.” Louisa studied their intertwined fingers. “I earned my PhD at nineteen.”

  His thumb rubbed a slow circle on the back of her hand. “Is that why you need to find her so badly? Because she’s like you?”

  Was Louisa like Zoe’s parents, simply refusing to accept the girl’s death because the truth would be too painful?

  “Maybe.” Tears glistened in her eyes. “I know what it’s like to be alone in a room full of people, to be an academic success and not have friends, to be desperate to fit in. My father traveled. My mother was dead. My aunt wasn’t interested.”

  “And you were alone.” His fingers tightened around hers. “I’m sorry.”

  “It was a long time ago.”

  But she hadn’t gotten over it, and Conor thanked God for his thr
ee siblings. As crazy as his life could be, the Sullivans always had each other.

  “That time-heals-all-wounds saying is total bullshit. Cuts that deep never go away, no matter how many years pass. I still miss my parents.” Conor’s sandwich arrived. He pushed the plate to the middle of the table, but she didn’t seem interested. Had she eaten anything since the muffin he’d brought her that morning?

  The setting sun elongated shadows on the sidewalk outside. For the first time, she’d opened up to him. She’d given him a glimpse of the wounded soul beneath her mask.

  Now, staring out the window, her profile had frozen again, all evidence of her grief smoothed away. She was a swan gliding at the edge of the Schuylkill River, for all appearances elegant, quiet, and still. All the motion occurred beneath the surface, hidden from view. He wondered for the hundredth time how many layers he’d have to uncover to find the real her.

  She fascinated and challenged him.

  With a sinking sensation, he realized getting closer to her would require more touchy-feely type discussions. And dear God, he was going to have to be the one to initiate them, which was the complete opposite of the natural order of the universe.

  Louisa’s phone buzzed. “Excuse me.”

  She got up from the table, went outside, and answered the call on the sidewalk.

  She returned a few moments later and slid her phone into her purse. “Xavier English is the professor of Celtic studies. He comes to the museum frequently. He’s also Zoe’s mentor. Professor English will talk to us if we meet him off campus. He doesn’t want us to let anyone know he’s speaking with you.”

  “I can understand that. Where does he want to meet?”

  “He’s coming here. It’s dark enough, and he can always claim I didn’t tell him you were here,” Louisa said.

  “How did you convince him to come?”

  “I told him I thought you were innocent.”

  “And that was enough?”

  She raised a shoulder. “He said he wants to decide for himself.”