Tangled Lies (10 page)

Mary Lee reappeared, slightly flushed.

“I’m sorry. But you need to leave.” Before Sasha could say a word, she found herself standing on the porch, the door closed at her back.

She looked down at the photo still in her hand. Who were the other people in the photo? Did any of them know something that could help her?

Sasha climbed back into her Jeep and headed to the old brick building a block off Main Street that had housed the
Safe Harbor Gazette
for decades. A hand-lettered sign on the door read “Closed due to death in the family.” She wondered if Mr. Ames still ran the
Gazette
or if he was the one who had died. To Sasha he’d always been old, and she couldn’t remember ever seeing him without his bow tie or an unlit cigar clamped between his teeth. Even in church.

She tapped a finger on the steering wheel. If she couldn’t get into the newspaper archives . . . She spun around, drove a few blocks, and pulled up in front of the aging Victorian that housed the local library, grateful for a parking spot in the shade. She headed up the wooden stairs into the two-story building. Just down the block from the police station, the library looked like a poor relation compared with the former boardinghouse. The pine floors were worn from thousands of feet, the railings dull from too many hands. But it held its own magic: the wonderful smell of musty books that took Sasha back to her teen years.

“Hello, dear. How may I help you?”

Sasha looked down at the tiny woman’s name tag, pinned to a gray cardigan that hung loosely on her thin frame.

“Hello, Mrs. Robertson. It’s Sasha Petrov. Do you remember me?”

Behind thick lenses, blue eyes brightened, and Mrs. Robertson hurried out from behind the counter to give Sasha a hug.

“Oh, Miss Petrov. How lovely to see you again, child.”

The tiny woman didn’t even reach Sasha’s chin, so Sasha bent down to give her a careful hug, afraid of breaking her. Mrs. Robertson gave her a surprisingly hard squeeze before she let her go, keeping Sasha’s hands in both of hers.

“How is your dear mother? Is that what brought you back?”

“She’s holding her own. Yes, Eve and I came back for her sixtieth birthday.”

“Rosa is a fighter. If anyone can beat this thing, she can.” She patted Sasha’s hand, then said, “So, young lady, what brings you here? You never did come just to browse. You always had a mission.”

Sasha grinned. “Today is no exception.” She looked around, but the few patrons weren’t paying them any mind. “I’m looking for anything you have from the time my brother, Tony, disappeared. Newspaper articles, television clips. Anything.”

Mrs. Robertson’s blue eyes darkened in concern. “That was such a tragedy. Your mama was never the same after that. But why now, after all these years?” Then she gasped. “Is the cancer worse?” she whispered.

Mrs. Robertson was a dear, but she was also a devoted member of the Safe Harbor grapevine, able to spread gossip in a single bound.

“Mama wants closure. She wants to know what really happened. I told her I would do some research. The
Gazette
office is closed.”

Mrs. Robertson shook her head sadly. “Yes, poor Mr. Ames passed just a week ago, right there at his desk, that old stogie still between his teeth from what I heard. But at least he died doing what he loved.”

She led the way into a back room and pointed to a bulky machine and a crowded wall of labeled containers.

“This is where we keep the microfiche. I’m afraid we don’t have the resources to digitize all of this. You’ll want 1991.” She walked to a shelf and pulled out a container, then deftly set up the machine. “There you are. Let me know if you need anything else, all right?”

Sasha nodded, sat down in front of the machine, and froze. Her fingers hovered over the controls and she tried to figure out why she was hesitating. Normally she dove in with both feet and checked the water temperature after it closed over her head. But this time it all mattered so much.
Please, God, I need answers.

“Just get on with it already,” she muttered as she started scrolling. Suddenly there it was in black and white. Tony’s picture, and according to the caption, it was taken just three weeks before he disappeared. It was the same photo Mama kept on her dresser. Tony sat on the grass behind the house, all sturdy limbs and covered in dirt, grinning at the camera with Pop’s brown eyes and Mama’s dimples. He looked so much like them, there could be no doubt who his parents were. What would he look like now?

She scanned the article, looking for anything she hadn’t already learned through the police report, but there was nothing new. It listed Tony’s clothing the day of the disappearance: a pair of blue shorts, a blue-and-yellow tank top, and tennis shoes.

She kept reading, following the progress of the search, scanning pictures of dozens of townspeople who had come to help. She stopped, enlarged a picture, and studied each face, trying to match a name from memory, but she couldn’t. She recognized some people, of course, but she had come to live with Pop and Mama years after Tony vanished.

She sat back and rubbed her eyes, frustrated. There had to be more. It was technically possible for him to have been washed out to sea, but it seemed unlikely. Even if Mama Rosa had been on the phone for twenty, even thirty, minutes, if he’d fallen in the water, they would have found him. From what the reports said, people waded into the marina in a line, holding hands and dragging their feet, just in case. They came up empty.

So where did he go?

Sasha wrapped her arms around herself. If Tony didn’t drown that day, someone took him. But who? And why? Even more important, what did they do with him?

Either he is alive and well and living . . . somewhere. Or
—Sasha swallowed hard—
there is an unmarked grave hiding his body.

Both options made her heart hurt.

She steeled herself and looked through the rest of the articles, but as time wore on with no developments in the case, the stories simply rehashed what they’d already said. She put the microfiche away and went to find Mrs. Robertson.

“You don’t, by chance, have any copies of the newscasts from that time on tape, do you?”

“Actually, I do. When it first happened, I recorded them thinking I’d give them to your folks later, after Tony was returned home safe and sound. But then . . . well, I didn’t have the heart. So I brought them here and put them in the archives. His story is part of our town’s story, you know.”

Within minutes, Sasha sat in front of a television while Mrs. Robertson inserted a videotape into the player. She tried to shut out the emotion of the situation, to distance herself from what was happening and see it as an outsider, but it proved impossible. When Mama Rosa stood and pleaded on television for whoever had taken their son to bring him back, Sasha squeezed her eyes shut to block out the pain.

“The town of Safe Harbor has offered a reward for information leading to the safe return of Tony Martinelli.”

Sasha stopped the tape. Hit “Rewind.” This was the first she’d heard of a reward.

She hurried back out to Mrs. Robertson’s desk and waited while she checked out another patron. “Mrs. Robertson, I just learned about the reward. Do you know anything about it?”

“Of course,” she said, and came around the counter again. She leaned close. “I thought it was such a nice thing, the local captains all doing that. They set it up and let anyone in town contribute who wanted to. They ended up with over two thousand dollars in the fund.”

“Who kept track of it?”

“Well, it was set up at the bank, and Mr. Hamilton, the bank president, said he would personally oversee it.”

“Did anyone ever come forward with any clues or information? Who were they supposed to call?”

“Why, the police chief, of course. He said his phones rang off the hook for weeks with crazies trying to get hold of that money. None of it ever panned out.”

“What happened to the money?”

Mrs. Robertson cocked her head. “Why, I don’t know. I suppose it’s still sitting in that account.”

“Thank you, Mrs. Robertson. You’ve been so helpful.” She put everything away and walked down the block to the police station. Luckily, the chief was in.

He didn’t look especially happy to see her. “Sasha. What brings you into town today?”

“Hello, Chief. I was just in the library, doing a bit of research, and I found something I didn’t know before.”

“Libraries are good for that sort of thing, I hear.” He laughed at his own joke, but Sasha didn’t join him.

“At the time Tony went missing, the local captains posted a reward. I heard all kinds of tips came in, but nothing ever came of them.” She paused until he finally met her gaze. “I never saw a single mention of any tips in the police report.”

“None of them ever panned out. The poor kid died and we were never able to find his body. That’s what happened.”

Sasha wanted to say,
Maybe,
but instead she asked, “What kind of tips?”

“Well, now, that was a long time ago.”

“Come on, Chief. This was a big deal in this town. You haven’t forgotten.”

“The usual nonsense. Someone saw him with Elvis. We even had somebody say they saw Marilyn Monroe carrying him down the street. Someone else saw him being swept up into a spaceship on the high school football field.”

“Nothing useful at all.”

“Why are you still asking about this, Sasha?”

“Mama asked me to.”

“We did have a few calls that seemed promising. Somebody saw a car leaving the marina when everyone else was heading toward it. That kind of thing.”

“Nothing?”

“No. The guy was late picking his kid up from ball practice. The two came back together a little while later.”

“Did you keep a record of all the calls?”

“Of course. Police procedure.”

She locked eyes with him. “May I see them?”

“They should have been with the file Officer Stanton showed you.”

She shook her head. “They weren’t.”

He spread his hands. “Then they must have been misplaced over the years.”

“Chief, phone for you,” the dispatcher said.

“I need to go. I’m sorry, Sasha.”

Sasha thanked him and walked out, unsure what he was sorry for, exactly.

She also wondered about information that conveniently went missing just as she was looking for clues.

Maybe she was tilting at windmills, looking for conspiracies that weren’t there. But she didn’t believe that.

Somewhere in this town, someone knew what had happened to Tony. It was up to her to find the truth.

Sasha got back into the Jeep and headed for the marina, one eye on the rearview mirror. She didn’t see anyone, but she couldn’t shake the feeling she was being followed.

Jesse knew Sasha was back a half second before he heard her Jeep crunching down the gravel drive. Since high school, he’d had a sixth sense about her. Not that he’d ever tell her that. He stayed bent over the propeller he’d been inspecting and waited until he heard Bella’s bark and Sasha’s footsteps coming down the dock.

He wiped the grease from his hands and stepped out of the shed to meet them. Bella bounded over, tail wagging, and got a scratch for her trouble. He looked up and met Sasha’s troubled expression.

“Everything OK?”

She glanced around. “I think Pop took a spill earlier.”

Jesse stepped closer, studied the concern in her blue eyes. “You think there’s more to it.”

She punched the air in frustration and started pacing. “I don’t know what to think anymore.”

Jesse got that twitchy feeling between his shoulder blades again and looked around, but didn’t see anyone. “About what, exactly?”

“Everything. That’s the problem. Something’s off around here, and I can’t figure out what.”

Jesse chose his words carefully. “Are you sure some of it isn’t the whole cancer thing? That throws everyone’s world out of whack.”

“I think that’s part of it. But . . .” She stopped, and he could see some internal debate. “How much do you know about Tony, their biological child who disappeared years before they became foster parents?”

“Not much, except that he was just a little tyke, and after he disappeared, nobody ever found a trace of him again.”

Sasha nodded, kept her eyes on his. “Mama wants me to look into it. Find out what really happened.”

“Don’t the police think he drowned?” When she flinched, he added, “Sorry.”

“They do. But all the evidence is circumstantial. Or should I say, the lack of any evidence whatsoever made drowning the only explanation that made sense.”

“Mama Rosa doesn’t believe it?”

“She says she would know in her heart if he were dead.”

“Why now, after all these years?” He thought for a moment. “Right. The cancer.” He paused. “Is it worse than anyone is letting on?”

Sasha shrugged. “I’ve been asking the same question. They say no. It has come back, but this new drug has had promising results.”

Jesse nodded. “You need a break. What time do you want to go to dinner tonight?”

“Who said anything about dinner?”

“I did. Yesterday. What time is good for you?”