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“Did you see your car?” Marcus said eagerly, changing the subject.
The new Alfa had been sitting in the courtyard, a gleaming red. I’d barely glanced at it. “It looks very nice,” I said lamely.
“No one cares about the goddamned car,” Mary Alice snapped. “We’ve got more important things to worry about.”
“I’ll go upstairs and see if I have any information on getting in touch with Kitty,” I said, unable to bear their company a moment longer. “Would you tell Ian I need to talk to him?”
“What about?” Marcus demanded suspiciously.
“About my leaving,” I said truthfully.
“You can’t go until after the service,” Valerie spoke up.
“Watch me.”
At least no one tried to follow and reason with me.
Mary Alice’s voice trailed after me. “Typical. She was only here for the money and now that she’s lost that, she has no time for anyone.”
“Except Ian,” Marcus voice followed, and there was an odd note in it.
Fuck. Them. All. Particularly Ian.
It wasn’t until I reached my room that I remembered Bella’s conversation. She knew about the fake engagement, she knew the will was being read. How? Was someone in on our ridiculous charade? Who could have possibly told her—these things weren’t public knowledge.
Someone in this house, or anywhere on Mariposa, was a spy, and my bet was on the mysterious man who seemed to follow me wherever I went. But why would Bella do it? She’d always treated the workers as beneath her notice, including Maldonado. The idea of her setting up an informant was both unlikely and extremely creepy.
The truth of the matter was that my disenchantment with Bella ran deep, and I didn’t trust a word she said. Whatever had been in that letter might have explained a great deal, and she’d done nothing but shove it in her handbag.
I was steeling myself to face Ian—at some point, I expected I was going to have to confront Bella herself. That, or maybe I could just fade away. Bella had always had a habit of showing up when she wanted something, and once I got rid of the bequest, I wouldn’t have anything she needed. She’d take care of the ghosting.
I picked up the state-of-the-art iPhone Bella had given me, with its ridiculous numbers of cameras and its facial recognition, and resisted the impulse to hurl it against the wall. There was still no signal down here, but there must be internet access somewhere. There’d be no way for Ian to do business without it, and Mary Alice had said they’d been searching for any trace of me—where else but on the internet?
On top of that, there had to be goddamned telephones in the office and the kitchen, and I’d never even thought of that. Escape had always been closer at hand than I’d imagined, and I’d been a total idiot.
No, I hadn’t. For all my complaints, I hadn’t really wanted to leave. I hadn’t wanted to leave Granda, I hadn’t wanted to leave Mariposa, the only constant home in my life. And damn it, I hadn’t wanted to leave Ian.
I was more than ready to go now. The mess was so bad that the only way I could make sense of it was with an ocean’s distance between us. I had no intention of taking Bella’s money and heading to Paris—I wanted someplace to curl up and lick my wounds. I had no idea where that was, but New England was a start.
There was no sign of anyone when I went down to the kitchen—even Maldonado had disappeared. The telephone hung on the wall, but there was nothing useful like a telephone book. I tried my luck with information and my decent Spanish, but got nowhere in my search for a car, and I ended up slamming down the phone in frustration.
I wasn’t happy with the idea of broaching Ian’s office, but if I was looking for internet, that was where I’d find it. I knew he’d taken over Granda’s old library, but I’d kept strictly away, not wanting to run into him and the way he looked at me. Not anymore.
The graceful room was a travesty of what it had once been. The rows of leather-bound books were gone, replaced by file boxes and electronic equipment. His desk was littered with papers—odd, I would have thought he would be almost compulsively neat. Most control freaks were, and there was no question that Ian had been trying to control my presence here since I first arrived. The desktop computer was turned on, but of course it had password protection up the wazoo, and God knew I couldn’t begin to guess what he would use. The phone by his desk had three lines, none of which were lit up, and I opened the top drawer of the desk, hoping to find an internet password conveniently stuck there.
Instead, I found a gun. I stared at it in numb disbelief, then slammed the drawer shut again. I shouldn’t be surprised—rabbits were both a constant problem and a national delicacy, and hunting them was an expected part of farm life. But who would hunt them with a handgun? I didn’t want to think about it.
I looked around me nervously. At any moment, I expected Ian to appear, cold and contemptuous as he had been the last time I’d seen him. He had no reason to direct all that anger at me—as far as he knew, I had nothing to do with the contents of the will. In truth, I hadn’t. For some reason, Granda had dispossessed all his relatives for a virtual stranger, and I had no idea why. All I could figure was that rather than a gift to me, it was more about the slap to everyone else. I couldn’t even take hope from a long-lost gesture in my favor.
I was half-tempted to take the gun with me. The man who lurked in the shadows unnerved me, the memory of the man on the dance floor still upset me. I didn’t feel safe, but I knew I was being ridiculous. The man at the taberna had been a crude drunk, the man who followed me was simply one of the many workers. And I had no idea how to shoot a gun, if by any chance I felt I needed to. No, Ian the Wretch could keep it safe to take potshots at rabbits nibbling on the grapevines.
The first person I ran into when I left the office was the last person I wanted to see. Marcus was there, and I wondered if he’d been lying in wait for me.
“Bella, darling!” he crooned from behind me as I closed the office door. “I’ve been looking for you everywhere!”
“Why?” I said briefly, in no particular mood to deal with him.
“We need to talk. You know we do.”
