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“And that makes it all okay, does it?”
There was a bitterness to Lucy’s tone that Alexia hadn’t expected, a hard edge she didn’t remember hearing before.
“No, of course not. Nothing can make it okay. But it means I should at least try to forgive.”
“I don’t see why.” Lucy hid her face behind the menu, so Alexia couldn’t gauge her emotions. “Do you still love him?”
Alexia paused. “Yes,” she said at last. “I suppose I do. I daresay it sounds ridiculous, but meeting Billy Hamlin’s ex-wife this week really got me thinking.”
“Meeting Billy Hamlin’s . . .” Lucy shook her head despairingly. “Now you really have lost me. What on earth does she have to do with you and Teddy?”
“Sally and Billy had been divorced for well over a decade before Billy was killed. But when I met her, she still had so much compassion for him, so much love. It was really touching. Like they were two parts of the same body.”
“Please.” Lucy gave a dramatic eye roll, drained her glass, and poured herself another.
“I’m serious,” said Alexia. “And it struck me, that’s what it’s like with Teddy and me. After all these years together, he’s as much a part of me as my arm or my leg. I can’t just cut him off. You must feel the same with Arnie, don’t you?”
“I don’t know if I do or not,” Lucy said matter-of-factly. “Arnie’s never killed a man, buried him in our backyard, and lied about it.”
“True. But if he had? Don’t you think you’d forgive him?”
“No.” Lucy was so certain, so brutally final about it.
“Even if he did it to protect Summer?”
“No. Never.”
“Really? But how can you know that, Lucy? You’ve never been in that situation.”
Lucy shrugged. “In my book, some things are beyond forgiveness. It’s as simple as that. Let’s eat.”
They ordered food, and the mood instantly lightened. Alexia filled Lucy in on the progress of her search. Her meetings with Chief Harry Dublowski, with Jennifer Hamlin’s friends and family, with the various business associates who had abandoned Billy and driven him bankrupt back in the nineties. Finally, she told Lucy about the information on Milo Bates that Sir Edward Manning had unearthed for her.
“Billy always claimed his partner had been abducted and killed, but everyone dismissed it as a morbid fantasy. The police, his wife, everyone.”
“But you think differently?” Lucy sipped her ice-cold Chablis and speared a deliciously buttery sliver of lobster ravioli with her fork.
“There was a body, just one body, of a white male, washed up in the Hudson the year that Milo Bates took off.”
Lucy laughed. “But that could be anyone! A homeless man or a kid on the run. Do you have any idea how many people go missing in this city? How many wind up dead?”
“Yes, I do,” Alexia said excitedly. “Close to a thousand. But only half are men, and only a handful show signs of torture, which is what Billy said happened to Milo. This one white guy had been tortured and thrown into the river alive, to drown. That’s exactly what happened to Jennifer Hamlin. Exactly!”
Lucy took this in. “Where’s the body now? Can you test it? For DNA or . . . something. Whatever it is they do on CSI.”
“Unfortunately not. Unclaimed John Does are cremated after two years. But I’m certain it was Milo Bates, that he was killed by the same psychopath who murdered Jennifer Hamlin. Billy’s voices weren’t all in his head. One of them was real.”
“So you keep saying. But how do you know?”
“Because the same person called me, in my early days as home secretary. Right after Billy showed up in London. They called Cheyne Walk spouting biblical mumbo jumbo, making threats. And they used a voice distorter, just like the one Billy described. I hardl
y think that’s a coincidence, do you?”
Lucy frowned. “You never mentioned any weird phone calls to me at the time.”
“Didn’t I?”
“No. And you told me everything else. Your whole past life, Billy, what happened in Maine that summer. How come you never brought this up?”
