At the very least.
“I’m just trying to consider all the possibilities, Mr. Stavros.”
“You’ve never heard of the idea that everybody has a twin? A doppelganger?”
“I’ve heard of it but I’m not sure I believe it. The only close resemblances I’ve ever seen were between close relatives.”
Michael and his father, for one.
“And so you automatically assume this girl is Athena? Bah! That’s absurd. I identified the body myself. Athena committed suicide.”
“And you’re sure it was her?”
“Yes,” he snapped, standing up. “Although I can’t believe you have the unmitigated gall to even pose that question. To bring up the memory of my niece’s bloated, water-ridden body is sacrilege.”
“But she was recognizable?” Evan persisted, which was really kind of rude. But he didn’t buy this guy’s grief. No way. The girl’s death conveniently left Fredrico Stavros with the other half of the fortune he had reputedly married to regain.
Stavros shook his head in apparent amazement. “Your father is commonly known to be an arrogant bastard and I see he passed it on to even the lowliest of his sons. I wouldn’t take this kind of treatment from Michael Reynolds or the old man Damien himself and I most certainly won’t take it from one of his countless other punk sons.”
Evan didn’t take the bait. “Actually, there are just five of us. The sixth is a daughter and she’s even more impertinent.”
“Is that all?”
Evan remained seated. “Did your wife have any relations?”
“My people already spoke to your detectives when they were investigating this girl to begin with. We told you then. Whoever she is, she’s not a Stavros. Or a Bennett. And if she plans to make some specious claim that she is—”
“I don’t know where Andrea Prentiss is.” Well, that much was true. “But I certainly doubt a claim is what she has in mind.”
“I don’t care either way!” Stavros growled, pounding on the desk for emphasis. Fredrico Stavros was awfully upset for a man who supposedly thought this whole matter had nothing to do with him. He gestured toward the door. “We’re done here. Now get out.”
“Do you mind if I see the autopsy report?”
Stavros exploded. There was no other word for it. With one sweep of his ham-like fist he knocked everything off the desk onto the floor—papers, knickknacks, framed photos—and came around the front of it in a rage, clenching his fists. His beefy face turned five shades redder than it had been at the beginning of the conversation.
Evan straightened the pleat of his pant leg but didn’t otherwise move a muscle as the big Greek glowered down at him, standing over his chair at a proximity that was undoubtedly intended to intimidate. It didn’t intimidate Evan. But it did bother him. In fact, it left him feeling sick and furious, though he masked his reaction. He knew—he just knew that what he had suspected upon coming here was true. Andrea Prentiss was Athena Stavros, and this man was why she had disappeared, at the beginning from this Greek island paradise and then years later from Evan’s own sanctuary.
Evan stood up and smiled.
He was going to put an end to her running if he had to kill this man to do it.
And that was beginning to look as if it might be the best plan.
“Thank you for your time.”
* * * * *
His next stop was the police department. In the small Greek town adjoining Stavros’ estate, the headquarters was a modest building, whitewashed with deep-blue trimming just as were all the other buildings in town. He fervently hoped that computers had come to this town and that, as in every other town in the world, money talked.
When he went inside the building, he saw there was a front office and thankfully what looked like pretty modern Macs on the few desks therein. Being the typical American he was, Evan expected the police officers to speak English and they did, not even too heavily accented.
“What can I do for you, sir?” asked a man whose uniform identified him as the captain to even somebody with as rudimentary Greek skills as Evan had.
“I’d like to see an autopsy file from about eight years ago. Athena Stavros.”
The captain expressed absolutely no surprise, confirming that Stavros had called ahead. “I’m afraid those records are confidential, sir. What is your interest?”
“They’re here, then? Either physically or on your computer?”
“Again, sir, those records are confidential.”
Evan had never been particularly good at throwing his weight around. He’d never had to be. He was a fair judge of people, though, if he asked the right questions. “Stavros won’t permit me to see them, right?” he floated for a starter.
“Mr. Stavros has nothing to do with it.” The response from the wiry, gray-haired police captain was without expression, but Evan thought he could read some resentment there. The man was probably about Stavros’ age but without the natural cushion from the years that wealth provided. He’d probably been pushed around by the Greek tycoon his whole life.
“Did you work on the case?” Evan asked.
The captain hesitated, glancing at the younger man who was the only other occupant of the office and who was doing a pretty good job of pretending to study his computer screen. Maybe money didn’t talk here as much as Evan would hope, but that could be a good thing. Maybe this man was sick of being bullied by Stavros.
“Yes. I worked on it. Terrible thing, a young girl like that.”
“Could you tell me a little bit more about the circumstances of the case?”
“Come on back to my office.”
The headquarters were deceptively roomy, the back office sporting a high ceiling fan and built-in bookshelves filled with volume after volume of leather records of some kind. “Have a seat,” the captain directed him and then pulled down one of the numbered volumes resting it on the desk and opening it to a certain page before he slid it across the desk Evan’s way.
It was a newspaper clipping, black and white, but yellowed with age. “Tragic Drowning,” the man translated the headline.
Evan glanced at the date, but could not otherwise read the article. Greek to him, as they say.
“It’s an account of the finding of Athena Stavros’ body. Anything you notice there?”
Evan glanced at it again. “Not really.”
“No picture of the girl. Usually a story about someone’s death would be accompanied by a picture of the deceased. But Stavros was bizarrely obsessed with not having his niece photographed. I’m told he made it a rule at the boarding school she attended as well, until he took her out of school completely, that is, and brought her here. And he watched her like a hawk when she was on the island. Might even say kept her a prisoner almost. Barely anyone saw her.”
Evan nodded.
“My brother was one of her guards. One of her later guards.”
Evan didn’t want to even guess at the significance of the “later” reference so he just asked. “What happened to the earlier ones?”
The man spit out a word in Greek. “Scum,” he clarified. “My brother said whoever had guarded the girl before had,” he hesitated, “hurt her.”
The blood came pounding to Evan’s head and he felt a rage that rivaled what Stavros had just demonstrated in his office. He wished he could slam something or pound it. But now was not the time to express outrage. Now was the time to gather facts.
And make decisions.
“Was your brother there the day she, er, died?”
“Yes. He said she just swam away and they couldn’t catch her.”
Evan said nothing.
“But she was a strong swimmer. By the time my brother and the other guard reported it—”
Something about the way he said that seemed to suggest a delay.
“She was nowhere to be found. And these currents…”
“Where was this?”
The captain jotted down a few lines of precise directions. “Here.
You can go see the spot if you want.”
“They found a body?”
“Not until Stavros flew back to the estate and took over the search himself.” He pulled back the volume with the news clipping and flipped a page, shoving it back Evan’s way.
Evan looked at the open page, swallowing his immediate surge of disgust and despair. It was a photo of a corpse, black and white and unforgiving in all its merciless detail. Small but bloated, with seaweed draped around the limbs like some kind of perverted decoration, it was hard to even tell whether it was even a woman, though the corpse was naked on the sand.
“I’d never seen Athena Stavros. But my brother had.”
A long pause.
“A corpse doesn’t lose six inches of height. Athena was a tall girl and this poor soul…was not.”
“But the coroner ruled it Athena?”
The captain shrugged. “Of course.”
“Any other girls disappear around that time?”
The captain focused soulful brown eyes at the photo. “Of course.”
Evan stood up and shook the captain’s hand. “Thank you for your time.”
He was at the door before the man called to him, though he hadn’t told him his name. “Mr. Reynolds. Fredrico Stavros is a dangerous man.” He said something in Greek.
“What does that mean?”
“Let sleeping dogs lie, Mr. Reynolds.”
“Like hell,” he muttered.
* * * * *
“Why do you have an apartment in Greece, Michael, if you’ve never been here?”
“I didn’t say I’d never been here, Vanny. I said I hadn’t been here in a long time.”
“Since before Miss Prentiss, I bet.”
“Yes, as a matter of fact, I think you’re right about that.”
“And she always traveled with you, which means she didn’t want to come to Greece.”
“Yes, well, I don’t want to either really. So what exactly are we doing here now?”
“I told you. Scouting out a possible wedding venue.”
“Yes, that’s what you told me. But what are we really doing here? Following Evan? Or following Andrea? Because if we think we’re following Andrea, then we’d be on a wild goose chase,” he said gently. “Just like Evan.”
Vanny shrugged. “I don’t know. I don’t think Evan was telling us everything he knows about what happened to her.”
“I still think we should have gone with my original idea of just sending some security to go with Evan for his interview with Stavros.”
“Don’t be silly! You don’t want to give Evan the impression he’s being followed.”
“Which he is, right? Just to be clear.”
The doorbell to the penthouse rang and they traded looks of confusion, Michael’s leavened by slight disapproval.
“You don’t like it when people come to the door, do you, Michael?”
“No, for one thing because they’re not supposed to be allowed to just come up. That’s what doormen were invented for.”
He went to the door and opened it. “Oh.” He leaned forward and kissed the woman at the door on the cheek lightly, ushering her in. “What are you doing here?”
Vanny came forward eagerly. “Amanda!”
Vanny was exceedingly interested in all things Reynolds family focused, his father’s ex-wives among them, so she’d met them all by now and was busy becoming fast friends with each and every one of them. She was determined to make the Reynolds clan into the Brady Bunch if it was the last thing she did. Well, more power to her. Personally, Michael thought his fiancée had her work cut out for her on that front.
“Fancy meeting you here! You look fabulous as ever!”
Evan’s mother smiled at Vanny and even spared a less harsh glance than usual her ex-stepson’s way. “You too, my dear. But when am I going to be able to wear the perfectly spectacular peach outfit I bought for your wedding, by the way? Or are you just torturing this poor man by putting the ceremony off all these months like this?”
Vanny laughed. “As if! I’m having to drag him to the altar and he just weighs a little more than I thought. It’s taking me longer.”
Michael shook his head in disgust, muttering, “I’d marry her at city hall if she’d let me, as she well knows.”
“As everybody well knows, Michael,” Amanda added wryly.
“But what the hell are you doing here, Amanda?” Michael asked. “How did you even know we were here?”
“Your father, of course. We’re both worried about Evan.”
“Join the club,” Vanny said.
“And you came all the way to Greece because you learned he was here? That seems excessive.”
“He’s my son, Michael,” she snapped, ever mindful that her ex-husband had never let her forget he wasn’t. “A mother cares about her son.”
“Of course,” Vanny soothed.
“I just don’t know what you can do here. Hell, I don’t know what we can do. I don’t even know what we’re doing here,” he noted as an aside to Vanny as she showed Amanda to one of the sofas in front of the stunning view of the Aegean.
“I’ve been trying to catch up to Evan for days,” Amanda explained to Vanny. “I went out to Maine and couldn’t seem to connect and then, well, I admit my focus wandered for a day or two—there was this scrumptious grocer gentleman—and when I looked back, I found my son was interviewing some Greek thug in the local jail and was involved in some altercation. And then off to Greece!”
“It all seems to be connected,” Vanny admitted. “Evan came to see Michael about setting up an interview with this Fredrico Stavros character and then—”
“Then Dad got a call from the Maine attorney general, an old friend—”
“Of course,” Vanny said snidely.
“Telling him about this business in the jail. In light of that, I was of the opinion that we should have sent some security for Evan’s interview with Stavros—”
“But it seemed to make sense to maybe just come here ourselves and poke around,” Vanny finished for him.
“My reaction exactly,” Amanda assured Vanny, “when I called Damien and learned the whole story. So here I am.”
Both women looked up at Michael.
As if he was the one who should have a plan.
“Well?” they said in unison.
He shook his head.
* * * * *
Evan steadied the tiller of the boat he’d just bought from an ex-investment banker in the marina—bought,like any other billionaire, instead of made like Evan Reynolds always had in the past. But he was in a hurry. He wanted to see for himself where Athena Stavros—Andrea—had disappeared into the sea. And the five-times premium he’d paid the startled ex-investment banker for the privilege was worth it.
Staring out at the rocky shoreline to Stavros’ compound, he tried to imagine the thoughts of the eighteen-year-old girl who had walked into the sea. Tried to imagine the thoughts of that girl right now.
And while he was at it, maybe figure out where the hell she was.
A crack of thunder was his only answer and he glanced up at the darkening sky. The sun-kissed blue had turned to gray verging on black. As an experienced sailor, he should have taken note of the conditions before heading out, but he could think of nothing but the police captain’s revelations.
The body they had found had not been Athena’s.
He looked toward the shore, almost too distant to see. He was a good swimmer and could swim that distance easily. But then he looked out to the churning ocean in the other direction.
But swim to where? There was no boat here the day Athena Stavros disappeared into the sea.
Or was there?
The rain began as a thin, cold stream that Evan just absorbed, barely registering the damp turning his windbreaker and then his T-shirt and shorts to soaking. Eyes fixed on the shoreline, deviating only to check out the waves behind him every once in a while, he stood stock still in the storm—his sea legs second n
ature to him as the boat rocked this way and that—as if somehow by standing there he was accomplishing something that would bring that long-ago girl, his girl, back to him.
He would kill Fredrico Stavros. He would. There were ways. Hadn’t some part of him always despised the money and the power he’d been born into because he knew instinctively there were ways? Ways to get around every rule made for other people. Even the biggest one.
And if he didn’t get around it—if he ended up in some Greek prison—so be it. It wouldn’t matter. At least Fredrico Stavros would be dead for what he’d done to Andrea.
A jagged shard of lightning brought a figure up from the roiling waves at the back of the boat and with a deft leap, the sea creature landed on the deck, water streaming from her sleek black swimsuit and long wet hair as she came to her feet, breathing heavily.
Evan jumped back a foot from the apparition, startled. He couldn’t help it. His heart jarred out of his chest as well as he recognized who had just climbed onto his deck. But the heart pounding wasn’t out of fear.
More like disbelief in equal measures with elation.
Jesus. It was her. As if she was some kind of siren and his engrossed thoughts had called her to him.
Oh no, with sirens it was the other way around. They called to you.
But shit. She was here.
The rain was so loud now the sound resembled hail on the hard wooden deck as the two soaked figures stared at each other, visible in the faint illumination of the automatic lights that the investment banker’s toy sported and that had gone on in response to the darkening storm.
“Do you get some kind of a charge out of showing up in the middle of storms and freaking the shit out of me?” he finally called to her over the sound of the rain.
She shook her head.
“Ever think of using a boat or do you just swim everywhere?”
“I didn’t want anyone to see me. You’re awfully close to his compound.” She didn’t need to specify who “his” was. “Why can’t you just stay out of all this, Evan?”
“All what? Your life? No fucking way.”
“He’s a dangerous man.”
“And yet you came right back here when you discovered I was talking to him, didn’t you?”
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