Page 14 of Stolen Beauty

I massage my temple, kneading the dull, throbbing pain. “I didn’t go to the police. I called the US Embassy. I have no experience with this. I mean, her employer said she resigned, and I didn’t believe them, but I assumed she’d call. I didn’t want to be overly dramatic.” Oh, my god, I’m an idiot.

“Do you know who you spoke with at the embassy?”

“I wrote her name down on a piece of paper. I was going to give her one more day to call me back. She was going to look into it. It just seemed so unlikely that something would really happen to Sloane, like I just kept thinking she would turn up. But…something has to have happened, right?” I search Knox’s face. “I screwed up. I should’ve gone to the police on the first day after she missed my call. But Jimmy told me not to worry. That she’d show up. She can get very absorbed and…”

Knox pulls at a stool and gestures for me to sit, but I can’t sit.

“Listen,” he says, “you did what most people would do. Give it some time. And she’s in another country, which is an added complication. But think. Did she send you anything? Videos? Documents?”

“Letters.”

“Emails. That’s what you mean, right? Do you have multiple email accounts?” The tech guy’s voice startles me.

“No. Letters. It’s what we do in our family. Sam started it. We write letters to each other.”

“With stamps?” Max asks, both eyebrows raised.

“Yes. Why?” Who cares about our family’s letters?

“Where’d you store them?” Erik asks.

“In a wooden chest.” I close my eyes, realizing the fire would’ve destroyed it. “My dad made me the chest. I kept all the letters in that.” The tips of my fingers cover my mouth. That chest holds all of my letters from Sam, all of them except the instructions he placed inside the duffel.

“You think they burned a house down for letters?” Max asks.

I didn’t say that. But Max isn’t asking me. I can’t believe my home caught fire.

Knox runs his hand back and forth over his head. “Not sure. If they knew they existed…maybe. Chances are they knew you weren’t home, so they didn’t do it to kill you. Could’ve just been sending a message.” Knox’s eyes flash to mine. “Or someone’s flushing you out.”

“What? Like hoping I’d run home to see the fire?”

“Maybe. If you were nearby, it’d be hard to stay away from the ruins, right?”

Ruins. He’s talking about my home. “Is it that bad? Did the fire destroy everything? Is there a news article I can read?”

“Or they’re looking to see who she reaches out to confirm she’s alive,” Erik says. “That’s absolutely what they’re doing.”

“You can’t reach out to anyone. Not yet,” Knox says.

“As of right now, the fire department hasn’t uploaded any reports into the database on the fire. It’s hard to know what caused the fire without those reports,” the speakerphone announces.

“Look.” I wrap my fingers around Knox’s wrist, above his thick watchband. “I’ll tell Jimmy he can’t tell anyone I’m okay, but I have to let him know. You remember him, right? My grade. Jimmy Ringelspaugh.”

“I don’t remember?—”

“I have to call him. He’s going to be worried sick.”

“He lives with you?”

“He lives in a house in a different neighborhood. But we moved to Asheville at the same time. I can’t let him think…you know, they never found Sam’s body. I can’t…I can’t let someone else go through?—”

Knox pulls me in for a hug and my face presses against a hard, muscular chest. To breathe, I turn my head to the side. Pressure on the top of my head has me wondering if Knox just kissed my hair.

“All right. You can call him. But from one of my phones.”

Knox and Erik go back and forth about what phone I should use and how the call should be handled. The scenario is straight out of a movie, but it’s also what I’d always imagined Sam’s work life had been like. The reason he became so paranoid.

Why would someone set fire to my house? Sloane is a scientist. Could they think she sent me something proprietary? If so, they couldn’t be more off. Sloane never talks to me about her work. She assumes it’s over my head. And it is. She’s a cellular biologist.

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