Page 2 of One Last Goodbye

I lean back in my chair and look away, out over the harbor to the ocean beyond. Annie and I used to sit at the top of a small seaside hill and watch the waves crash onto shore. Since my return to Boston five months ago, I haven't visited that hill once, even though I know exactly where it is.

Finally, I say, “I will offer you a bonus of fifty thousand dollars to continue investigating. This is in addition to your current rate.”

“Oh, Mary, for the love…” He presses his fingers to his temples and says, “I can’t take that. Mary, I’m sorry, but the case is unsolvable. Look… the officers are probably right. She was taken, she was hurt, she was killed. I’m sorry to be blunt; it breaks my heart, but there’s nothing for me to find, and I’m not going to take your money to find nothing.”

“You will take my money to findsomething,” I retort. “You will think outside the box and turn up stones you didn’t before. You will consider it your mission in life to discover what happened to my sister, and you will charge whatever is necessary to take this case and only this case. Do you understand?”

“I understand, but I still can’t take your money.”

“Sean, please!” I cry out. “I’m begging you.”

He leans back and slumps in his chair. He stares at me with exasperation for a moment, then rubs his temples. “Fine.” Again, this isfine.“But keep your bonus. I’m not taking fifty thousand dollars from you for a bum job.”

“Your pessimism is quite encouraging,” I remark drily.

“Glad to hear it,” he replies just as drily. “Will you have the same number in Switzerland, or should I call your employers?”

“I’ll call you,” I reply. Then I stand and reach for my purse.

“Oh please,” he says, “the tea is on me. Then I can say I’ve done something for you.”

I nod. “Thank you.”

I grab my coat and start to leave, but he calls after me, “If you’re wealthy enough to pay me this money, then why do you work as a governess?”

I turn and smile at him. “I like helping people.” Then I leave the café.

CHAPTER ONE

The plane touches down heavily, prompting a cry from several of the passengers. I anticipate the heavy landing, so I am better prepared for it than others, but I still flinch when the wheels contact the ground with a jolt.

I take a breath and look out the window as the plane slowly comes to a stop. There’s a light carpet of snow on the ground. Perhaps this is why the pilot must land more aggressively.

As the plane taxis to the gate, I pull my thoughts away from Annie and onto the job ahead of me. I will be working for the Jensens, a wealthy American family that resides on an estate on Lake Geneva. Their estate is roughly ten miles from the city proper in a neighborhood filled with similar estates.

They live in Switzerland for business purposes. The father, Frederick, is a wealthy hedge-fund manager whose father, Heinrich Jensen, founds the company in Geneva thirty-five years ago and moves his then seventeen-year-old son to the country with him. Frederick never leaves, maintaining dual citizenship for himself and his children.

His wife, Catherine, is a former fashion model. They met at a gala in Geneva. I'm told their wedding was quite a stir among social circles at the time. They've been married for twenty years and have two children: Olivia, sixteen, and Ethan, twelve. These children will be my charges.

We reach the gate, and I am met by a stiffly polite gentleman named Franz who takes my bag and leads me to the baggage claim area where a hulking young man named Pierre retrieves my luggage. The two of them take me to a waiting Rolls Royce. Not a word is spoken between us other than the greeting. I put that to the fact that both gentlemen are Swiss. In my experience,the Swiss are a very polite people who prefer to maintain their distance from strangers until they get to know them better.

So, the journey begins in silence. That silence combined with the carpet of white and the already dimming sky puts a chill through my heart and pushes my thoughts back toward Annie.

The weather was similar when she disappeared. The winter in Boston is somewhat harsher than the winter in Vienna, but the winter she vanished was fairly mild. I see her last the night she disappears when she chooses to walk home from our parent's house rather than take public transit as I repeatedly urge her. She doesn't return home that night, and when I wake the next morning and see that she is still gone, I call the police.

The next twelve weeks progress from denial to panic to desperation and finally to despair. By the time the police department drop the case, all hope for her survival is lost. As Sean alludes to during our conversation, the belief is that she was kidnapped on her walk home and eventually murdered. I don’t want to think about what might have happened between her kidnapping and murder.

But…

But so many things. If she was killed, why was her body never found? Why were her footprints not found in the woodland path she took from our parents’ home? I know she took that path because she always did. Unfailingly, she preferred it to the main road.

I suspect sometimes that she wasn't kidnapped but instead ran away. She wasn't happy with her life in Boston and talked frequently of leaving. But if she left of her own accord, then why didn't she contact me? She and I were thick as thieves. I can see her running off without telling our mother, but without telling me. I can't believe that. She would have at least left a note.

Sean is right that there's nothing to be found, but the fact that there is nothing is what makes me suspicious. It's as though shevanished into the night, pulled into the sky by aliens, or whisked away by fairies to parts unknown. She was there one moment, then she was gone. No evidence of foul play, no evidence of running away, no evidence of kidnapping or of an accident that might have befallen her.

Thatis what I refuse to accept.Somethinghappened, and ifsomethinghappened, thensomethingwas left behind that can tell me what it was. That’s what Sean will discover for me.

The sedan turns a corner, and I put thoughts of Annie aside again as I regard the Jensen estate. Each family I work for since leaving my job as a schoolteacher two years ago is vastly wealthy, and each home reflects not only that wealth but the character of the family. The Ashford Estate is barren and bleak, and the family is just as barren and bleak. The Carlton estate is utterly resplendent, but it hides death in its perfectly manicured gardens and the perfect smiles on the faces of its inhabitants. The Tylers—the only family thus far that hides no terrible secrets—live in a perfectly ordinary if opulent mansion in Cheshire. The Greenwoods live in a Georgia plantation that is a relic of the past and houses a family that clings desperately to its own past even as it tries to hide it.

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