Page 24 of One Last Secret

“I believe so, yes. I was at Victor’s private beach with Celeste yesterday morning when the housekeeper alerted us to his disappearance. His studio had been torn apart and one of the window shattered. There was a bottle of whiskey in the room, so the initial assumption was that he had a meltdown, but we found no sign of him, and the neighbors didn’t see anything.”

“What about the housekeeper?”

“She’s the most likely suspect,” I admit, “but she’s not acting like a suspect.”

“Neither did Sophie Lacroix,” he reminds me.

"Actually, she did. I just didn't see it at first. Perhaps it's the same with Evelyn, but if she's acting like a suspect, it'sdifferently from how Sophie did. You should look into her, just in case. Her name is Evelyn Torres."

“That’s a very common name.”

“She’s Hispanic, in her mid-thirties, with a dark complexion. She has a husband and young children and doesn’t live in the house.”

“You mean she lives in her own house?”

“Yes.”

“All right. That’s enough for now. Besides the housekeeper, who have you got in mind?”

“Victor’s dealer, Lisa Reinhardt.”

“Dealer? Like drug dealer?”

“Art dealer.”

“Artists don’t ‘have’ dealers. They have agents. Is she his agent?”

“He introduced her as a dealer.”

“Then she’s someone he’s trying to sell to. That’s important to know because an agent relies on their clients to survive. Dealers can pick and choose who they work with.”

Thatdoeschallenge my earlier conclusion that Lisa couldn’t have allowed Victor to disappear. “She had dinner with Victor and Marcus Fairfax two nights ago. He’s the owner of the Carmel Art Gallery.”

“Got it. I’ll look into all of them.”

“Do that. Also, look into Elias Blackwood.”

“That’s one lead I can close right away. He’s dead. He committed suicide twenty-eight years ago.”

“Yes, by walking into the ocean. Victor went into seclusion immediately after that and emerged a year later as a changed man. And not for the better.”

Sean chuckles. “Did you ask me to look into Elias so you could brag that you already had?”

“Much as I love bruising your ego, no. The timeline is suspicious. Annie arrived here thirty years ago. Victor painted her portrait. Elias was a fixture in Victor’s life, which means he would have known Annie too. Annie disappears again, then Elias commits suicide. After that, Victor becomes a manic-depressive person who paints in the abstract because ‘reality is a façade.’”

“And then he marries a woman and has a daughter with her. He can’t have gone too far off the deep end.”

“I wish I could agree with you that women only marry sensible men.”

“Fair enough. So this is related to Annie then, not the current mystery.”

“Actually, it’s related to both.”

“Both?”

I take a deep breath. “The newspaper article I read in the art closet labels the mouth of the inlet that feeds Victor’s cove as the Vanishing Point.”

“Does that mean something?”

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