Page 44 of One Last Secret

“No,youare. But since you bring it up, Evelyn Torres has been in some pretty interesting places too. You get Celeste out of the way, and she’s alone to ‘take’ Victor. Then you leave her alone with Celeste, and all of a sudden, Celeste is gone.”

My eyes narrow. "You're trying to make a square peg fit in a round hole. Just because I happened to be nearby when the crimes were committed doesn't mean I committed them. The same goes for Evelyn Torres."

“But you do happen to be nearby, don’t you? In fact, looking back at your history, you happen to be nearby when a lot of crimes are committed. You were pretty close by when Sophie Lacroix murdered Frederick Jensen. Come to think of it, so was Irishman Sean O’Connell. How odd.”

“So we’re somehow to blame for Sophie’s actions?”

“She was a housekeeper too.”

“Evelyn is not the criminal responsible for these kidnappings.”

“Now they’re all kidnappings. Boy, we can’t even stick to a story, can we? And how is it that youknowEvelyn is not responsible? Is it perchance because Irishman Sean O’Connell illegally obtained security camera footage from a neighbor and confirmed that she was startled by the sound of his studio window shattering?”

I don’t reply, but the expression on my face must tell Reyes all she needs to know. “Who are you, Mary? What are you doing here?”

“I’m trying to care for a young girl,” I insist. “A young girl who’s suffering and scared.”

“I wish I could believe that,” Reyes replied, “but your work history doesn’t track. You were governess to the Ashford family in New York for about five weeks before you happened to force a confession of murder from Mrs. Cecilia Ashford. The children then moved with their uncle and aunt. You then worked for the Carlton family in England for the same amount of time and broke the lid on a cold case involving a murdered young friend of their adult children. The whole family ended up in trouble for that one except for the two sons, both of whom promptly moved to Japan with their cousin. Then you have a nice incident-free six months with the Tylers before flying to Baltimore and exposing two more cold cases. Immediately following the conclusion of those cases, you leave. What happened to the children you were supposed to care for? Do you even know?”

“The Greenwoods were paying me. When they left, I had no income.”

“Except for the millions of dollars you have in your inheritance.”

I don’t have an answer to that.

“Then we have Frederick Jensen. You left the house once his murderer was caught too. Now the Holloways. I’m sensing a pattern here.”

“What pattern? In the first three cases, the murders occurred before my arrival.”

“I’ll give you that,” Reyes says. “But not in the past two cases. I’ll just focus on this case, though. You arrive, and days later, your employer goes missing. Soon after that, a close business associate of his goes missing and now his daughter’s run away moments before she was going to be removed from the house. Momentsafteryou arrived to prevent that.”

“Once again,” I reply, trying to keep myself calm in the face of these accusations. “You’re trying to fit a square peg into a round hole. This is all coincidental.”

“Hell of a coincidence.”

“But far from proof.”

She doesn’t answer. I hold her gaze. For the moment, I’ve maintained my innocence.

“What happened to your sister, Mary?”

I stiffen. “Excuse me?”

“Your sister, Anne Wilcox. What happened to her?”

I’m no longer able to keep calm. “I fail to see what that has to do with Celeste.”

“I just find you to be a fascinating person,” she says with a touch of contempt. You present yourself as a sensible and proper English gentlewoman, but when I look at your history, there are a lot of holes. Your sister disappears five years before your father dies. You end up inheriting all of the money that would have gone to your sister.”

“Oh, please,” I scoff. “This is ridiculous. I assure you, I would have been quite as happy with a half million dollars as I was with one million.”

“Except that you would have inherited nothing. Your father’s will left everything to Annie up until a week before his own death.”

I stare at her in shock. I wasn’t aware of that. “I didn’t know that. I assumed we would be left with an equal gift.”

"You can see why I might find the timeline suspicious, though. We have you and your sister getting into a fight the night she goes missing, never to be seen again—"

“We didn’t fight! We—”

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