A Bookmarked Death Page 15

  I had Frank’s number on speed dial. Even if he would not share information with me, I would make him listen to what I had to say.

  “Marselli.”

  “It’s me.” Miss Marple, your favorite amateur sleuth. “Before you remind me, I’m not calling you for information. I have to tell you something important.”

  “Okay . . .”

  “Did you see the story in Newsday today?”

  He sighed.

  “What it didn’t say was that the judge himself didn’t seem to think Colin was guilty. But I talked to the reporter and he told me that the Crosleys’ dinner bill came to over five hundred dollars. That’s too much for two ­people, even in the Hamptons.”

  Silence.

  “It turns out that they paid for a ­couple at another table. A woman who looked very much like Sheila Crosley. I’ve seen a photo of Kathleen, the Irish woman who’s missing, and she looks just like Sheila. I think the Crosleys treated her to dinner. Before.”

  “Who told you all this about the restaurant?”

  “Newspaper reporters do a lot of digging. Did you find Will Crosley?”

  “Not yet, but—­you didn’t hear this from me.”

  “I didn’t,” I agreed.

  “I mean it, Delhi, although it’s a moot point now, I guess. Will was picked up in a drug sweep in the South Bronx two months ago. He was dealing, but he negotiated his release.”

  “How?”

  “He offered to give the FBI Art Crimes Unit information about his father’s antiquities ring. Ethan Crosley was smuggling artifacts out of archeological sites and selling them to collectors. Will Crosley worked for him making fakes from the originals, and Ethan sold them as the real thing too. Will offered to give them a lot of solid information if they would make the drug charges go away.”

  “Did they?”

  “What do you think? The specifics checked out. The FBI was getting close to an arrest when the Crosleys disappeared to Barbados. Ethan Crosley had already been questioned once.”

  “That’s why they left,” I cried. “Not because of some vague threat to prosecute them for kidnapping from me.”

  “Probably,” he agreed. “He was already being tracked by several governments.”

  “So he wasn’t that smart after all. Did you find Will?”

  “Not yet. He’s deliberately gone to ground.”

  “Well, I’m thinking that maybe it was his phone Elisa used his phone to text Hannah. It was a 917 number and Elisa said he lived in Spanish Harlem.”

  “Did you tell Carew that?”

  “I just thought of it now.” I should have thought of it earlier, but with so much else crowding my mind I hadn’t.

  At the farmhouse, the porch light went on.

  “Do you have the 917 number?” he asked. “It will be on her log of texts received.”

  “It will? Even on a cheap phone?”

  “The kind of phone doesn’t matter. It’s the server that keeps the record.”

  Quickly I gave him Hannah’s number and told him it was hosted by T-­Mobile.

  “We’ll check it out.”

  “I haven’t been able to reach her today, but I’ll try the landline when I get home.”

  He rang off.

  I had just pulled back onto the road when I heard my ringtone. Hannah!

  But the identification came up as Louis Benat. Again. So far I had not taken the reporter’s calls, two or three of them today, but I considered that he might have some new information.

  “Hello?”

  “Hi there, Ms. Laine. You’re a hard person to get ahold of.”

  “Just busy. I told you I’d call you when I knew anything.”

  “Ah, but I bet you already know why the Crosleys’ bill was so high.”

  I sucked in my breath, startled. “I just found out.”

  “I knew it!”

  “If I tell you, will you leave me alone?”

  “For how long?” The man was insufferable.

  “Two days,” I said firmly.

  “Deal.”

  Was it that easy? “They treated a ­couple at another table. They plied them with champagne.”

  “Who?”

  “I don’t know yet. I’m going to find out.”

  “Me too.”

  If Frank picked up on trying to identify them, it would be a three-­way race.

  Chapter Twenty-­Six

  MY NEED TO reach Hannah had gone from I’d better talk to her tonight to I have to find my daughter now. I knew I could not rest until I heard her voice.

  Driving home, I tried to remember the last names of Hannah’s three housemates. Like nearly half of Cornell undergraduates, she lived off campus, in the upstairs of a retired science professor’s home. I reminded myself that the girls probably used smartphones whose numbers would be impossible to get from an online directory. There had to be a landline in the downstairs of the home, but I didn’t remember the name of her landlord either.

  But I had her street address in my book at home.

  As soon as I unlocked the kitchen door, I went to the address book I kept on the counter near the phone and brought it to the kitchen table. Then, accessing the Internet on my phone, I typed in Whitepages.com and clicked on “Address.” It wouldn’t work if the professor had an unlisted number, but a name popped up and a phone number at the address. I told Siri to connect me.

  The phone rang.

  “Good evening.” An older man.

  I glanced at the schoolhouse clock and saw it was just before ten.

  “Yes, hello! This is Delhi Laine, Hannah Fitzhugh’s mother? I can’t reach her on her phone and it’s an emergency.”

  “She’s not answering her phone?” he inquired politely.

  “No! Is she there?”

  “We don’t usually interfere with the girls. Young women, I mean.” He chuckled softly.

  “Please. And if she’s not there, could I speak to one of the other girls?”

  “You want me to go upstairs and ask?”

  “If you would. It’s very important.”

  “I’ll ask my wife to go up.” The sound of the receiver being laid gently on a table.

  While I waited, my eyes squeezed shut, I did not allow myself the possibility that she might not be home.

  Minutes passed before the phone was picked up again.

  “Hello?” a voice said.

  Not Hannah.

  “Hi, Mrs. Fitzhugh, it’s Janelle. We met—­”

  “Yes, I remember. Hannah’s not home?”

  “I thought she was with you. That maybe you’d come up early?”

  I wasn’t prepared for the rush of panic that knocked me back against the wooden chair.

  With us? “When did she leave?”

  “Oh, gee. When did I last see her? You know, it was probably Sunday night when we were brushing our teeth. Everybody’s so busy . . .”

  Another rush, this time of sadness. This was Tuesday night. Why didn’t Hannah have close friends who would have noticed that she was not around to walk with them to campus, friends who would become worried when she did not meet them for dinner Monday night? Close friends kept tabs on each other and always seemed to know where the other one was. Was this the reason Hannah had become so completely enmeshed in Elisa, finally deciding there was someone she could trust?

  Suddenly I resented Janelle and her disregard of my daughter. “Could you do me a favor? Could you go up to her room and see if any of her clothes seem to be gone? Her laptop, things like that?”

  “But if she’s not with you, where is she?”

  “That’s what I’m trying to find out.”

  “Hannah wouldn’t just—­I mean, she doesn’t even have a boyfriend.”

  Of course not.

  �
��Could you please check those things for me?” Unfair, but I wanted to scream it at her.

  “Oh, sure. Just a sec.”

  I wasn’t even sure what it would tell me. Had Elisa come to Ithaca suddenly and the two of them gone off somewhere?

  A too-­long wait. And whoever finally picked up the phone was not Janelle.

  “Mrs. Fitzhugh? This is Kim Collins. We met at—­anyway, I was here yesterday morning when those men came for Hannah.”

  “What men?” I was so astounded I could barely choke the words out.

  “I was the one who answered the door. At first I thought they were college officials, they had on suits and all, but when Hannah came back upstairs to get her stuff she said that her sister was in trouble and that they were going to bring her to see her.”

  “What kind of trouble?”

  “She didn’t say. I’ve met her twin, she’s really nice. But—­aren’t you her mother too?”

  “Yes, but there’s no trouble. It must have been a trick to get Hannah to go with them.”

  “Oh, my God! Who were they?”

  Think, Delhi. “What did they look like?”

  “Well, I was in kind of a hurry, I was late myself, but one of them was kind of dark like he was Arabian. The other was younger, with glasses. Like a nerd? They were very polite, very nice to Hannah. I never thought . . .”

  Then in one of those flashes that seem spontaneous but probably aren’t, I knew who the dark man had to be. He had shown up at the 7–Eleven, described as looking like Omar Sharif, but I hadn’t made any connection them. Now I was sure he was Ethan’s employee who had disappeared from Egypt before he could be prosecuted for antiquities theft. I had read the story online though I didn’t remember his name.

  “Did she say anything to you about Elisa, where she was?”

  “No, just what I told you.”

  I remembered Kim then, a lanky, freckled blonde who played on the basketball team. “Listen, Kim, if you remember anything else, if you hear from Hannah at all, could you call me? I’ll give you my number.”

  “Okay, sure. Are you coming up for graduation Sunday?”

  I hope so.

  Chapter Twenty-­Seven

  WITHOUT MUCH HOPE, I tried Hannah’s phone one more time. As before, it went to voice mail, and I left yet another message. “Hani? Kim Collins told me what happened. If you get this, wherever you are, call me.” It was impossible to keep my voice from shaking and I couldn’t think of anything else to say.

  Dear God, let her still be alive.

  But why had they taken her? I had the wild idea that maybe Elisa wanted Hannah with her, that perhaps Hannah was headed out of the country with the Crosleys too.

  At least she would still be alive.

  Even if you never see her again?

  I was still at the kitchen table when my phone rang.

  Unbelievably, Hannah’s ID appeared.

  “Hani?” I gasped.

  “Mom?”

  “Oh, my God, where are you? I’ve been worried sick. Where are you?”

  “I think we’re in a harbor. We’re not moving right now.”

  “You’re in a harbor? On a boat? Is Elisa there?”

  “No. They promised she’d be and that she had to see me, but she’s not! They don’t know where she is either. They said to tell you they’ll trade me for her.”

  “But she’s not with me.”

  “They think you can find her. You found her before. But maybe you shouldn’t, they’re so mad at her. They may try to hurt her.” The sound of a slap on flesh, and then a gasp. “Oww!”

  “Hannah—­” My whole body was shaking. How could this be real?

  Silence and then a different voice, young, insistent, male. “A twin for a twin. That’s fair, isn’t it?”

  “I don’t have her! I have no idea where she is. How can you do this?”

  “You’re good at finding ­people,” he mocked. “Don’t try to call back, we’ll be in touch. This phone’s going overboard when we’re done.”

  “You can’t do that! And if you do anything to Hannah, there’s no deal.”

  The phone clicked off.

  I redialed Hannah’s number immediately. But it rang uselessly and I imagined the small maroon phone spiraling gently into the water, drifting in a slow dance to the bottom of—­where? Narragansett Bay? Long Island Sound? The police could trace where the call was made from, but I knew the boat would be hours away by then.

  Nothing made sense. I had to believe that the men who had Hannah were acting on Ethan’s orders. The Crosleys had to still be alive. They must have first gone to Boston to get Elisa. Had she been thrilled to find out that the Crosleys were still alive, that her grief had been for nothing? Yet why would she have run away from them? Maybe these men had had an altercation with Ethan and they had then killed the Crosleys to take control of the antiquities operation. Maybe they had gone to Boston and lured Elisa away with promises of taking her to her parents, lured her the same way they had tricked Hannah.

  But why? Unless it was some kind of Middle Eastern revenge killing they were planning, or Elisa had something they needed to get?

  I turned my attention to where they could be. On a boat, Hannah had said. That might be impossible to trace. Unlike planes, boats did not have to register with the authorities before they set sail. You could leave a harbor with no one knowing your destination, and unless you got into trouble and called the Coast Guard, no one could tell where you were. Even if it was confirmed that the Crosleys had owned a boat, there was no way to track where it was now. There could only be the negative information that the yacht was no longer in its slip.

  Besides, if they were dead, this could be some other boat entirely.

  Wishing that I had not called him before, I called Frank Marselli’s number again. This time he was no longer in his office. The phone went to voice mail, then suggested another detective’s extension if it was an urgent matter.

  I pressed in that number.

  “Rogers.”

  “Yes, hi! This is Delhi Laine. I need to talk to Detective Marselli right away.”

  “He’s not on duty.”

  “I know that. I just got his answering machine. But it’s about one of his cases and something terrible’s happened. My daughter’s been kidnapped!” As soon as I said it out loud, I found I couldn’t breathe.

  “Your daughter’s been—­you need to talk to a duty officer immediately! Did you call 911? How do you know it was a kidnapping?” His alarm ratcheted up mine. “We need to put out an Amber Alert!”

  “Well, she’s not a child. Frank Marselli knows all about the case. It’s Detective Carew’s, but this is something else.”

  “Are you talking about that arson out east?” His voice turned as guarded as a yellow caution light. What had Frank been telling him about me? Of course they would talk about the case. Last year Suffolk County had had under twenty-­five homicides.

  “Ma’am, you’ve got to call 911! I’ll give you back to Frank’s voice mail so you can leave a message for when he comes in.”

  “No! It can’t wait that long. Can’t you at least call him and ask him to call me? Tell him they have my daughter Hannah and they’ll kill her!”

  “You know who they are?”

  The world was spinning now, my voice not part of me. “Please, please. I’m not crazy! I just need to talk to Frank. He’ll know what to do. Just call him and ask him to call me. You can do that.”

  “Give me your name and number.”

  I started to say that he knew the number, then did as I was told.

  I DREADED CALLING Colin. He had admitted he was glad I had found Elisa, even if it meant his coming under suspicion. But that was before Hannah’s life had been put in danger. He would not tolerate another of his children in jeopardy. I shut my eyes and ma
de myself breathe. If I had known ahead of time that I would be risking Hannah’s life, would I have set out on this quixotic quest?

  Of course not. I would have ignored the note from England, treated it as a missive from hell. I had underestimated how vicious these ­people were. I had not let myself realize that anyone who would steal a child and murder the go-­between would stop at nothing to hang on to the life they had made.

  Hannah. What if her captors kept her alive and tortured her, reporting each fresh outrage to me? I had warned her to be careful and not go anywhere alone. But I had not warned her about being tricked.

  Dumb bookseller in her dumb little world.

  I called Colin next.

  But instead of his usual “Hey-­lo,” the phone went right to voice mail.

  I panicked. I didn’t know what message to leave, what to say. More than that, where was he? In the past I had never worried when I could not reach him, assuming he was at a lecture or out with colleagues. Now my thoughts ran wild, scavenging hyenas reaching for the bloodiest morsels possible. He had fled the country after all, was driving down through Mexico where perhaps a driver’s license would suffice in getting across the border. Or worse. He had become despondent over the possibility of going to prison and killed himself.

  Maybe the Crosleys or their killers had tracked him down and killed him—­just because they could. There seemed to be no limit to their rage. For that matter, why was I still alive?

  Crouched in the wing chair, holding my arms, I willed my phone to ring. Raj came over and put his paws on my leg, his small Siamese face anxious. He could always sense what I was feeling and tried to offer comfort. I wanted to push him away, to refuse any softening that would compromise the edge I needed. I didn’t deserve consolation. But I wanted it. Reaching down, I airlifted him and pressed him against my chest, closing my eyes and stroking him hard.

  Tell me it will be okay.

  But no one could do that, especially not a cat.

  I opened my eyes finally and looked at the clock. Nearly eleven! Even if Colin had gone somewhere local, a theater or lecture hall where he needed to turn off his phone, he would be home by now. If Frank had believed my message, he would have called me back.