Or that she would have such trouble leaving it behind.
This cottage in Malta was where she should have come when Tottingham first recognized her. Here or any one of her other obscure hideouts. But she hadn’t. Instead she had lingered, leaving Andrea Prentiss behind only in the most technical sense but staying close at hand in Maine to the one person who really meant something to that imaginary girl. And consequently putting that one person at risk.
Goddamn it.
She went back to the computer screen and read the details again. It was a travel itinerary. It wasn’t on the Reynolds Industries database—Evan handled his own travel arrangements—but that made no difference. She had no trouble hacking into Evan’s personal accounts as well. And she had no qualms about doing it either. It was just as she had feared. He wasn’t leaving well enough alone after all.
He was going to Greece.
* * * * *
Fredrico Stavros was a bear of a man and not as old as Evan would have thought he’d be. They shook hands and Stavros offered him a seat and took one himself behind a polished teak desk. He was dressed as casually and as expensively as Evan in a maroon cashmere sweater and tailored pants to set off six-thousand-dollar shoes. Actually, he was dressed more expensively than Evan, even though for once Evan had dressed to make it clear he came from money.
The office was in a modern steel-and-glass structure right on the Stavros estate, hermetically sealed and cold to the point of freezing. Unlike the beautiful whitewashed open-air buildings that Evan had seen so far since arriving on this island, no breeze from the Aegean Sea would make its way into this office.
Stavros lit a long black cigarette and took a few puffs before setting it in an ashtray that could pass for solid gold even if it wasn’t. But it probably was.
“What can I do for you, Mr. Reynolds?”
Evan fell back on his timeworn, fairly accurate—until lately anyway—persona of the laid-back, relaxed young man of means. “First off, I want to thank you for seeing me, Mr. Stavros.”
Stavros shrugged. “You have powerful friends.”
“Well, family anyway.”
“So what is it you want, Mr. Reynolds?”
“Just some information. I’m interested in your first wife’s family.”
Stavros took a few more puffs from the cigarette, deeper this time, and blew the dark smoke upward when he exhaled. “The Bennetts?”
“Yes. They resided in Greece, I believe, but were of European origin.”
“Why would you be interested in them? My wife—or I guess you could say my stepdaughter—was the last of that line.”
“I’m trying to confirm that.”
“Is this about the girl who worked for your brother again? Some secretary?”
Evan felt umbrage at the description of Andrea Prentiss as a secretary. He knew it was ridiculous, though. For one thing, she had been a secretary. And an extremely competent one at that. For another, despite his elite upbringing, he knew there was absolutely nothing wrong with being a secretary any more than there was with being a carpenter or an electrician, both of which he had always been happy to consider himself. Maybe it was the implication that Andrea had been “just” a secretary. Nobody, but most especially Andrea, was just their job description.
“Yes,” he responded anyway. “I’m trying to find her and she looked a lot like your late wife, Angelica Stavros. Did Mrs. Stavros have any other children?”
“Other than Athena, you mean?”
“Yes. The girl who died.”
“A tragic case.”
“I understand the body was recovered.”
Stavros stiffened and stubbed his cigarette out with unnecessary vigor. “That’s very private, Mr. Reynolds.”
“Of course. And I don’t mean to pry. Really. But is there any way that this, this Athena might not have drowned? Been kidnapped or something?”
Stavros thinned his fleshy lips and when he let them go again said, low, “The suggestion in itself is preposterous. If she’d been kidnapped, we would have had a ransom demand.”
“Perhaps she escaped.”
“And not returned to her family? Worked as a typist in some crummy little office?”
It did sound kind of far-fetched when he put it like that, although Michael’s digs, not to mention Andrea’s, could never have been described as a crummy little office. But in any case, there was a crucial part of the equation that was missing from that narrative, but clear as day from the way Andrea had cringed at the suggestion of violence.
Nick Dukakis, the thug who had burst into Cassie’s apartment and who even now was enjoying the hospitality of Maine’s prison system, had not been able to tell Evan much, beyond the bare-bones fact that Stavros was looking for the girl in the picture and if Dukakis found her he was to bring her back to Greece. Dukakis hadn’t known who the girl was, and if he had suspected, he hadn’t shared it. But he had agreed, for a price, not to warn Stavros that Andrea had gotten away.