Chapter 2
I moved the dinner guests into the ballroom.
Nobody left.
Not because they were prisoners.
Because I did not yet know which of them had seen Elowen.
Sabella stayed beside me.
Althea sat across the sitting room with her engagement ring flashing beneath the chandelier.
I asked again.
“Where?”
She looked at Sabella.
Then me.
“Willow House.”
I knew it.
A private property owned by Althea’s family outside the city.
Two hours away.
“Since when?”
Althea hesitated.
Sabella answered for her.
“Six months?”
Her voice sounded strange.
Hope and rage do that together.
Althea closed her eyes.
“Yes.”
Sabella stood.
“Why?”
No answer.
I told Rafe:
“Send a car.”
Sabella immediately said:
“I’m going.”
“Yes.”
Althea looked at me.
“You don’t know what you’re walking into.”
I almost smiled.
“Then explain.”
She would not.
Interesting.
Instead:
“Her mother chose to stay there.”
Sabella stared.
“She vanished without her medication, coat, or purse.”
Althea flinched.
Good.
“Did she choose that too?”
Silence.
I looked around the sitting room.
“How did she get here yesterday?”
A staff member answered from the doorway.
My event coordinator.
“Sir?”
I turned.
“There was an elderly guest yesterday afternoon.”
Althea’s face changed.
The coordinator continued.
Miss Althea had requested complete privacy in the sitting room while decorators finished the wallpaper.
The elderly woman arrived through the service entrance.
Stayed forty minutes.
Left in a gray car.
“Did she seem distressed?”
The woman thought.
“She was crying.”
Sabella covered her mouth.
“Did she say anything?”
“Yes.”
The coordinator hesitated.
“She asked whether Miss Sabella still worked here.”
The room froze.
Sabella looked at Althea.
“You told her I was here?”
No answer.
“You let my mother come inside the house where I work and didn’t let her see me?”
Althea finally whispered:
“You were off duty yesterday.”
Wrong defense.
Sabella laughed once.
Painfully.
“That isn’t why.”
No.
It was not.
May you like
The question was no longer whether Elowen lived.
The question was why mother and daughter had been deliberately kept apart when both had been close enough to touch the same walls.
