Darling - K. Ancrum Page 0,65

The other officer searched her pockets until he found her wallet. He fished out her ID and compared its picture to her face. When he was satisfied, he put the wallet back in her pocket and walked her out of the room. Wendy kept quiet as they moved her down another hallway with dimmer lights to a much quieter wing of the station.

The officer stopped in front of a door near the back of the station. Wendy flinched in surprise as the officer behind her unlocked her cuffs. They opened the door, lightly nudged her inside, and closed it loudly behind her.

CHAPTER 14

There was only one table in this room, and Detective Hook was sitting in front of it. His maroon jacket was draped over the chair behind him as if he’d come straight to this interrogation from the party. He had a stack of folders to the right of him, but had one single, large image in his hand, balanced between his index finger and the curved end of his prosthetic.

Wendy approached the only other chair in the room and anxiously sat down.

Detective Hook looked at her hard for another moment, then placed the photo flat on the table and pushed it toward her.

“Do you know who this is?” he asked.

His voice was low and rich, a far cry away from his hysterical shouting at the Mermaid’s Lagoon. It was disconcerting.

Wendy pulled the picture toward her. With a spike of terror, she realized it was a picture of herself. A mug shot. Or. Actually … not her … Wendy hadn’t been anywhere near a police station in her entire life. She looked up at Detective Hook in confused terror. He sighed and put another photo in front of her, this time a candid, with the subject smiling big and freely with her afro hair permed and flat ironed, and Wendy suddenly knew her.

“This … is my mom?” Wendy asked.

Detective Hook leaned back in his seat. “You look like her, you know,” he said, crossing his arms. “The hair is different. Yours is curlier, but that might just be a change in fashion. Your ID says your name is Wendy?”

Wendy nodded. She didn’t know where this was going, but her blood felt like ice.

Detective Hook sat back up and picked out another folder from the pile.

“You need to sign these nondisclosure agreements before we continue.” He placed a few pieces of paper in front of her and handed her a pen. “Ominotago, Fyodor, and the rest have already signed theirs. Your mother has, too, actually. It’s about twenty years old, but I could pull it for you, if necessary.”

Wendy read the paper carefully and despite her better instincts signed the bottom. It had been a solid seven hours of confusion, but at least if she went to jail, she would go to jail with answers.

Hook put the cooperation agreement in the envelope, and Wendy was pleased to see the paper underneath hers had Ominotago’s name on it, so at least he wasn’t lying about that.

He put the folder of documents to the left and took another folder off the pile, pulling out another mug shot and placed it in front of her.

“This,” Detective Hook said with incredible gravity, “is Peter Pan.”

The mug shot was old.

Peter stared back at Wendy from the image, looking not entirely different from when they had met. There were small changes: His eyes were a bit brighter, he had a bit more fat around his face, and his auburn hair was chopped in a rakish mullet—just long enough to still look cool, decades in the future.

Wendy could hear her heart pounding in her ears.

Detective Hook jabbed the center of Peter’s face with a thick index finger. “When we took this mug shot, I was still a beat cop. I’ve been a detective for seventeen years.”

Wendy’s eyes scanned the image as she sat there numbly. The unbroken nose, the rosier cheeks, no stubble at all.

“I don’t…” Wendy started, at a loss for words as she tried to do the math.

“Peter Pan is thirty-six years old.”

Wendy pushed herself away from the table. She leaned over and tried not to vomit. She put her head on her knees and swallowed hard over and over until her throat burned with the bile she’d forced back down her throat. With that one sentence, the context of everything had changed. She had been alone in her bedroom in the middle of the night with a thirty-six-year-old man. She allowed a thirty-six-year-old man