I’m sure he knows I moved the things under our bed. I sense he’s worried about me and what I might do. What I love about him is that he always gives me my space, gives me the benefit of the doubt.
“To the store,” I say, putting a plastic grocery bag filled with things I didn’t need on the counter—moisturizer, shampoo, nail polish. He gets up and comes over to me. He sifts through the bag, and I know he’s not fooled by my pointless purchases. He takes my hand.
“Sit down a second,” he says, indicating a chair.
As I take a seat, he slides a poor-quality photograph printed from a color printer onto the table in front of me. The man in it has a pocked, fleshy face, with a bent nose and dead, mean eyes.
“Do you know who this is?” he asks.
My headache is so bad now it’s making me sick to my stomach. Something black starts to spread across the inside of my brain.
I rub my head. “No,” I say.
“Are you sure?”
I look again, but I feel like I can’t focus on the face. “I don’t think so.”
He sits down next to me and rests his eyes on the photograph, taps it with his finger.
“I went to the office and called your father from a secure line. I got a description of the guy who came to see him. Turns out he also left a name and phone number. The name is a fake, of course. The number is just a pager. But the name, Buddy Starr, is on a list of aliases for a guy called Simon Briggs. He’s a bounty hunter. Not as in bail bondsman, more like a private contractor. He’s the guy you hire when you want to find someone and aren’t necessarily worried in what condition. His list of criminal associations is long and colorful.”
“Why would he be looking for Ophelia?” I ask. The sun streaming in through the windows is way too bright. I cover my eyes.
“That’s what we need to find out,” he says. “The point is, though, that he’s likely working for someone.”
I stare at the picture, then close and rub my eyes again.
“Hey, you okay?” Gray says after a minute. “You look pale.” He puts his hand on my arm.
“I just have a headache.” I feel his gaze, but I don’t meet his eyes.
“Maybe you’ve seen this guy before and you don’t remember?”
“No,” I say, not wanting to admit that it’s not only possible but even likely, given my reaction to the photo. I put my head down in my arms. They come on hard and fast like this for me. If it gets any worse, I could be lying in a cocoon of pain for hours.
“I don’t know,” I admit.
I let Gray lead me upstairs. He puts me into bed and closes the shades. I hear him take my migraine medication from the medicine cabinet in the bathroom, run water into the glass by the sink. When he returns to me, I sit up and swallow the pills. He’s very good at taking care of me.
That afternoon Detective Harrison finally got lucky. A few telephone calls to the records office in the Kentucky town where Annie Fowler was born yielded a faxed copy of her death certificate. She and her infant son had been killed in a road accident when she was just twenty-one years old.
“A real tragedy,” the records clerk told him, over the phone. “She went to school with my son.”
“That’s terrible. How sad,” he said, trying to keep the excitement out of his voice. “Do you mind telling me what she looked like?”
“Red hair and freckles, sweet-faced, petite—maybe not even five foot two, and a little on the plump side. A lovely girl, though. Just really…pretty.” Nothing like the Annie Fowler he knew.
“I come from a small town myself,” the detective told her, though that wasn’t quite the case. It was just a way he had to lube people up, get them talking. “I know how hard a tragedy like this can be for everyone.”
“It’s true. It’s true,” the clerk said, sounding wistful and as though she were tearing up. “Her parents have never been the same.” Then, “I am curious, sir. What’s your interest?”
“I can’t say much, ma’am,” mimicking her polite tone. “But I have reason to believe that someone might have used her information to create a false identity.” He paused when he heard the clerk gasp. “Since her death have