“Dad! Who was Chelsea calling that night?” I pressed.
“It says here that the cell phone she was calling was registered to Adam Ward.”
No!
I was silent, and my dad repeated, “Looks like Adam was the last person Chelsea talked to right before she disappeared.”
This was not good, not good at all. Had those records truly been missed by the police? Or had they been buried? I knew of one person with enough money to make that happen. And it made me sick to consider it.
One thing for certain, I’d made a huge miscalculation by going on this date. To be honest, I’d misjudged everything. I had been deluding myself. You couldn’t go back in time, people change. This night was a lie. Who was Adam, really? He’d been calling Chelsea less than an hour before she disappeared. And what did that mean? Nothing good, I was sure.
Despair washed over me as I sunk to the lavatory floor. And in that moment I think my heart broke just a little.
Chapter 9
Things were a mess. Better put, I was a mess. Over a week had passed since my date had been cut short by my dad’s discovery that Adam was the person Chelsea had called from a pay phone in Harbour Falls shortly before she was never seen—nor heard from—ever again. Yes, you could say that little tidbit of information put quite a damper on the evening.
The flight from Boston back to Fade Island that night had gone from awkward, once I returned to my seat for takeoff, to tense by the time we landed on the island. I’d tried to play off my sudden icy demeanor toward Adam as an unfortunate side effect of some kind of stomach upset. True, I’d been feeling rather ill but not from eating something that hadn’t agreed with me. Despite my act, by the time the plane landed, Adam had correctly suspected there was something more behind my sudden cool and distant attitude.
On the short ride back to the cottage, he repeatedly tried to get me to tell him what had caused my change of heart. After all, we’d gone from almost becoming lovers to barely speaking. The whole episode served to remind me that I’d been moving entirely too fast with Adam.
Silent at first, I eventually stated I had nothing to discuss. Trust me, I wanted an explanation for the last known phone call Chelsea had ever made, but the problem was I’d have to offer up a reason of my own for even knowing about that forty-three second call to Adam. I had no desire to witness his reaction if he found out I was on the island to investigate his one-time fiancée’s disappearance. And, worse yet, write a book using the information I uncovered.
Just why had Chelsea been calling Adam after midnight that night? The files made mention that they’d argued earlier in the evening. Had she called to make things right? Why hadn’t she returned to the hotel? After all, the wedding was just hours away. More importantly, why had Adam never said anything about that call to the police? Unless, of course, he had something to hide.
Adam had grown increasingly frustrated, and definitely irate, by the time he screeched his Porsche to a halt in front of my house. As I’d swung open the passenger-side door to get out, I turned back to him and said, “I’m sorry, Adam. This just isn’t going to work.”
Then I slipped off my heels and hurried to the front door before he could stop me, not that I noticed him trying. Later that night I cried myself to sleep, soaking my pillowcase with tears.
Since then I’d avoided Adam rather handily by holing up in my cottage and barely talking to anyone. It helped that he’d gone on another business trip the day after our abbreviated date. I learned of his travels from the many texts and voicemails he left, telling me he was out of town but asking me to please tell him “what the hell had gone wrong” and how could he fix it.
A part of me wanted to talk to him. After all, I still had so many questions. Apart from the whole phone-call mess, I had never gotten around to asking Adam if he was still seeing Lindsey, the woman Helena had told me about. Another reminder that I’d behaved recklessly on my date with Adam.
Helena had somehow found out about our interrupted date, probably