everyone had come through the storm okay. The volunteer search teams would no doubt go out again, but Will was grimly certain that if Miriama had been anywhere where she could be found, she would’ve already been found.
Setting aside the journal for now, he decided to look quickly through the rest of the items in the tin. He found mostly what he’d expected: ticket stubs from a show in Auckland, a curling photograph of a stunning woman who might’ve been Miriama with twenty more years on her, a Valentine’s Day card that had the words To my love and Always, I’m yours written within and was signed only with xoxo.
The flotsam of Miriama’s life—flotsam she’d kept as reminders of moments that had meant something to her. He’d have been disappointed not to find a photograph of her lover if he hadn’t already read her journal and known how carefully she kept that secret. If she did have an image of the man, it was most probably on her phone.
Or, he realized, it could be out in the open in a way that’d raise no eyebrows—one of her photographic portraits. He’d seen images of Vincent, Daniel, other men both known and unknown in her files. He’d look at those portraits again, but with Miriama skilled at bringing out emotion in all her subjects, he wasn’t expecting a sudden epiphany.
The Valentine’s Day card might be useful in providing a handwriting sample to compare against the lover’s, but that would come after he’d tracked down a solid suspect.
Will picked up and looked at the snapshot of the woman again. This had to be Miriama’s mother—the resemblance was striking except for one thing: the older woman’s face displayed none of Miriama’s sunny joy in life. Her eyes were jaded despite the smile that curved her lips, her face set in lines that hinted at petulance.
When he flipped the photograph over to look at the back, he found a note in the same large and generously looped handwriting as in the journal:
Ma just before she found out she was pregnant.
It struck him as an odd thing for Miriama to have put on the back of the picture; most people would’ve used another marker for their mother’s life. Will had the bleak feeling Miriama had grown up knowing her existence had forever changed her mother’s. Matilda would never say a hurtful thing to a little girl. Which meant the message—and the rejection—had come directly from Miriama’s mother.
What did that do to a child?
Did it leave holes in the soul?
A hunger to be wanted, to be loved?
Just the kind of vulnerability a smart, selfish man might exploit.
Putting down the photograph, Will finished looking through the other items in the tin box. Nothing that immediately jumped out, though the two ticket stubs from an exclusive stage show were interesting—dated months before Miriama began seeing Dominic, they must’ve cost in the hundreds.
He’d follow up, but he knew the chances of tracing Miriama’s lover through the tickets was unlikely. If the unknown male had stuck true to form, the tickets had been purchased either in cash or in person or—more probably—by Miriama after her lover gave her the cash to cover the credit card repayment.
Will’s hand fisted.
An affair was one thing, but for this man to protect himself with such caution, even using Miriama as a shield, it spoke of an intense and manipulative self-interest. Miriama had been right to fear that her lover would never fulfill his promises to her. And she’d been smart to break away.
But had she stayed smart?
Love could make people do stupid things.
Sometimes, that stupidity led to death. And to screams Will had never heard, but that haunted him each time he closed his eyes. As long as he lived, he wouldn’t understand why a loving mother would pick up the phone and invite a monster to visit. Daniella Hart had been safe. Her little boy had been safe.
But she’d picked up the phone.
So no, Will didn’t trust that Miriama had stayed smart.
33
Anahera walked into Josie’s café just after nine thirty the next morning, the world sunlit around her, knowing she’d see this through to the bitter end. Something bad had happened and was continuing to happen in Golden Cove and Anahera wasn’t about to ignore it. People did that too often. Just ignored things because those things were uncomfortable or awkward, and in the end, all they had left were broken pieces and blood.
She forced a smile onto her face as Josie bustled around