of philandering men everywhere, and just like them, he was probably wrong. Though, when you factored in how well Vincent had insulated his family from the locals, it was possible that Jemima had no idea. But if she had worked out the truth…
“I’ll need to speak to Jemima at some point,” Will said.
Vincent’s face turned to flint. “You’ll have to get through my lawyers first.”
“That’s how much you love Miriama?” Will asked softly. “Enough to block me from talking to someone who might know what’s happened to her?”
“Miriama left me. She chose Dominic de Souza.” The words were like ice. “She’ll still choose him when she comes back. I’m not going to lose my wife, too.”
There it was, the rage. Deep and black and violent. The kind of rage that came from passionate love. “Do you know where Miriama is, Vincent?”
“Go to hell, you bastard.”
Will didn’t stop the other man when he got into his car and sped off down the drive, away from the house. Right now, he had nothing with which to further push Vincent.
That didn’t mean he was about to give up.
Starting his own vehicle after a short delay but not turning on his headlights, he followed Vincent. As it was, the covert surveillance ended up a bust: Vincent parked in front of the pub.
Going around to the back of the local drinking hole, Will managed to get hold of the manager, a great bearded man who was a well-known hunter and who’d spent hours searching for Miriama. When Will asked him to keep an eye on Vincent and to let him know if the other man said or did anything out of the ordinary, the manager stared at him with hard eyes.
But his response wasn’t the stonewalling Will had expected, wasn’t the town protecting one of their own against an outsider. “I saw the way he looked at her,” the other man said, twisting a tea towel in his nicked and scarred hands. “Also saw the way she looked back. Miri’s too good for the likes of him and I’m glad the girl was smart enough to see that. Using her, that’s what he was doing.”
“Did you know,” Will said, “or did you suspect only?”
“Didn’t know for sure. Was hoping I was wrong.” He slapped the tea towel over his shoulder, his black T-shirt branded with the fading emblem of a metal band. “Her thing with the doctor? That’s got a real future—he’s a townie but he respects little Miri enough to want her to be his wife.”
“So his plan to propose is open knowledge?”
A faint smile. “Mattie isn’t too good at keeping happy secrets. She whispered it around when the doctor asked her to sneak away one of Miri’s rings so that he could have the engagement ring made the right size.” Smile fading, he folded his arms over muscle gone to hard fat. “I’ll keep an eye on the rich boy, don’t worry.”
“Don’t do anything,” Will warned. “He’s not the only one I’m looking at.”
“When you know for certain, you sure as hell better drive whoever it is out of here before I get my hands on them. But Vincent’s safe for now.”
The journal sat heavy against Will’s heart as he drove off after that exchange.
He knew he wouldn’t be getting any sleep tonight.
Before he returned home, however, he’d do a sweep of the town, make sure no trouble lurked in the shadows.
Though the air was clear of the scent of rain, the cloud-heavy sky held no stars, no moon, and it felt to Will as if the entire town was suffocating under a blanket of darkness. Miriama’s disappearance had stained Golden Cove’s heart. Nothing would scrub away that stain until they found her or discovered what had happened to her.
Spotting a huddle on one particular corner, he came to a stop by the curb and rolled down his window.
41
“You should all be at home,” he said to the teenagers loitering outside the closed fire station.
Kyle Baker flicked off some ash from his cigarette. “We were just discussing Miriama. Thinking about what else we could do, where we could search.” Insolence in his eyes but pious worry in his tone. Kyle was putting on a show for his fans, and, interestingly, many of those fans were younger than him.
“That’s a good thing,” Will said, “but, if anything happens to any of you, it’ll make a bad situation even worse.” He wasn’t surprised to see a number of faces familiar to him from the other