a towel. That mania he had of leaving it behind so as to not be traced.
It was ten days until the remnants of his car was discovered. Ten harrowing days of hell. The police did grill me about Juan’s cell phone after his death, did find it suspicious that he had left it behind, but I guessed they verified my alibi and traced my credit card spending that day and realized I was innocent. Because they never bothered me again. When the insurance company contacted me, I was dumbfounded, had forgotten Juan even had life insurance. They too wanted to know why he didn’t have his phone with him at the time of the accident, and all sorts of other personal questions. Obviously, I didn’t let on, didn’t tell them about Juan’s paranoia. I just pretended he’d forgotten it.
But the Mustang haunted me. I never did understand why he’d chosen to drive it to the airport instead of taking his Range Rover.
Because, he obviously hadn’t! Maybe the triplets had shoved him into the car—possibly drugged, or even already dead—and rolled the Mustang off the cliff at the carefully selected Ragged Point, knowing what a dangerous place it was, and where other drivers had met their fate in the past, assuming he’d never get found for months. It was a possibility. Since the body had never been discovered, maybe they had disposed of it elsewhere then pushed the car over the cliff?
If only I’d been home when Juan set off for the airport!
Juan had been going on about that upcoming meeting, telling me what a big deal it was. I wished now I could remember every scrap of conversation, every look, every smile, every last parting word. I still had a mental snapshot of him that day, winking at me and saying, “Take care of yourself, my English rose.” We had made love early that morning; he was more passionate than ever, kissing every inch of me, his lips lingering on each of my fingers as he moved rhythmically inside me. “I love your pretty hands,” he’d whispered. “Every quirky little curve of you, every funny little bone in your funny little valentine body.” And then he called out my name, as I too gave him all of myself in that moment of symbiotic pleasure and release. The insatiable need we had for each other momentarily sated.
And then I drove off to Carmel for my appointment, already missing him, replaying the details in my head. His dark locks hanging over his brow, the sweat on his forehead, the sound of his desire for me. When I got home, the emptiness I felt in the space where his beloved Mustang had been haunted me, as if I knew right then something was very wrong.
Had the triplets arrived at Cliffside straight after I’d left for my doctor’s appointment? And taken him by surprise? Maybe they pretended they wanted to rekindle a relationship with him. Isn’t that what most biological children do when they track down a real parent, if they’ve been adopted or something? They would have arrived at the door, all smiles and charm, then Juan contrite, wishing he’d been a proper father to them the second he laid eyes on his gorgeous grown-up brood.
Doing something as premeditated as his murder would take a huge amount of skill and organization on the triplets’ part, not to mention brute force. But Dan was strong. Worked out. Three against one, with the element of surprise working in their favor, Juan didn’t stand a chance.
Forensics could trace all sorts of stuff these days. To make a car explode, to guarantee a person’s death, you’d have to lace the car with gasoline, and there’d be a trail of evidence, surely? But there was an answer to that, too. Because of a spate of unusually bad weather the day Juan disappeared, and the days that followed, and that dangerous drop off the sheer cliff face, it wasn’t until ten days later that the police were able to rappel all the way down there successfully, by which time the storm had washed away most of the debris. A helicopter had surveyed the car’s wreckage, of course, but nobody had been able to examine anything.
The triplets had it all planned out. Knew exactly what they were doing. They knew how hard it would be for rescue teams to rappel down there.
The riddle was solved. They had murdered their parents.
And then they set their sights on me. An easy target.