You Don't Want To Know - By Lisa Jackson Page 0,36

in a chair by the window. What she needed to do was figure out where everyone had been the night of Noah’s disappearance. She’d wondered about it often enough in the past but hadn’t had the strength or presence of mind to figure it out.

Of course, the police had done something similar, but Sheriff Biggs and his underlings hadn’t tried too hard, she thought, because they’d worked under the supposition that Noah had wandered outside and drowned. After cursory statements from everyone in the house, a search by officers and volunteers of the island and divers who had scoured the waters of the bay near Neptune’s Gate’s private dock, they’d decided that her son had slipped off the dock and drowned, his little body carried out to sea with the tide.

Except that the tide had been coming in at the time he’d been discovered missing.

She’d checked.

But no one had listened to her, and she really couldn’t blame them—she’d been a maniac: frantic with fear, wild with desperation to find her son, and suffering a breakdown in the process . . .

No wonder no one took her seriously. In the ensuing two years, she hadn’t given up faith that her baby would be found, but her fractured mind hadn’t been able to focus or concentrate.

Until now. She glanced to the bedside table and the tiny cup holding the pills Demetria had picked up from the floor and placed on the table.

Tranquilizers to calm her.

Antidepressants to lift her spirits.

She carried the container into the bathroom. Once more she threw the meds down the toilet, but this time she made certain they all flushed away. She supposed the intensity of this headache might be from stopping the pills cold turkey, but she didn’t care; she’d suffer through the withdrawals or whatever they were.

Once satisfied that there was no trace of the pills left, she returned to the bedroom, drank down half the water in the glass, and left the empty pill cup on the table, not that anyone would believe her, but she went through the motions anyway. Next, she quickly braided her hair away from her face so that it wouldn’t get in the way as she typed and dived into her project.

She remembered the night that her life had changed forever. The Christmas holidays had been in full swing and the house filled with people—those who worked at Neptune’s Gate as well as those guests who had been invited to be a part of the festivities. Ava started listing everyone who had spent the night as well as those who had just dropped by. One by one, she placed their names on a legal pad with a pencil she’d found in the desk drawer, but she couldn’t be certain that she’d recalled everyone, not with the way her memory was these days. Nonetheless, she transferred the list onto her computer.

Her fingers moved awkwardly over the keyboard at first, the keys feeling unfamiliar, but she kept at it, typing carefully, making mistakes and corrections until muscle memory took over. “Just like riding a bike,” she told herself, and soon she was in the rhythm of it, creating columns of names, relationships, where each person had claimed to be when Noah disappeared. She’d gone over it with the police again and again but had been so brokenhearted she hadn’t been able to do much more than grieve.

Now she looked down at the spreadsheet she’d compiled. Would it help?

No way to tell until she tried.

Three hours later, a headache throbbed behind her eyes as she sat in her desk chair. She rotated the kinks from her neck and stared at the chart and timeline she’d created on her computer, one made primarily from her own recollections and conversations with others over the past few years.

She could see the house as it had been that night. . . .

The foyer had been festooned with fir garlands winking with white lights and threaded with gold ribbon. A twenty-foot tree had stood at the base of the steps, its boughs laden with winking lights, ornaments, and red bows, its upper branches nearly reaching the second story of the open stairway.

A steady stream of Christmas songs had been playing from speakers located all over the house, familiar notes audible only when the din of conversation, laughter, and clink of glasses had receded.

The mood had been festive, the only moment of sadness when, at dinner in the dining room, Ava had glanced to her right, to the seat her