Ashley scoured the gravel-covered ground looking for more clues. I dropped Milo’s iPhone into my shoulder bag and almost immediately my upper body tensed. I felt like I was carrying the emotional baggage equivalent of an anvil. I was positive it was Milo’s phone—I could feel it in my gut, and my gut feelings usually served me well. The last time I trusted my gut was when I met Milo, and that wound up being the best relationship of my life. Now my gut feelings were telling me something bad had happened to him. After seeing the devastating damage someone’s violent act had had on his phone, it wasn’t a big stretch to imagine how that same violence might look if directed toward him. I quivered at the thought.
Ashley stretched and adjusted her dress. “These heels and dress are killing me.” The sides of her mouth turned up, forcing a weak smile, but her eyes froze in mortification. She crouched down again, her head hung in awkward embarrassment. “Sorry. I wasn’t thinking.”
Clearly she was thinking about Milo possibly being dead or killed. And yet I was the one she accused of jumping to conclusions. “That’s okay.” I patted her shoulder. “But let’s not go there quite yet. If something bad happened to him, it doesn’t mean he’s necessarily dead. Although, if the dude ran off with another woman, I might be tempted to kill him.”
“Um, tell me how you really feel. But I agree with everything you just said. Our imaginations are in overdrive and we might be getting ahead of ourselves.” Ashley laughed lightly. “That being said, I wonder if someone smashed the phone here or somewhere else. They could’ve flung it over the hedge from another pathway. What do you think?”
I chuckled. “So much for considering other possibilities. But good call. We should probably check out all the maze pathways to see if there are any clues there. The more I think about it, I don’t think it was smashed to send a message as much as to destroy evidence.”
Ashley straightened up and wiggled her dress into its proper position. “You mean his phone log and text messages?”
I nodded. “Yeah. I think the intent was to wipe out a record of who Milo had been talking to—especially right before he disappeared.”
“Like a kidnapper?”
“Yes, maybe.”
“So you think someone took him for a ransom?”
“Right now, that’s my hope, given the other possibilities.”
“But why didn’t they take the whole phone with them and dispose of it somewhere else?”
“I don’t know. I’m free-associating. Trying to consider all possibilities. If he was kidnapped, maybe his kidnapper stepped on it accidentally and got flustered and was afraid of being caught with Milo’s phone on them.”
Ashley pulled her face into a sad pout. She rearranged a few wayward curls of mine like a mama cat grooming her kitten before resuming her search for clues, cursing at her tight dress as she crouched down again.
“Look, Tory, over here!” She pointed to a big rock in the shallow gully at the foot of the hedge. Her voice was breathless with excitement. “I bet that’s what someone used to smash the crap out of his phone.”
The light gray rock was about the size of my open hand. I imagined it would be easy to grip and use to smash a phone. Or hit someone. It was big, smooth, and oval—and out of place in the maze. The only other rocks in the maze were the small ones in the pea gravel covering the pathways. I caught my breath when I realized why this larger rock looked so familiar. Rocks like this decorated the base of trees that bordered the Hidden Garden. I knew because I was the one who’d specified them. Landscape architects favored them for trim and borders. Their smooth, clean look lent a Zen-like quality to gardens—the exact opposite of what it now represented, violence.
I inspected it without picking it up or touching it. “I don’t think we should touch it because—”
“Fingerprints?”
“Exactly. I don’t know whether it’s possible to leave fingerprints on a rock, but I don’t want to mess them up if you can.”
Ashley stood upright. “I doubt it, but they might be able to get DNA evidence.”
We both took pictures of it with our phones. I moved to the opposite side to take some shots from a different angle. When my flash went off and spotlit the rock, my heart sank.
I squeezed Ashley’s wrist. “Please tell me that’s not blood on the rock.”
Ashley knelt down, using her phone’s flashlight, and let out a whistle. “Holy crap. That’s what it looks like.” She grabbed my hand and stood up. When our gazes met, I saw fear in her eyes and she hugged me. She pulled back and held my gaze. “You need to file a missing person’s report with the police as soon as possible and tell them about the smashed phone and bloodstained rock.”
I nodded in sad agreement, hating the turn our search for Milo was taking.
“And by police, I mean someone who is smart and fair-minded, pretty much anyone other than Ernie.”
I took a deep breath and forced myself to push on. “Okay. I’ll call Adrian right now.”
One of the benefits of living in a small town was you were likely to know someone, or someone who knows someone, in practically every city department, from the mayor’s office to the police department. Adrian Ramirez was another old classmate of ours who was currently a police sergeant bucking for lieutenant. If there were a bell-shaped curve of decent stand-up guys, Adrian would fall on the right, above-average tail of the graph, whereas Ernie would find himself on the left-side tail at the lower end of the distribution. My rankings were based on years of observing their behavior and interacting with them from kindergarten through high school. Since Santa Sofia was a small town with slim pickings on many counts, Ashley and I had spent our four high school years chasing after the same few good guys. Adrian was one of those guys so, consequently, we’d both briefly dated him, and by “dated” I meant we hung out with him at the strip mall opposite our school. We’d ended up becoming good buddies with him but lost touch when we’d all graduated and moved on to college. Ashley had since lamented to me, during a particularly maudlin happy hour session, ironically, that she viewed Adrian as the one who’d gotten away.
The operator at SSPD took my name and number. I didn’t give her much of a backstory other than I was an old friend of Adrian’s and needed to talk to him ASAP regarding a missing person. She said he was on another call and she’d give him my message.
“Hopefully he’ll call me back soon. In the meantime, let’s continue our search. I don’t think anyone will disturb the rock since it’s tucked under the hedge in that little drainage ditch.”
Ashley nodded. “For sure, Ernie won’t notice it. Wouldn’t even if he tripped over it.”
I opened the Notes app on my phone and made a list of clues: Milo’s smashed phone, rock used to smash phone, possible blood on rock. My hand quaked as I typed the last entry.
We continued on the maze path that led to the Hidden Garden. Ashley chattered away about another dress online she wanted to get for the upcoming firefighters benefit, which was being held at the Hidden Garden in a couple of weeks.
“The sequins are already coming off of this one. I’m leaving a trail.” She chuckled and paused for what normally would’ve registered a giggle from me. “The one I saw online is made from a black stretchy material. Just in case I need to take a hike in a maze again.”
“Let’s keep our eyes on the ball, shall we? I can’t even hear myself think with your constant banter.” Man, I sound mean and bossy. When I spun around to look at her, her eyes were downcast. “God, I’m sorry, Ash. I didn’t mean to come off so snippy. But we need to focus. I’m trying to reconstruct in my mind all of our movements today to see if I remember anything that seemed out of the ordinary.”
Ashley kept her gaze averted. “Sorry. I was trying to lighten things up. I get super talkative when I’m stressed.”
“You? Talkative?” I smiled sheepishly. “I’m the one who needs to apologize. I get super cranky when I’m nervous.”
She was silent.
I mock glared at her. “Nothing? Really? Not even a ‘You? Cranky?’ Come on, Ash. I’m sorry. It’s called fear.”
She threw her arms around me and we hugged tightly.
“Forgiven. We’re both in stress city right now. We’ve got to cut ourselves some slack and be kind to each other and ourselves. Deal?”
“Deal.” I headed forward again. “Just a few more bends and we’ll be at the Hidden Garden.”
Moments later we emerged from the maze. Groundskeepers were stacking the folding chairs on gurneys, dismantling the arbor, and loading potted palms onto wheelbarrows. We traipsed over to the little alcove a short path away from the Hidden Garden, where Simon had taken our photographs and where I’d seen Milo last.
“There’s nothing here to see except grass,” Ashley said.
“Not quite.” I rushed over to the trees around the perimeter. “See. The same rocks as the one in the maze. This is where whoever smashed the phone got the rock. They’re identical.”
“Wow. Good work, Sherlock.”
I took some photos of the rocks. “What should we do now?”
Ashley scrunched up her face in concentration. “Well, we should check yours and Milo’s place, but that’s on the other side of town. And his office is downtown. How about we start here and drive around the neighborhood around the hotel first and look for his car.”
“Good idea.”
As we passed the groundskeepers stacking the chairs again, one of them, a weather-beaten sinewy man in a cap and a hooded jacket, quickly threw down a cigarette butt and stomped it out with his foot as soon as he’d made eye contact with me.
I smiled. “Hi there. How are you doing?”
His strength and ease of hauling and loading chairs made me think he was around forty. But as I got closer, his weathered face made him look at least a decade older. I guessed years of smoking and working outdoors without sunscreen had aged his face. The rest of the groundskeepers lifting chairs looked younger, so I assumed he was the supervisor.
He tipped his hat. “Howdy.”
“You haven’t seen anything unusual today, have you?”
He gave Ashley and me, in our frothy cocktail dresses, the once-over. “You referring to the missing bridegroom?”
I nodded.
“Yeah, heard about that. Weird as heck.”
“Did you or any of your workers see anything odd?”
“I didn’t see anything unusual, just the regular hotel employees and vendors. Hold on. I’ll ask my men.” He called to the three guys stacking chairs and rattled off a question in Spanish. Two shook their heads.
A third man I guessed to be in his late thirties stepped forward. “Hi, I’m Octavio. I heard men arguing in the maze after the ceremony.”
I sucked in a breath. “You did? Wow. Did you see who they were or hear what they were saying?”
“No. I couldn’t see them. They were real angry by the sound of it. I was walking through the maze to the patio cocktail party. One of the heavy potted palms on the patio needed to be moved. The vendor had already left, so they called me to move it. Potted palms are pretty but their wide fronds can get in the way if they aren’t in the right position. They have to be arranged like this.” He extended his arms to his sides. “Not like this.” He extended one arm in front and one in back. “That way they don’t poke people.”
I nodded quickly, hoping he’d wrap up the Potted Palms 101 lecture and tell me more about what he’d heard.
Benning Brothers had supplied all of the plants for the wedding. Jed Barnes, our head nursery guy, should have checked on the palm placement. Jed was an excellent foreman and he usually was sensitive to plant placement at parties. But since he was also a wedding guest today, I figured once he started drinking, the only thing potted he’d been focused on was himself.
“Then what?”
Octavio’s eyes glistened. “At first I heard two men arguing through the hedges. I couldn’t see them because the hedge is thick. I heard one guy say ‘Give it to me’ or something like that. I didn’t hear anything after that until one guy shouted ‘Where is it?’ The other guy told him to calm down.”
He paused and stared at me.
I waited a good thirty seconds before prompting him again. “And then what happened?”
“Nothing.”
“Nothing? You didn’t hear anything else?”
“That’s all I heard. I had to get to the patio for—”
“The potted palm. Right.”
Ashley put her hand lightly on my arm. “Thank you so much, Octavio. Here’s my card. I’m a lawyer. If you think of anything else, please give me a call.”
She steered me back toward the maze.
I turned back to Octavio. “Thank you!” I tugged on Ashley’s arm. “What’s the rush?”
“As a wise woman once said to me, we have to keep our eye on the ball.”
“Touché, but I was keeping my eye on the ball. He was probably a witness to Milo arguing with whoever smashed his phone.”
“I know, but he’s already told us everything he knows. He has my card if he thinks of anything else. That way we avoid another infomercial on potted palms and go look for Milo before the sun goes down. I call that a win-win.”
“I guess you’re right.” Right now, the thought of sitting down anywhere had high appeal, but especially my Lexus with its heated seats. My reception outfit had turned into a torture chamber. My spaghetti strap dress gave me as much coverage as a Kleenex and my Cinderella slippers squeezed my toes like they were in a vise. “Okay. We can take the shortcut through the maze to the parking lot.”
“Ugh! The maze again? This time I’m holding on to you the whole way.”
My phone buzzed. “The caller ID says SSPD. I bet it’s Ernie. But what if it’s Adrian returning my call? What should I do?”
“Don’t answer it. Let it go to voice mail. If it’s Adrian I’m sure he’ll leave a message and you can call him right back. Nothing good will come from talking to Ernie right now. Put off an interview as long as possible. I wouldn’t put it past that little worm trying to pin Milo’s disappearance on you as a murder just out of spite for rejecting him in seventh grade. It won’t help once he finds out Milo’s will names you as the primary beneficiary. He’ll call that your motive.”
“But that’s absurd.” My phone’s voice mail icon indicated a new message. I put it on speaker as we listened to Ernie ask me to call him.
Ashley rolled her eyes. “Not to him it won’t be. Like I said, nothing good will come from talking to him.”
“I would never even think of hurting any living creature.” Except spiders. If a spider ventured inside my house, game on.
“I know that, but perception is what counts. I could see him arguing that it seems like once you married Milo, you killed him but made it look like he left of his own volition.”
“That seems counterintuitive. Why on earth would I do that?”
“Simple. To deflect attention from your insurance windfall.”
“Let me get this straight. You think Ernie might say I killed Milo for his insurance money but made it look like Milo skipped town? But then I wouldn’t get the payout if he wasn’t dead anyway. That makes no sense.”
Ashley stared blankly. “True. But my point is he’s going to use Milo’s will against you somehow. Mark my words.” She paused and a smile formed. “Honestly, I think he’s still in love with you and just likes engaging with you. That and since you’ve rejected him multiple times, he’s now in a position of authority over you and it’s payback time.”
I chuckled to myself. Ashley was a highly rated attorney, but she had a habit of letting her imagination run wild when she was stressed. “Okay. I don’t know about that, but I’ll keep dodging his calls if you think that’s best for now.”
Ashley grasped my upper arm. “Good girl.”
After a series of meandering turns through the maze, we exited onto a brick sidewalk. We leaned against each other, balancing ourselves as we brushed the mud off our shoes. We followed the sidewalk to the small remote parking lot shrouded in tall hedges, where Milo and I had parked our cars earlier in the day. We’d checked the lot earlier before confirming his disappearance to our wedding guests.
What had won Benning Brothers the Hotel Santa Sofia renovation bid was our design concept for several small parking lots instead of one big one to preserve the resort’s residential feel. I gazed at my ground cover choice, the carpet-like moss Dichondra repens peeping out between the brick pavers, and reflected on the irony of the tall hedges, back when the only feelings they’d evoked had been privacy and seclusion. Now the parking lot, like the Secret Maze, seemed almost sinister, its remote and isolated nature providing the perfect setting for a crime.
Dusk was hastening upon us, and the motion-detector parking lot lights flipped on as we proceeded to my car. My black Lexus SUV was now the only car in the otherwise empty lot.
I turned to Ashley. “I was so flustered when we rushed here earlier and discovered his car was gone. We need to make sure we didn’t miss any clues.”
I stood in the space where Milo’s car had been parked next to mine and walked around, hunched over like a camel, searching for what, I didn’t know. “Aha!” I pointed to what looked to be a fresh muddy footprint on the bricks near where the driver’s side of Milo’s car would have been. I aimed my camera phone and took a few shots. “Look. A footprint with treads, like a boot or athletic shoe. Milo was wearing his dress pumps, so this isn’t his footprint, unless he changed into a different pair of shoes.” It was someone else’s footprint. I was sure of it. But whose?
Ashley muttered “uh-huh” and wandered off, pacing around the perimeter of the lot and scanning the ground. She turned back periodically to look where Milo had been parked. “Tory, come here. This strip of ground cover looks like something dug it up recently. Where cars have driven over the ground cover, it’s flattened. This is different.”
I examined the top of the sod. Something had ripped it out and exposed the mud underneath it. The remains of little leaf parts dotted the brick.
“Hmm. Looks like tire marks, but they’re too narrow for a car tire.” My gaze roamed the area nearby. “Look. There are more of them. The same marks on the sod.” They formed a trail that led from the maze entrance to where Milo’s car had been parked.
Ashley took out her phone and snapped some shots. “Yeah. Maybe a bike?”
“Maybe. It looks kind of wide for a bike, though, unless it was an old-school bike.”
“Okay. We’ve got a footprint that isn’t his and someone on a bike. Both point to another person. So, either Milo drove his car or someone else did.”
Lightheadedness overcame me as reality seeped in. I tuned out for a moment, floating in an emotional limbo, wishing I could press a reset button to the morning again. My mind drifted back to a couple of months earlier, before my father had died and when Milo was still my fiancé, when my life had been near perfect. But now? No father. No husband. What was next?
Ashley continued on her manic quest to inspect every square inch of the lot while I leaned against my car, praying I didn’t lose consciousness.
“I don’t see any security cameras, but they must have them, right?” When she got closer to me, her jaw dropped. “Oh my God. Tory, are you okay?”
I took a few deep breaths and exhaled slowly. “I’ll be fine.”
“Are you sure? Because your face matches the color of your dress right now.”
My exhaled breath ended with a spurt of laughter. “Um, thanks? Just felt woozy for a couple of seconds. I’m okay now.” I grasped her hands to steady myself and motioned with my head to a nearby light pole. “Look. That’s a security camera up there. We recommended them all over when we did the renovation. I’m not going to lie, I’m so grateful to my past self right now.”
“Don’t the security guards monitor the live feed? They’d have noticed any criminal activity.”
Criminal. I shuddered. The thought of foul play floated in my brain. Reading about or watching reports of violence in the news was one thing. To think that someone had possibly committed a violent act against someone I loved, my husband of thirty minutes, was a whole different ballgame, and it scared the daylights out of me. I trembled as I visualized someone striking Milo’s phone . . . and then him.
Ashley bobbed her head of ’fro curls around in front of me. “Look, his missing car is physical proof he’s gone. Tracking down a car might be easier than tracking down a person. It’s bigger and harder to hide. Hopefully, if we track down his car, we’ll find him. What do you think?”
“I think we should call the police and give them the car’s description.”
Ashley punched in a number on her phone. “I’ll call Adrian’s personal cell.”
She left a message referencing Milo’s disappearance and missing car.
“You have his number on speed dial?”
“Doesn’t everyone?”
I smiled. “Still carrying a torch for him?”
She gave me a meaningful look and smiled slightly. “Maybe. Okay, let’s forge ahead and see if we can track down Milo’s car. We can ask the hotel about the security camera footage when we get back.”
We climbed into my car. I buckled up and called Milo’s cell phone, forgetting we’d found it smashed and it was in my purse. I was officially living in a Twilight Zone episode. I called his landline one more time with no luck. “Should I trace the route to his town house first?”
Ashley fastened her seat belt. “Since he’s not answering his home phone, I’m assuming he’s not there. Why don’t we circle around the hotel neighborhood first as we’d planned?”
“Right.” I followed the narrow drive out of the parking lot and merged onto the main ring road around the hotel. “I’m going to focus on driving safely, Ash, so you’re the main lookout.”
“Okay. Good plan. Last thing we need is an accident.”
“You know what’s funny?”
“What?”
“Before we found the phone and the rock, my worst fear was that Milo had gotten into a car accident and was lying injured in a ditch somewhere in his mangled Fiat. That, or he’d had second thoughts and had taken off with a new girlfriend. But now . . .”
Ashley patted my shoulder gently.
A tear, then two, ran down my cheek. “But now it’s probably worse than either of those. I just feel awful not knowing where he is. What happened to him? Did he get kidnapped or murdered? I can’t deal with not knowing.”
“I’m worried too. Let’s try to keep positive.”
Taking Ashley’s advice, I fantasized we’d see Milo rolling into the lot. He’d greet us with a merry wave, his disarming smile, and a plausible explanation for his absence. He’d express profound regret for worrying us. My relief would wipe out any anger. I prayed for his safe return, vowing to be a nicer person if we could just find him safe and sound. I’d be grateful and all would be forgiven. I just wanted things to go back to the way they were yesterday.
After forty minutes of cruising the surrounding residential and commercial neighborhoods and entering and exiting the ramps of the 101 freeway, the main artery that ran through town, connecting San Francisco to Los Angeles, there was still no sign of Milo or his car anywhere.
I let out a sigh of frustration. “How about we backtrack now. Maybe we’ll notice something when we’re coming from a different direction.”
We were in a residential neighborhood south of the hotel that didn’t get a lot of traffic, so I made a U-turn at the next intersection. As I did so, a car a couple of car lengths behind me made the same move.
“Uh-oh.”
Ashley threw me an alarmed look. “What?”
“The car behind us just made a U-turn too. I think we’re being followed.”