Chapter Sixteen

Zoe laid awake for what seemed an eternity, going over and over in her mind about how her dad didn’t believe her about Grace’s book, and how he had said someone else had already written it years ago. Zoe hated him—hated him for his betrayal. Hot tears of anger ran down her cheeks. Why was she the only one who believed in Aunt Grace? Grace would never have treated her so meanly.

Wiping her eyes on her pajama sleeve, she thought back to when she was younger and Aunt Grace would sit on the edge of her bed and read to her. Like the Goosebumps books they had read together. Suddenly it occurred to Zoe that all the Goosebumps books had the same name—or at least the same first name—but they were all different books. And there were also those Star War movies Billy had. So it was possible Grace’s book was just part of a series. Maybe the full title of her book was Crime and Punishment II.

Zoe stared at the ceiling. Except, she pondered, it did not explain why Grace’s publisher said he had never heard of her. Unless 1) Dad called the wrong publisher, or 2) it was the right publisher and Detective Tasca had gotten to him first. With that thought in mind, Zoe fell asleep—a sleep filled with dreams of haunted houses and ghosts and bad cops.

She awoke in the morning to the loud honking of Canada geese flying over the house. She was about to put her pillow over her head when she became aware of another sound—the phone ringing downstairs. She sat up. Maybe it was Detective Tasca calling back about the passport.

Then she remembered there was a phone in the guest room. Aunt Grace had disconnected it because she had her own cell phone.

The phone downstairs rang again.

Zoe jumped out of bed and dashed down the hall into the guest room. The bed had been stripped and the room was bare—except for the furniture. The scent of Grace’s lily of the valley fragrance had been replaced by the smell of Lysol.

The ringing stopped.

Zoe frantically searched the closet for the phone. There it was—on the top shelf in the closet. She grabbed the Princess phone, plugged it into the jack beside the night table, and very carefully lifted the phone from its cradle.

“She probably just forgot she had his passport on her,” she heard her dad saying. “You know what grief can do to people.”

“That’s possible,” a woman’s voice replied—no doubt Detective Tasca’s. However, she didn’t sound convinced. Detective Tasca paused a few seconds, then said, “There’s been a new development.”

“Oh?” Dad’s voice answered.

“A potential witness has turned up—a tourist from Britain—an elderly woman who just heard about the story in a local tabloid. She thinks she may have seen something from the cable car that crosses over the monastery from the side of the mountain.”

Zoe felt a rush of relief. She wondered if the police had found a witness who saw the gypsies murder Luke.

“Well, let’s hope this clears Grace once and for all,” Dad replied, echoing Zoe’s very thoughts.

“Not exactly,” Detective Tasca said. “And there’s the matter of that letter.”

“Zoe?” Mom called from downstairs. “Are you up? I thought I heard you.”

Zoe quickly hung up the phone, thrust it back into the closet, and ran into the bathroom across the hall between her bedroom and Grace’s. She quickly flushed the toilet then stepped back into the doorway and called out, “I just got up. I’ll be down soon.”

“Take your time,” Mom replied.

Zoe returned to her room and dressed, all the while going over the phone conversation in her mind. What had Detective Tasca meant about a witness at the monastery in Spain where Luke was murdered?

Her curiosity getting the best of her, Zoe pulled the journal out from between her mattresses and skimmed through it. There were several more entries as well as more news clippings that Grace was probably collecting for her novel. Zoe skipped ahead to September. The first few entries were about the wedding and honeymoon, how happy Grace was, and the wonderful time she and Luke were having cruising the Mediterranean, basking in the warm sun, and visiting the Coliseum in Rome and the casinos of Monte Carlo.

Zoe turned the page. A picture of an old stone monastery on a mountainside was taped on the page opposite the entry. The entry read:

The more I think about what had happened this morning at the hotel, the angrier I get. Saying he loves me, that I mean the world to him and he’ll protect me. And then today shoving that damn locket in my face (really—he had no business searching through my makeup bag like he did) and accusing me of—well, need I say more? And here he was prattling on about turning me in—his own wife! Then he brings up that Tasca woman—says he’s going to “talk to her.ˮ Right. Well, I’ve just about had it with him.

Zoe closed the journal and took a deep breath. So her suspicions about Detective Tasca had been correct all along. But how was she going to let the police know Tasca was a crooked cop? She certainly could not tell her parents now—not after last night. Her own father was so mean right now he would probably turn her in to the police for stealing the journal in the first place.

When Zoe finally came downstairs for breakfast, Dad was sitting at the desk in the family room going over some papers. Mom was peering over his shoulder. Yoda was hunkered down in front of the glass doors, watching a pair of squirrels scampering from tree to tree.

Dad looked up. “Morning, Zoe,” he said. “Look, I’m sorry if I was harsh with you last night. I overreacted.”

Mom came over and put her arm around Zoe’s shoulder. “I thought we could do a little shopping this morning,” she said. “Get you a nice dress—maybe a pretty sweater—for the service and the funeral.”

Zoe gave a noncommittal shrug.

“You can pick out some new outfits for school too,” Mom said, doing her best to sound enthusiastic about the shopping trip. “Then maybe we can go to lunch afterward at Dave and Busters at Providence Place.”

“Can I invite Jen?” Zoe asked.

“Sure, sweetie, whatever you want.”

Jen, it turned out, couldn’t come to the mall with them because she had to babysit for her younger sister, but they agreed to meet at Hera’s Country Store near the Veterans’ Memorial Cemetery later that afternoon.