Free The Secret Hour by Luanne Rice Page B

don’t recall seeing her name in any of the materials…if she was here then,” John said carefully. “Why didn’t you contact the police?”
      “Because I didn’t know she’d been here…at that time.”
      “I don’t understand.”
      “We tracked her to Newport, Rhode Island. She was…getting over a bad love affair.” Kate could hardly get the words out; they rasped at her throat like sandpaper, as if they could make her bleed all over again. “She’d driven up from Washington, checked into an inn there—a bed-and-breakfast, really. Very much like the East Wind.”
      “One of the old mansions?”
      “Yes, on Ocean Drive. Just around the bend from Breton Point.”
      “She told you she was going there?”
      Kate shook her head. “No. She didn’t tell anyone. But after she’d been missing for a week, and I hadn’t heard from her—”
      “A week’s not very long to get over a bad love affair,” John shot out.
      “No, but it’s six days longer than she and I had ever gone without talking,” Kate flung back. “She had never not called me for a whole week. I was worried after the second day…” She drew a breath, remembering the terrible circumstances. “And getting frantic after the fourth. I called Matt, and he convinced me to wait, to give her space…We’d had a fight, you see, Willa and I…That was so rare.” Kate’s eyes filled with hot tears, but she brushed them away before John could see.
      “How did you find out she’d been to Newport?”
      “Like you said, a credit card trail. I called the D.C. police; they found them. And phone records. She’d called the man—her reason for running off in the first place, but she couldn’t stay away from him. She called him every day…”
      “But not you,” John said. His tone was suddenly soft, and by the way he turned his head to look, Kate knew that he understood her pain. The lighthouse beam flashed through the car, illuminating his eyes.
        “Not me. She didn’t call me once.”
      John nodded, and she thought she heard him let out a long, low breath. His knuckles were white on the steering wheel—did he know something he wasn’t saying? Kate’s pulse began to race.
      “Then what? After you tracked her to Newport?”
      “The police said she’d checked out of Seven Chimneys Inn on Tuesday, April fifth. She made a call to Andrew—her…lover—that night, and again the next morning. Then, nothing. No phone calls, almost no credit card activity. On Thursday, her Texaco card was used in Fairhaven, Massachusetts. On Friday, her MasterCard was used at a camping supply store in Providence.”
      “But nothing on the Connecticut shoreline,” John said.
      “No.”
      “No credit card use, no phone calls originating from the area.”
      “Nothing.”
      “Then,” John said, turning to gaze into Kate’s eyes, “what makes you say what you did? That my client killed Willa?”
      “Because she was here ,” Kate whispered, the word “killed” like a knife in the wind. She would never get used to it, “killed” in the same sentence as “Willa.” Fumbling in her pocket, she pulled out the postcard. “She sent me this.”
      Passing it across the seat, she saw John hold it up, braced against the steering wheel. They sped along the Shore Road, and he looked at the picture—of the scene just to their right—the rocks and lighthouse of Silver Bay—and read Willa’s writing by the streetlights overhead. Closing her eyes, Kate went over the message she now knew by heart.
     
    Hi, Katy,
      I’m okay…are you? It’s all been too much, and it’s gone on for too long. I’m so sorry about everything, and especially, now, about making you worry, making you wait to talk. I hate what I did to you…I’ll be on my way home soon…Bonnie likes it here—there’s a long beach, and she runs along the tide line…It reminds me of home—of Chincoteague. I wish you could be here—maybe