Free The Girl with a Clock for a Heart: A Novel by Peter Swanson Page B

up two fingers as though he were giving a presentation. “First, one of the higher-ups at my company came to me and said that he’d been working late one night, and that when he came to see if I was in my office he found Jane going through my file cabinets. He said that he wouldn’t have thought twice about it, but that she had one of the drawers completely pulled out and was running her hand along the insides of the cabinet, as though she was looking for something hidden, maybe an envelope, or something stuck to the inside of the cabinet. Here’s the rub. I actually did have my office safe’s number stuck inside one of my cabinets. I didn’t generally use it because I have the numbers up here pretty good”—MacLean tapped his right temple—“but just to be on the safe side, I’d written them out on an envelope label and stuck them inside one of the cabinets. I had no recollection of ever telling Jane anything about hiding away secret stuff like that, but I might have. I didn’t know what to make of it. The thing was, if Jane had really wanted the safe combination, I would have gladly given it to her.
    “Then came the second part. One night I was staying over at Jane’s apartment, and she had to step out for a few things. I won’t pretend I wasn’t snooping, but I happened to be sitting at her desk, looking at her computer, and I started going through her desk drawer. There wasn’t much in it, but there were a few photographs, including a couple of snapshots from Barbados. I knew they were from Barbados because she was right in front of the Cockle Bay. I thought they must be pretty old photographs because (A) they were actual photographs, not something from a computer, and (B) in them Jane had long hair that was kind of a streaky blond. It totally changed her appearance. I flipped the picture over, and it had one of those time stamps on it, with the date, that tells you when the photograph was taken. The picture was from just one month before I’d come down to Barbados, just one month before I’d met Jane.
    “And it suddenly all clicked. Jane knew that I had a lot of money and that I was booked to come to the Cockle Bay, and she must have researched me, or Googled me or whatever, and found out I’d had two wives. I’m sure she saw pictures of them, and she changed her hair so that she’d look like my first wife. I could prove none of this, of course, in a court of law, nor did I want to. But I felt like a fool. I didn’t say anything to Jane right away, but I did have her checked out. I hired . . . this person to look into her background, and he found absolutely nothing. And not nothing as in nothing bad, but nothing as in nothing at all. There was no Jane Byrne. There were people with that name, of course, but none of them were the woman I knew. There was no past history, nothing to make it seem like she had actually ever existed.”
    He paused again, and George asked, “What did you do?”
    “I didn’t go to her with everything I suspected because . . . because I don’t know . . . but I did tell her that spending time with Teresa . . . with Teresa dying . . . had changed my mind about my relationship with her and that I needed it to stop. But she knew that I knew, and I saw something go out of her eyes, like she didn’t need to pretend anymore. She told me she’d remove herself from my life, and I foolishly decided to not have her escorted from the office that very minute. I told her she could stick around till she figured out what to do next.
    “Well, you know the rest. She stole a half million dollars from me and disappeared. I could almost have forgiven her and just let it go—it wasn’t that much money—but I kept remembering that black hair and those blue eyes and how much she reminded me of my wife when I first laid eyes on her.”
    MacLean sucked a rattling breath in through his nose. “Long story short, the cunt played me from the very beginning.” A tiny spray of spit