Free Slightly Abridged by Ellen Pall Page B

the police radio, notify the MTA officers, the Port Authority, the airports. They’d run her name, description, and where she was last seen through the NCIC, a national data base listing people the police were looking for, send a description in if they didn’t find her there already. They’d see if they could pick up a credit card charge—maybe she’d charged a theater ticket last night. They’d talk to the police in Espyville, get the names of some neighbors and relatives. And of course—Lopez gave another glance at Landis—they would check the New York hospitals. And the morgue.
    If Suzy would kindly call her phone company now and get a
list of outgoing calls since Mrs. Caffrey arrived, that might help, too. It was a lot quicker for Suzy to ask for this than for the police to get it, they explained. They would also search her building from top to bottom, beginning with the old lady’s room, if Suzy didn’t mind.
    At this, Suzy’s hands, already tightly clasped together, began to writhe. Could they please just tell anyone they spoke to that a friend of hers had vanished, not a paying guest? A furtive awareness that she had never paid the tax due to the city for the room she rented out told her to keep her mouth shut, but the vision of cops knocking on her neighbors’ doors, referring to “Ms. Eisenman’s bed-and-breakfast” trumped this. Lopez and Glowacki had no objection.
    As Suzy picked up the phone to call MCI, they went into Ada’s room. Landis also stood up to go. He winked at Juliet.
    â€œI’ll get back to the house now and get ahold of my partner. We’ll call your friend Dennis, start from that end, retrace her steps. Don’t worry,” he added, smiling into Juliet’s anxious face. “We’re gonna find her. She’s gotta be somewhere, right?”
    He meant it for comfort. But both women immediately pictured Ada dead.

chapter FIVE
    Mrs. Caffrey Back Again
    On the following Tuesday, the day when Ada Caffrey indeed proved to be “somewhere,” Juliet was busy making Selena Walkingshaw discourse with her younger sister on the always interesting (Juliet hoped) topic of love.
    The two girls were seated in a gazebo at their uncle’s estate waiting for a summer shower to pass. Catherine was arguing that love between man and woman was a thing apart from other kinds of affection. Romantic love, she said, “comes suddenly and gives the heart no more notice than a springing tiger.”
    But Selena (thinking secretly of Sir James, of course—she was unaware of Captain Vizor’s infatuation with her) insisted that, like friendship, romantic attachment could grow “quietly, by degrees, from affinity through affection and so on to—”
    Here Selena blushed, to the puzzlement of her sister, who was evidently too much of a dork to realize her sister was in love with Sir James. Neither lady mentioned that they were having this conversation only because the author responsible for them was vamping until she could come up with the next piece of plot, though that would have been truer and more to the point than their various observations.
    Instead, Selena was attempting to divert her sister’s attention from her own scarlet cheeks by pointing out a cardinal perched on
a nearby branch (were there cardinals in England in 1813? Did they turn up in the spring? Were they rare enough that it would be worth a person’s breath to point one out?) when the phone rang in Ames’s office. A few moments later, there was a reluctant tap on Juliet’s door.
    â€œI’m so sorry, Dr. Bodine—”
    â€œThat’s okay,” Juliet called. “What is it?”
    â€œDetective Landis is on the phone.”
    Ames opened the door, and at the sight of her large, plain face, Juliet felt a jolt of fear. For once, blankness had eluded her assistant: Ames was upset, and Juliet thought she knew why. Four