The Beautiful and the Wicked Read online

  “Exactly.”

  “An ex-­con. Sounds about right. And no one on the boat has ever met this Nicky Collins?”

  “Never. She’s a fresh hire. So, there shouldn’t be any problem.”

  “But, look,” Teddy said as he studied one of the papers. “The agency sent a picture of her to the head stewardess for approval.”

  “True. But I think we look similar enough.” Lila snatched Nicky’s picture back from Teddy’s hands and held it next to her face for his inspection. True, Lila was more beautiful than the woman in the picture, but they had similarly fine noses and wide mouths.

  “I guess,” Teddy said hesitantly. “But your hair will have to go.”

  “Won’t be the first time.”

  “And how are you planning on bumping her off her gig?”

  “You know me, Teddy. I’ll read the situation once I get there. But, worst-­case scenario, I’ll offer her fifty grand to get lost. That’s the kind of money it’s hard to say no to.”

  Huddled together over reams and reams of evidence, Lila laid out her plan until the wee small hours of night, only pausing to gobble down artfully plated Japanese food served up by Conrad.

  By 2 A.M. even the rowdy street noise from below had died down and Lila felt overcome with exhaustion as the stress from a long day finally got to her. She needed to go to bed, but first she had to show Teddy the video. She grabbed her laptop.

  “The first few months after Jack’s death were some of the darkest of my life,” Lila said. “I couldn’t believe that my sister was gone. All I wanted was to see her again and, with each passing day, I felt like there was less and less of a chance that she’d ever come out of hiding. And the way the press vilified her didn’t help matters either. My certainty that she was innocent began to falter. I mean, she hadn’t told me anything about Jack. I began to wonder if I knew her at all. Then I found this video.”

  Lila pressed play. Teddy watched it carefully, looking intently at the heavily made up TV reporter standing in the shadows of Jack’s giant yacht.

  “What am I looking at?” Teddy asked.

  “It’s coming up in a few seconds, at a minute and forty-­three seconds. Watch the far left side of the screen.”

  When the video got to that moment, Lila hit pause and pointed. “That’s my sister, right there,” she said, tapping the screen.

  Teddy squinted, seeing the fuzzy outlines of a woman with long blond hair wearing a canary-­yellow dress. “This is the last video ever recorded of her. According to the testimonies given by witnesses, this is the day she boarded the boat. But the crew boarded the boat several days before.”

  “Okay,” he said cautiously.

  “She’s beautiful, isn’t she?” Lila said, staring at the screen.

  She felt his eyes on her, watching her watch her sister.

  “She’s just a blur.”

  Lila felt an electric current of irritation run through her at Teddy’s offhanded dismissal of something so precious to her. This quick video of her sister alive had given her so much comfort, but she couldn’t exactly say why.

  Teddy walked over to a wall that Lila had covered in nautical charts, mapping the course of The Rising Tide through its Caribbean tour. She could tell he was trying to figure out how to say something difficult. She felt her body tense in anticipation.

  “I hate to say this, but . . .” He paused. “No matter what you prove, you may only be clearing Ava’s name posthumously.” Teddy cleared his throat. “I mean, the boat she used to escape was found capsized with traces of her blood and Jack’s blood on it. And it’s been, what, over ten years since she’s disappeared? I don’t mean to be too pessimistic, but maybe they never found her because she’s . . . gone. And then what would be the point of all of this? You can’t change the past, that’s the rule. So Jack can’t be saved, which means you’d be putting yourself in so much danger and through so much emotional agony to exonerate a woman who was lost a long time ago.”

  “She’s alive, Teddy,” Lila said, feeling a tightness grip her chest. “I know she is.”

  “How? The same way you know she’s innocent despite every damn piece of evidence pointing to her guilt? Lila, all this,” he said, gesturing around the room, “really concerns me. I think you’re so mired in the details that you aren’t asking yourself the tough questions.”

  “Trust me on this, Teddy.”

  “I don’t think I can. I know you’re not seeing things clearly.”

  “Maybe the real problem here is that you doubt everything too much. You don’t know what it’s like to believe in a person, to have faith in someone.”

  He shook his head, as if saddened by Lila’s display of naïveté. “I have faith in you, Lila.”

  “Then let me do this.”

  She caught his gaze, but he quickly looked away. She could tell he wasn’t convinced. Knowing she’d have to put all her cards on the table, she said, “There’s one last thing I need to show you.”

  Lila left her office and walked to her bedroom without saying another word. The sky was a purplish black with a sliver of moon hanging low on the horizon. The sliding glass door was open, letting in the sound of crashing ocean waves and wind-­rustled palm trees. Teddy silently followed her, standing in her doorway as Lila went into the bedroom closet. There was an intimacy in the act of entering her bedroom that gave him pause. She pushed her clothes out of the way and punched numbers into a wall safe she’d installed the first week she moved in. The safe’s heavy metal door clicked open and Lila removed a small wooden chest, about the size of a shoe box.

  Her fingers gripped the box carefully, as if its contents were explosive. She left the bedroom, setting the chest down on the dining room table.

  “This is hard for me,” Lila said. “I didn’t even show these to my mom on her deathbed. So you’ve got to promise that what you’re about to see stays between us and no one else.”

  “Of course,” Teddy said quietly, matching Lila’s solemn tone.

  “Because if anyone finds out what I have here, I could be in big trouble.”

  “You can trust me, Lila. You know you can.”

  She slowly, ceremoniously, opened the box. Its contents were wrapped up in a pure-­white muslin. As she unwound the cloth, Teddy saw she was holding a stack of small landscape paintings, each about the size of a paperback book. “This,” Lila said in a whisper as she placed each painting on the table, “is how I know Ava is still alive.”

  Laying them out carefully in one long row, she pointed to one that showed sugarcane fields in the foreground and a large mountain range in the background. “This was the first one I received. It came in December 2008, only three months after she went into hiding, a few weeks after I turned twenty-­one.”

  “It’s magnificent,” Teddy said. And it was.

  Lila admired the painting with a small smile. “Ever since I was a little girl, Ava always painted me something for my birthday. And even in hiding, she kept doing it. Each painting is from a different place. This looks like Cuba. In 2009, I got this one that looks like coastal South America. The next year, Mount Kilimanjaro was painted in the far background. Then Greece. Then several from South Asia. This last one looks like she’s back in South America. I’ve stared at each of them for countless hours, trying to decipher any code.”

  “Don’t the stamps tell you where they’re from?”

  “Not always. One year the stamp on the package was from Argentina but the painting was clearly from somewhere in Africa. Two years ago, she sent me this painting of what looks like Thailand, but it was sent from Tanzania. What I do know is that she’s circled the globe and back trying to outrun something she didn’t do.”

  “Does she ever include a note? Telling you she’s innocent?”

  “Never. She’d know it would be too risky for her and for me. But I hoped I could find some answers
in the paintings themselves. I even worked with an old forger I knew from my days back on the force. He helped me have all the canvases analyzed and the various pigments examined.” She shrugged. “I thought I could find out where she purchased her materials, but that didn’t go anywhere. It was all basic stuff, impossible to trace. Then I had each painting tested using infrared reflectography, which lets you actually see what’s on the canvas underneath the paint, just in case she’d written me something. And that came up empty, too, except for the painting I got in 2018. It’s this one.” She picked it up. It was of a town square dominated by an old Spanish Colonial church. “The postage came from Quito, Peru, but, after spending months researching churches in this style, I finally discovered that this one is from San Cristóbal de las Casas in Chiapas, Mexico.”

  “And there was something written on the canvas?”

  “Not written, but drawn. They uncovered a pencil sketch Ava had made on the surface of the canvas before she painted it. I’ve got a printout of the image here.” She grabbed a folded sheet of paper from the bottom of the box and handed it to Teddy. It was a sketch of two children in swimsuits holding hands by the shore. Then Lila pointed to a framed photograph she had on her side table, of the exact same image from real life. “It’s one of my favorite pictures. The one with the pigtails is me. It was taken Christmas Day in Key Largo. I was five, but I remember that day so vividly. Teddy,” she said, turning toward him, her voice breaking, “I need my sister back. She’s been on the run for so long. And I think what this pencil drawing means is that she’s ready to come home. And I’m the only one who can make it safe for her to come out of hiding.” She felt tears come to her eyes but blinked them back. She needed to appear strong, even though inside she worried that if Teddy didn’t let her go back in time, she would crumble.

  Teddy took Lila’s hand and squeezed it. A look of understanding passed between the two friends. Then he picked up his phone, and even though it was after two in the morning, his faithful manservant picked up on the second ring. “Conrad, can you come join us? Lady Day is going on another trip and we need to make sure she’s got all she needs. Passport. License. Cash. You know the drill.”

  Lila was beaming. “Do you mean it?”

  “Yes,” he said, then frowned. “But, Lila, promise me that this time you’ll play by the rules. Keep your nose clean. No affairs. No drinking. Form no attachments. And, most importantly, don’t interfere with the past.”

  “I promise,” Lila said quickly, careful not to say anything that might change his mind.

  “And this time you’ve got to keep your promises,” he warned her. Lila knew he was thinking of the Star Island murders, and how she’d tried to change fate. “Promise me you’ll let Jack Warren die.”

  “I will.” That was an easy promise to make. In this whole sad saga, the one thing that Lila never wanted to change was the moment when those four bullets were shot into Jack Warren’s body. As far as she was concerned, the world was a better place without him.

  CHAPTER 4

  TWO DAYS LATER, wearing a white hazmat suit that covered her from head to toe, Lila climbed into Teddy’s time-­traveling contraption, ready to go back to 2008. Every detail had been ironed out, every move had been talked through, but the moment she strapped herself in and Teddy’s face appeared on the screen before her eyes, she felt her nerves kick in.

  Lila didn’t know the first thing about how time travel worked, and frankly, she knew she never would. The science behind it was beyond her. But she did know there were dangers. She’d felt them firsthand as the physical toll of time travel wore on her with each and every trip. But as long as it got her where she wanted to go, it was worth it. This gift of traveling back in time to solve cold cases was worth every moment of panic and pain. It was what she imagined women felt like after they’d given birth—­that all the excruciating agony of labor was instantly erased once it was over. The miracle of the reward trumped the cost.

  And no case had ever mattered more to her than this one. At last, she’d prove to the world that her sister was innocent.

  Conrad’s disembodied voice came over the speakers. “We are approximately T-­minus-­ten from inflationary vacuum state.”

  She didn’t have much time. Her heart began to race.

  “Want to know my favorite Jack Warren joke?” Teddy asked, watching her from the control room. All her vitals were being intensely monitored, so he’d have seen that her pulse was racing.

  “Not really.” Lila wasn’t in a joking mood. Whenever she was feeling overwhelmed or stressed, Teddy was quick to try to lighten the mood. It drove her crazy—­even though, most of the time, his distractions worked.

  “What’s the difference between God and Jack Warren?” Teddy asked.

  “What?”

  “God doesn’t think he’s Jack Warren.”

  Lila smiled. She hadn’t heard that one before. Then her mind shot off in so many different directions. Was she prepared? Would she finally be able to clear her sister’s name? Or was Teddy right—­was she too close to this case to have the perspective she needed?

  “Lila?” Teddy called out, snapping her out of her ramble down second-­guess lane. He and Conrad were both in the control room, peering at her on the screen just inches from her face.

  “What?” she said.

  “Everything okay?”

  “Of course it is,” she said somewhat defensively. She wrapped her hands around the briefcase on her lap, which was full of the supplies she always brought on a case: her gun; handcuffs; one hundred grand in cash; freshly forged documents, this time under the name Nicky Collins; and all her case info scanned and archived onto a thumb drive.

  And, one thing extra. For this trip she’d decided to bring an object of sentimental value. In between the stacks of bills, she tucked the picture of her and her sister holding hands on the beach all those years ago. It wasn’t a good idea to take along anything that connected Lila to her real life, and she knew that, which was why she didn’t disclose the decision to Teddy. But she needed to keep that token of her sister close. She needed to remember why she was doing all this.

  “Ready?” Conrad asked.

  Lila took a deep, bracing breath. “I’m ready when you are,” she said, though she didn’t feel ready.

  Though this was Lila’s sixth go-­round “slipping through the wormhole,” as Teddy so cavalierly called it, the process never failed to put the fear of God into her.

  The lights turned off inside the machine, but she could still hear Teddy’s voice. “Good luck, Lila. See you on the other side.”

  “We are T-­minus-­two from inflationary vacuum state,” Conrad said, sounding more like a computer than a man.

  Almost instantly, the contraption began to violently shudder. Then came the deafening whir, preparing for what Lila thought of as “lift-­off,” though there was no lifting at all. Then, the last thing she heard was Teddy’s voice booming into her ears, counting down her departure from this world out into the frightening unknown.

  “Ten . . . nine . . . eight . . . seven . . .”

  The first part was scary enough. Even a stoic like Lila would own up to that. But what came next was so much worse, simply because what came next was impossible to categorize, to name, to equate with anything that fit within the physical laws of the known world.

  Suddenly a veil of blackness and silence enveloped her. It was a darkness so profound that it seemed as if no light had ever existed at all.

  Her spatial awareness began to waver and distort. She felt tiny in a vast space and then gigantic in a shrinking space. Then her very body seemed to fall away until she was unable to differentiate between her own corporeal form and the hovering nothingness surrounding it, as if she had dissolved entirely.

  The final phase, to Lila’s mind, was the one she most dreaded. It was the endless plummeting. It reminded her of that brief
but terrifying feeling of falling that sometimes tore her out of early sleep. But in time travel that feeling went on almost forever. She had once asked Teddy how long the process of time travel actually took, but he answered her only in riddles. “Somewhere between an instant and an eternity,” he’d said, with his typical sly grin. Lila wasn’t amused. She liked things black and white.

  So here she was, once again falling between two parallel fields of time, quite convinced that this go-­round would be her last, that she’d never make it out of this thing alive. And, once again, just at the very moment that she felt herself giving in to the fact that she was forever doomed, there was a surge of light and a breath-­halting tug upward on her entire body, as if an invisible rip cord had been pulled to stop her free fall.

  And then she found herself thrust back into the known world, spread flat, her back pressed against a cold cement floor. For a long, terrifying moment she had no idea who she was or where she was. She scrambled woozily to her feet, trying to force her mind and body to shake off the recent traumas. She needed to get her shit together, and fast.

  With her heart pounding in her chest, her eyes darted around the strange space as she tried to fit the puzzle pieces together. But she was lost in the fog of the unknown until, after a few frantic minutes, the flood of adrenaline coursing through her body helped snap her out of her stupor. Then, like a momentarily forgotten name suddenly remembered, she instantly recognized her surroundings. The bare-­bones, cinderblock room in which she was currently standing was in a North Miami storage building. She’d been there plenty of time before as it, bizarrely, served as the sole opening to Teddy’s time-­traveling portal. Even Teddy couldn’t explain why this was the geographic location on the other end of his time warp. Lila didn’t dwell on it. She was back in time, and that was all that mattered.

  The first thing she did was immediately open the metal briefcase that sat at her feet, checking to make sure that the money, the gun, and her data had made the time leap with her. Relieved to see it all there, she rubbed her hand over the crisp dollar bills and the gun’s elegant barrel, grabbed a solid steel padlock from beneath one of the $10,000 stacks of hundred-­dollar bills, and took one look at the photo of her sister before clicking the briefcase closed. She peeled off the hazmat suit and headed out of the room, securing the padlock to the door and slipping one of the keys, which she had attached to a thin silver chain, around her neck. She tucked the other key above the doorframe of an adjacent storage unit. On Lila’s first-­ever time-­travel trip, an unexpected lock on this very door had almost prevented her from returning to the present, coming close to stranding her in the past forever. Needless to say, she’d learned from that mistake.