Page 86 of The Newcomer
R U home? I’ve got something!
Letty grabbed a towel and mopped up the spilled tea, then texted back.
Yes. Home. Come now.
Sheheard the buzz of the Vespa approaching, and walked out onto the breezeway to wave the girl inside.
“Maya’s asleep,” Letty cautioned as they entered the unit. She gently closed the bedroom door.
“Oh man,” Sierra said, as she removed her helmet and began to unload her backpack onto the table. “This was a blast. I mean, it was crazy complicated, but I was totally into figuring it out, onceI got started. It’s definitely high-tech, but it was WiFi enabled, like I thought. Normally these cameras only sync up to the network where the camera was installed. Because, like, if you’re watching your nanny, you’re not watching her everywhere. You’re just watching her at your house, right?”
“Oh-kay, I guess that makes sense.”
“But this camera—it was uploading to your sister’s iCloud.”
Sierra flipped the top of her laptop and powered it up. “I didn’t watch all of it,” Sierra said, as she clicked some keys and brought up Tanya’s iCloud. “Here’s one of the video clips. I think Ellie must have been sitting on a table nearby, because the video quality is better than a lot of the other stuff.”
To Letty’s surprise, the video was in color. The image was blurry, but as soon as Sierra tapped the arrow on the film clip, she immediately recognized Evan’s voice, and saw him, in soft focus, sitting at a table, drinking a glass of red wine.
“Maya!” His voice was sharp, irritated. “Stop dropping food on the floor. You’re a big girl now. Big girls don’t do that.”
Letty heard but couldn’t see Maya, who began crying. “I’m sowwy Daddy.”
A woman’s voice came from off camera. “Evan honey, leave her be. It’s a few Cheerios. I’ll sweep it up when she’s done.”
“That’s not the point, Juliette. She’s turning into a little slob, because Tanya lets her get away with crap like that.”
Evan’s girlfriend moved into camera range. She was lovely, slender with long hair and dressed in a flowing, gauzy green caftan.Just his type,Letty thought. Juliette began massaging his shoulders. “You’re still cranky because of your meeting with the co-op board. Can’t you let it go?”
“No! You don’t understand. They’ve hired a lawyer, and they’re threatening to take me to court over my units in that building. I haven’t been able to rent them out for nearly two months now. Do you have any idea what that’s costing me in lost income, not to mention the legal fees I’m looking at?”
“Well, what are you going to do about it?”
He sighed. “The debt service on those units is killing me. Looks like I might have to sell.”
“Oh no,” she laughed. “The great Evan Wingfield is going to sell? I thought you only bought.”
“Not funny,” he snapped. “The good news is, my girl Vikki is working out great. That last city inspector was a pain in the ass. Every time I turned around, he had his hand out. Lucky for me, I heard he got canned. Vikki’s gonna work out just fine.”
“How do you know you can trust her?” Juliette asked.
“I just know. I get vibes from people. Vikki’s vibe is mellow. She’s not greedy. Realizes she’ll make more in the long run if she works with me.”
“And what kind of vibe did you get from Tanya?”
He turned to look at her. “Don’t start. She was an unfortunate, temporary lapse in good judgment.”
Juliette leaned down and kissed his neck. “Oh, Evan. Relax. I’m just teasing you. If it weren’t for Tanya, we wouldn’t have Maya now, would we?”
“That’s true,” he said, pulling his girlfriend onto his lap. “And if we ever get done with all this custody shit, we’ll have Maya full-time, and get her crazy mother out of my hair once and for all.”
Maya’s voice chimed in from off camera. “All done! JuJu, I want grapes.”
“Grapes, please!” Evan yelled. “Jesus, she’s just like her hillbilly mother. No manners.”
Lettywinced at the mention of her late sister’s name. It was jarring, hearing Evan’s voice after all these months, and even more disturbing hearing the way he interacted with Maya.
“There’s a lot of this kind of stuff,” Sierra told her, pausing the video. “It’s a ton of data, so I broke it up into individual files and put them on a thumb drive for you. The original files are date-stamped,by the way, so it looks like your sister put the nanny cam into the elephant back in November. The most recent date on any of the files was from February twenty-eighth.”
