Page 16 of The Newcomer
Sascha Hallowell was married to Evan’s Princeton classmate Skipper. She’d pretended to like Letty, but as Tanya later confided, “She thinks we’re both a couple of hillbilly hayseeds. What Sascha doesn’t know is that good ol’ Skippy tried to put his hand up my skirt the last time we had dinner at their place.”
Letty could picture the sneer on Sascha’s face when she referred to Tanya as “that girl.”
She was scanning the rest of the story when she spotted Ava’s son Joe sauntering out of the motel office toward the parking lot.She watched as he walked slowly through the parked vehicles, stopping behind her Kia. He took out his phone and clicked off a few frames of the license plate, did a slow circle around the car, then got in his own truck and drove away.
Letty froze. She thought she’d been so smart buying that car. After renting a car at Newark Airport the previous Sunday night, she’d driven as far south as Raleigh, North Carolina, before checking into a fleabag motel.
Maya had finally stopped crying, and the two of them had fallen asleep almost as soon as they hit the bed, not waking until glaring sunlight blasted through the thin draperies. She’d been horrified to see that they’d slept past noon. She’d hustled Maya out of bed, put her in the shower with her, and headed back toward the interstate.
Of course, the child screeched with joy when she spotted the golden arches at the strip of shopping centers and fast-food joints near the interstate on-ramp. They were devouring their chicken nuggets and French fries when Letty noticed the car parked several yards away, facing traffic. It was a silver Kia with aFOR SALEsign posted prominently on the dashboard, and it offered the solution to something she’d been worried about since leaving the Hertz lot at Newark.
She’d rented an Acura with Tanya’s credit card. Although Letty was three inches shorter with hair several shades darker than Tanya’s, on a driver’s license photo she could easily pass for her younger sister.
The police would probably be looking for her by now. Maybe they had found Tanya’s Mercedes in Newark already, or maybe not. Maybe they had traced the credit card and seen that it had been used at the Hertz counter. Maybe she was already the subject of a multi-state manhunt. She needed to ditch the rental car, and fast.
From the plastic booth in McDonald’s, Letty called the number on the Kia’s dashboard sign and, after a short discussion about price and the car’s mileage, arranged to meet the seller in the Hertz lot at the Raleigh-Durham airport. He pulled up alongside her atthe appointed time, got out of the Kia, and seemed surprised to find someone who looked like Letty standing there, clutching the hand of a little girl, surrounded by two small suitcases and a child’s car seat.
“Here’s the keys,” he said. “And the title. You gotta sign it right there.”
She wrote her name on the registration in a deliberately illegible scrawl, then handed him the money. He counted the bills and nodded. “I gassed it up like you asked.”
“Thanks,” Letty said.
Now she didn’t know what to do about the Kia, or Joe the cop. Should she move on? Where would she go? The Murmuring Surf seemed like as good a place as any to lie low and figure out her next move. Tanya must have had a reason for saving that magazine article about the motel. But sooner or later she’d need a job. She didn’t want to touch any more of the money in Tanya’s stash than was absolutely necessary. That was Maya’s money, as far as Letty was concerned.
Right now, though, her most urgent concern was to keep as far away from Maya’s father as possible.
“Letty,” Maya said, tugging at the hem of her shirt. “Let’s go to the beach now, okay?” She kicked her sandal-clad feet. “Swimmy, swimmy, swimmy.”
“Okay,” Letty promised. “As soon as the laundry’s done.”
7
JOE PAINSTAKINGLY TYPED THE LICENSEtag number into the South Carolina Division of Motor Vehicles database. After a few moments, he had the answer to one of the questions in the list he’d compiled about their newest guest at the Murmuring Surf.
The Kia was registered to a Myles Nordan, in Pickens, South Carolina, a town he’d never heard of. He wrote down the name, then entered Nordan’s name into the South Carolina DMV database.
Nordan, it seemed, owned lots of cars. Eight, to be exact. So maybe he was a small-scale used-car dealer?
He rested his stubby fingertips lightly on the computer keyboard. He would have liked to type Letty’s name into the National Crime Information Center Database, but he didn’t actually know her last name. As he’d pointed out to his too-trusting mother earlier that morning, there was very little they did know about this newcomer.
His sergeant poked his head into Joe’s cubicle. “Hey, ace. Got a situation at Sharky’s. Some drunk parked in their lot and wandered off to the beach. Their security guard called for the tow truck, which arrived at the same time as the drunk, who decided to take a swing at the guard.”
The Treasure Island Police Department was small, with eight uniformed officers and two detectives, including Joe DeCurtis, but with a department that small, the distinction between patrol and detective was frequently blurred. Like today.
“On it,” Joe said.
Hedidn’t get back to the computer until two hours later. By then, he had a last name to go with Letty’s first name. It was Carnahan. When he typed her whole name into the search engine, his screen lit up.
He shook his head as the pieces to the puzzle began to fall in place. Shit. Letty Carnahan was a fugitive, wanted for murder, who, if you believed the tabloid news accounts, abducted that little girl who’d already claimed Ava’s heart. She was living at the Murmuring Surf. It would only take one phone call. Just one.
If he went by the rule book, he’d make that call. But his cop’s intuition, which had never failed him, told him that there was much more to this story. He would hold off on that phone call until he had all the pieces of the Letty Carnahan puzzle.
Mayasat in waist-deep water, the gentle waves washing against her chest. She leaned back against Letty. “Fishes,” she said, pointing at the small shadowy green shapes darting beneath the surface of the water.
“Minnows,” Letty said, giving the child a hug. “Little baby fishes, just like you.”
“I’m not a baby. I’m Mommy’s big girl.” Maya turned to her aunt. “Where’s Mommy?”
