Fatal Connections

Chapter 75

After making a couple of phone calls, I drove to the Harcourts' house to meet Amy. By the time I reached the area, part of the neighborhood had been thrown into shadow by the patch of woods near the Harcourt house. But the setting sun gave the neighborhood's widely spaced trees a faint glow, and their thin shadows made stripes across the neatly manicured lawns. I parked close to the house but not directly in front of it.

All of my senses were on high alert as I left the car. Clutching an 8.5- by 11-inch envelope of papers, I approached the Harcourts' house. Ever since the episode with Benny, this place creeped me out. God only knew who might be out there watching. Would I get an arrow or a bullet to the head? My concerns about privacy took a back seat to my concerns about survival. Of course, by now, my backup might be in place or nearly there, which provided some reassurance.

With the hope that only the best had been hired to clean up what remained of the former owners, I approached the front door and knocked. Within a minute, Amy opened up. She wore a T-shirt adorned with what could have been the name of a band or maybe a new meme. Along with a pair of distressed jeans that looked outright tortured at the knees.

"C'mon in," she said, turning and leaving me to close the door.

"Have a seat," she called from deeper inside. "Want a drink?"

"No thanks." Not from you. I settled onto the beige cushions of a sofa with two Santa Fe–patterned accent pillows and set my envelope on the coffee table. I think the color scheme was supposed to be "relaxing," but it didn't do much for me. The pillows did provide a vivid splash of oranges, yellows, and browns against the neutral backdrop.

Amy returned with a steaming mug of what smelled like coffee. I kept an eye on that cup. She took a seat in a dark-brown accent chair to my left, set down the mug, and folded her hands in her lap. Then, she gazed at me, expectant.

"Amy," I said. "You need to come clean with the police." Her look of disbelief might have convinced me of her innocence at one time, but not anymore.

"What are you talking about?"

I moved the envelope toward her. "You might want to have a look at this."

Amy stared at me for what seemed like a very long time. And then she turned toward the envelope. Moving slowly, as if she were fighting against the current in a wind tunnel, she picked up the envelope, peeked inside, frowned, and slid the papers and photos out onto the table.

"Yeah. So?"

"Take a look at this photo." On my phone, I displayed the one I'd taken of the Harcourts from Calhoun's Wall of Fame. "Who's in it?"

Amy's frown deepened into a scowl. "My Mom and Dad. And some other people."

"Some other people?" I suppressed the urge to laugh. With a two-fingered swipe, I enlarged the photo, keeping the background images in frame. "Who are these two?" I pointed at the two figures emerging from the brown car.

Amy's mouth dropped open, then snapped shut.

"I . . . can't really tell. They're out of focus."

They weren't, but I let that pass and considered my next question as I rooted through the documents. "How much do you know about Aunt Phyllis?"

She pressed her lips into what was almost a hairline crack.

"Were you aware that you were adopted?"

Amy's eyes blazed. "Yes," she snapped.

"And Aunt Phyllis? What do you really know about her?"

She shrugged. "She was a friend of my Mom's from college."

I leaned toward her and gave her a fixed stare. "That's not true." Uncertainty rippled across Amy's previously neutral expression in a series of small twitches in her lips, nose, and eyebrows.

"What do you mean?" she said.

"First, tell me about Aunt Phyllis," I said. "Or is it Aunt Joan?" I added, emphasizing the name.

Amy's eyes narrowed. "What are you talking about?"

"It would seem they're the same person."

Amy blinked a few times but said nothing.

"Tell me about Aunt Phyllis," I prodded her.

She cocked her head slightly, eyes half-hooded. "She hung out with us a lot. Even lived with us for a while. Back when I was a kid, she would tell me the best stories. But around the time I turned eight or nine, she and my parents really got into it. Then she left. Disappeared." Her tone was sour.

"You missed her?" Like I had to ask.

"We kept in touch." Her voice turned wistful. "She traveled a lot, but she wrote to me." She paused, then added with a boastful lilt, "She never put her return address on the envelopes, but I could tell where she was from the postal markings. And you know what's sad?"

"What?"

"My parents never even noticed that we communicated this way." Amy gave me a wide-eyed, can-you-believe-this-shit look. "They were so busy with other things."

"Did you text each other, too?"

"It was hard to text her. She couldn't always do that." Amy's murmur suggested confusion. "She wasn't much for the phone, either. So we wrote to each other."

"When was the last time you saw her?" I asked. "In person." Not FaceTime or Skype or Zoom. IRL.

Amy opened her mouth, but said nothing. "Been a while."

"So that's not you with her in the photo?"

She stiffened. Shook her head as if just waking up.

"Did it ever strike you as strange that this woman who knew your parents in college would continue keeping in touch?"

Amy fell silent. I could feel the wheels turn in her head.

"Well, why not?" Her voice was petulant. "And who could I turn to with my problems? Ingrid, who barely spoke a word, or Sasha, who just put up with me?"

This was interesting, but I needed to get to the point.

"Amy, take a look at this photo again. Isn't that you and Phyllis getting out of the car?"

Amy froze. Then she shook her head. "No. No."

"I know it is. And you know it, too. This raises a few questions. For one thing, why did you lie to me about not being involved with your parents' activities? This picture of you suggests otherwise. For another, why were you and Phyllis there?"

Amy chewed on her lip for a few seconds before she said, "I don't know why, but she wanted to go there."

"She wanted to go there? And forced you to go with her?"

Amy went wide-eyed. "She picked me up to go out for coffee. It wasn't my idea."

I nodded. "Okay. So what were you doing there?"

She shrugged. "She just wanted to look around, I guess. I hung out and just waited."

I shook my head. "I don't think that's going to work."

"What do you mean?" Her voice took on a steely tone.

"Before I get to that, let's talk about Phyllis. How much do you know about her?"

Amy's lower lip ballooned a bit as she pouted. "Enough to like her."

"Did you know that Phyllis is your birth mother?"

Amy drew back. "No." But there was a bit of uncertainty behind the word.

"Did you know that Phyllis is Marian's fraternal twin?"

Amy's eyes widened to the size of small dinner plates. "What?" Her shocked tone was either real or Oscar-worthy.

I let that settle in before adding, "Did you also know that she kills people for a living?"

The room was dead silent except for Amy, who was breathing hard. Then the house shifted and creaked a little. I thought about her non-response to that last question. "Was it her job to kill your parents? How much did you know about that?"