A World of Deceit by Kate Flora

Author:Kate Flora [Flora, Kate]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: ePublishing Works!

Twenty-Four

No one spoke and no decision was taken. Burgess and Kyle and Perry simply automatically headed toward O’Toole. Even as he and his team moved toward her, Burgess was trying to remember when he’d last see the girl. Before he went swimming. Later, he’d looked over and seen that the guilt-inducing white presence was gone. Had she gone inside to eat or for some project? Had she gone swimming under O’Toole’s watchful eye and he hadn’t noticed?

Not his case. Not their case. If the child was genuinely missing, it was a matter for the county sheriff. Still, Burgess started asking questions as soon as they reached the distraught woman.

“How long has she been gone?” he asked.

O’Toole shrugged. Despite the cry for help, she looked more peeved than concerned. “Can’t say for certain. I was reading. She was reading. Reading and sulking because she couldn’t come to your party. I was inside, away from the heat, see, and she was outside on the porch on that sofa thing. It had been a while since I’d seen her so I decided to check and she was gone.”

“Give us an estimate,” Burgess said. “Ten minutes? Half an hour? What?”

“Can’t say for certain. Maybe it was forty minutes? Or a bit longer. I confess I was quite deeply into my book.”

Burgess restrained himself from shaking her and reminding her that her job was to look after the child.

“When you saw that she was missing, what did you do?”

“I looked around the cottage. I walked out on the dock and looked around the water, see, in case she’d gone swimming again without telling me. You know yourself she can be a willful child. I checked around the cottage and in the cars and Mr. Sherman’s Jeep. Then I came over here.”

“You haven’t called the sheriff? The police?” Burgess asked.

“But you are the police,” she said. Her tone annoyed him, there was an air of ‘I’m going to drop this in your lap. It’s really not my problem,’ that didn’t fit her caretaker’s role. As if she sensed his disapproval, she said, “This is supposed to be my vacation, see, when Arielle is with Dr. Gabbro and they’re both away from the house. I had plans.”

Burgess said, “We’ll take a look around, but you need to call the sheriff. Start with Detective Ryder. She’ll want to know and she will know what to do.”

Kyle said, “Is the child in the habit of running away?”

O’Toole nodded. “Not so much when she’s with her father, see. They’re close as two peas. But when she’s with her mother, she often comes to us. The mother, Mrs. Gabbro that was before the divorce, says Arielle is tiresome. Yet she won’t let the girl live with her father. It’s for the money, see.”

Kyle looked at him and Burgess nodded. “The father’s in the hospital, complications of diabetes,” he explained, “maybe complications caused by someone throwing his medication in the lake, and the mother is in Scotland on a walking trip. Ms. O’Toole is the father’s housekeeper.

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