Swan Song by Elin Hilderbrand

Author:Elin Hilderbrand [HILDERBRAND, ELIN]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Published: 2024-06-12T00:00:00+00:00

20. Thursday, August 22, 9:30 P.M.

The Chief’s phone rings—Lucy Shields, the harbormaster.

“I’ve ordered the chopper out of Woods Hole,” she says.

“Thank you, Lucy.” He turns to Zara and Lamont. “Coast Guard is sending out a chopper.”

Lamont looks skyward. “I wish they would take me with them. I could find her; I know I could.”

The Chief looks at Zara. Is she thinking what he’s thinking? “We should probably go talk to the Richardsons,” the Chief says. Maybe Zara is right and he should step away from the investigation, he thinks. He had hoped never to speak to Leslee Richardson again.

“I have another idea,” Zara says. She takes the Chief’s arm, leads him away, lowers her voice, and says, “Let’s talk to Kacy first.”

“Kacy?” he says. “She wasn’t on the boat.”

“But they were friends. Close friends, Dixon said.”

“True.”

“A woman tells her girlfriends everything,” Zara says.

Ed flashes to Andrea whispering with Phoebe and Delilah at Ventuno. “Good point.”

They find Kacy right where they left her, but her facade has cracked—tears stream down her face, her hair has slipped from its chignon, her nose is running. Ed considers calling Andrea and asking her to come; this is a girl who needs her mother. Kacy looks up, wipes the tears from under each eye with a manicured fingernail, and sniffs. “She’s somewhere. That’s the thing. She’s somewhere.”

Zara takes a seat next to Kacy, lightly touches her shoulder. “The best way you can help Coco now is to fill us in on a little background. I know you don’t want to break Coco’s confidence, but you’re going to have to give us all the gory details so we know what we’re dealing with here.”

Please, Ed thinks, don’t let them be too gory.

Kacy sits up straighter and focuses on Zara. “What do you want to know?”

Zara asks Kacy how she met Coco (“On the ferry”) and what she knows about Coco’s life before Nantucket. Kacy leans in, tells Zara that Coco grew up in a small town in Arkansas. She had been working in the Virgin Islands, which was where she met the Richardsons. They had dinner at the restaurant where Coco was bartending and they invited her to follow them up here.

Zara lifts her eyes to Ed. “These people have a thing for inviting perfect strangers into their lives.”

Oh, do they, Ed thinks.

“Most of what I learned about Coco came from reading her screenplay,” Kacy says.

“Her screenplay?” Zara and Ed say together.

“It’s really good,” Kacy says. “It’s Coco’s dream to get it produced.”

Ed is impressed by how much information Zara is able to pull from Kacy without even seeming to try. She definitely has a way. Ed knows only the bare bones about Zara’s personal life: She’s forty-four years old, divorced from the minister of the Old Whaling Church in Edgartown, whom she once referred to as “the most popular man on Martha’s Vineyard, especially with his lady parishioners.” Ed had just raised his eyebrows and asked if they had children. Yes, two girls, one a

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.