Patience, the nurse from earlier, approached. “Are you the husband?” she asked Ethan.
“Friend,” he said quickly.
“Have you noticed any changes in her sleeping or eating lately?” she asked as she shut the door to AnnieLee’s room.
“No,” he said. He patted Ruthanna’s hand. “She was happy. Excited. She has a lot to look forward to. I don’t think she was trying to hurt herself.”
But what, then, was she trying to do? he thought. The word came to him, sudden and surprising as a slap in the face. Escape.
“Sir?” Patience said. “I asked you if you knew any of her next of kin that we could contact.”
Ignoring her, Ethan turned to Ruthanna. “I’m sorry,” he said. “AnnieLee wants me to get her things, and I should probably go do that.”
When he was almost out the door, he heard the nurse say to Ruthanna, “Do I know you, ma’am? You look awful familiar to me.”
Ruthanna demurred in her low, rich voice. “Oh, I’m not from around here, darlin’。”
Chapter
76
Back at the Aquitaine Hotel, the manager visibly trembled as he let Ethan into AnnieLee’s room. “…just beside ourselves,” he was saying from the hallway. “Never in a million years would I ever…” He looked up at Ethan. “If there’s anything we can do—”
“Thank you,” Ethan said, and firmly shut the door in the man’s tanned, worried face. The poor man was probably expecting to be hit with a lawsuit any minute, and Ethan would have felt sorry for him if not for the fact that every ounce of his own concern and worry was being used up by the infuriating, intoxicating AnnieLee Keyes.
As Ethan turned around to face the hotel suite, he felt a jolt of adrenaline. Without even taking another step into the room, he knew that someone else had been in there with AnnieLee, and that the man had not been invited.
There was the faintest whiff of cigarette smoke in the air—AnnieLee never smoked—and, even fainter, what seemed to him like the metallic scent of fear.
Ethan leaned against the wall and closed his eyes as an old, sharp anguish shot through him. He was back in North Carolina, walking into a room where his wife lay strangled. She’d been wearing the nightgown he’d bought her for her birthday, the one made of silk as red as blood.
He took a deep, shuddering inhale—One, two, three, four—held it—One, two, three, four—and let it out: One, two, three, four. He waited four seconds and did the whole thing again. Box breathing, Jeanie had called it, and she had said it kept her calm in moments of great stress.
If only, he thought, it could have kept her safe.
Then Ethan pushed himself off the wall, shaking his head as if he could rattle loose the memories of his wife. He still missed Jeanie, despite her betrayal. But it was time to worry about a living woman.
He crept silently through the entryway, though he knew that whoever had come in had long since vanished. The bedroom lay ahead of him, and the living room was to the left. He went into the bedroom first. The bed was in disarray, its covers kicked to the floor. He glanced over at the muted TV, which was broadcasting drone footage of an enormous cliffside mansion. Closed-captioning suggested that it could be his for a mere sixteen million euros.
A black dress with a muted sparkle dangled halfway off the end of the bed. He felt the heavy, expensive fabric as he read the card from Ruthanna: You know what I say about “too much”… He tossed the card back onto the bed—he did indeed know.
And it certainly explained the shoe he saw lying in the middle of the bed. A thin, impossibly high stiletto with a jewel-encrusted heel, it looked more like a weapon than it did footwear. He couldn’t imagine AnnieLee ever wearing such a thing, though clearly Ruthanna hoped her protégé might be convinced. He spotted the other shoe by the wall, as if AnnieLee had flung it there in a huff after trying it on. He bent down to pick it up and noticed a pale bit of something clinging to the heel. He peered closer. It looked like…a scrape of skin.
Ethan stood motionless, even as his heartbeat quickened. Someone had used the shoe as a weapon.
He set it carefully on the bed and moved into the living room. The balcony doors were open wide, their pale curtains fluttering lightly in the breeze. A vase of roses had been knocked over, and water pooled on the coffee table, dripping down onto the thick cream carpet.
He walked out onto the balcony, gripped the railing, and looked down. He felt an almost overwhelming vertigo as he thought about falling that far. Below he could see the broken glass awning, and ribbons of caution tape blocking the hotel’s front entrance.