The Lost Story of Eva Fuentes - 10

London

2024

Margo couldn’t sleep.

The alarm clock blinked back at her, the red numbers taunting her.

It was just after two in the morning.

Each time she tried to close her eyes, the image of Mr. Thornton dying flashed before her. The police had to have notified his family by now. He’d never married or had children, but he had an older sister who lived in Wales and who he talked to frequently. She would be devastated. Anyone who had known him would be stunned.

He was one of the kindest men she had ever known, and the idea that he had been attacked so brutally in his own shop, that the killer had possibly been there at the same time she was…

Margo climbed out of bed, heart pounding, and walked down the long hallway of her flat, checking the front door once more.

It was locked, just as it had been two hours ago when she tried to go to sleep the first time. She’d even dragged one of her dining room chairs under the doorknob as an additional security precaution, and it rested there, unmoved.

When she’d called Bea and told her about Mr. Thornton’s murder, Bea had offered for Margo to come stay the night at her flat, but all Margo had wanted was a shower, a fresh change of clothes, and the comfort of her own bed.

Her old clothes sat at the bottom of her building’s rubbish chute.

Now she regretted the decision to be alone.

Her flat looked a lot less inviting at two a.m. than it had earlier in the evening.

Margo padded over to her little dining table and sank down in the remaining chair, her laptop open with the scarce research she had found on A Time for Forgetting .

The flash drive Mr. Thornton had pressed into her hand before he died rested in her computer. She’d told herself that there was no harm in looking at the information that Mr. Thornton had found, that she wasn’t doing it because Luke was involved or because once she sank her teeth into something, it was very hard to let go.

Tomorrow she would return the fee the client had already paid her.

And she was going to turn the flash drive over to the police.

And she wasn’t more than just a little sucked in by this whole thing.

The flash drive provided some interesting background on A Time for Forgetting , although it hadn’t contained the name of the person who’d asked him about the book in the first place as she’d hoped it would.

The publisher was Reston Brothers Publishing. It had been a small publisher in Boston for about thirty years from the end of the nineteenth century to the beginning of the twentieth. The publishers, a Henry Reston and his brother John, had long since passed away, but their obituaries were available online and Margo had tracked their various grandchildren via a somewhat sketchy people search website that may or may not be accurate.

Margo checked her email again, waiting to see if any of the Restons from Boston that she had reached out to on social media had responded.

Nothing so far.

She’d told herself that there was no harm in doing this—after all, it wasn’t like sleep was coming. If she was going to be awake at this hour, better to be productive than spend the time rehashing her conversation with Luke—or thinking about those horrible moments when she found Mr. Thornton.

If Mr. Thornton had been murdered because of A Time for Forgetting , then she couldn’t ignore the fact that she was at least partially responsible for dragging him into this.

It was a long shot that Henry or John Reston’s grandchildren would know anything about a book that their grandfathers had published over one hundred and twenty years ago, but at this point long shots were all she had. Mr. Thornton’s research hadn’t yielded anything else about A Time for Forgetting , which must have frustrated him to no end, considering she doubted he’d encountered many books that left him stymied.

What was so special about this one? What was it about A Time for Forgetting that made it worth killing for?

But at the end of the day, what made anything valuable? How badly someone wanted it.

It was the cornerstone of her business after all. She operated in a secondary market where prices were set by an item’s history, by its rarity, and by the lengths to which someone would go to obtain it.

Mr. Thornton’s research on Eva Fuentes had been a little more productive. She was a Cuban teacher, and Eva had traveled to Harvard in the summer of 1900 as part of a large delegation of teachers from Cuba. It was the largest cultural exchange of its kind at the time or since, and while there was plenty of information available about the summer school, there weren’t additional details about Eva Fuentes that Margo could find.

It answered some of the mystery at least—perhaps why Eva had chosen a publisher in Boston for A Time for Forgetting .

Still—there were more questions than answers.

Her email pinged with an incoming message alert.

She scanned the sender’s name.

Oliver Reston.

Subject line: Your message

Oliver Reston, born January 3, 1948, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, according to the genealogy website where she’d found him. He was the son of Henry Reston’s youngest son. Oliver Reston had appeared to be a Reston family genealogy buff, and she’d tracked his social media handle all over various message boards and websites where he passionately researched the Reston family legacy. He had been her greatest hope for a response.

She opened the email, reading through the message he’d written.

Ms. Reynolds,

Thank you for your email. I am indeed the grandson of Henry Reston. He and his brother ran a publishing house in Boston at the beginning of the twentieth century. They published several hundred titles before they were forced to close the business when they went off to fight in the Great War. My grandfather and his eldest brother were killed fighting. I’m not familiar with A Time for Forgetting , but we’ve donated some of my grandfather’s papers relating to his publishing business to the local public library. I’m visiting my granddaughter in Omaha for the next week, but when I return to Boston I will check his records to see if there’s any information on A Time for Forgetting and will let you know if I find anything.

Yours,

Oliver Reston

There was no mention of anyone else reaching out to him about the book, which made her wonder why she was the only one pursuing this line of inquiry. Had someone else already contacted him and he’d declined to mention it? Or was tracking the publisher a pointless endeavor?

She sent a quick email thanking him for his reply. She briefly considered asking him if anyone else had contacted him, but considering what had happened to Mr. Thornton, she figured the less he was involved, the better.

The other piece of information Mr. Thornton had gathered was equally interesting. He’d provided the name of a Cuban woman in London—Natalia Evans—who ran a website that from Mr. Thornton’s notes and her own observations was geared toward recovering items belonging to exiled Cubans. After a bit of research, Margo couldn’t resist filling out the contact form on Natalia’s website. She didn’t specifically say what it was about—just that it was regarding a book—and she questioned what she was doing several times before finally clicking “send.”

Late-night Internet indecision was turning out to be the theme for the evening.

Margo’s fingers hovered over her keyboard, pulling up one of the social media sites she’d used to look up Henry Reston’s descendants. It wasn’t the first time, and she feared it wouldn’t be the last as she typed Luke’s name into the search bar. His profile came up instantly in the results, the algorithm no doubt recognizing her propensity to search for him even if it had been months since the last time she’d done so.

She tried not to think of him too much, not to allow herself these slips, these moments when she would let him back into her life albeit briefly. After seeing him with his girlfriend tonight, she couldn’t help but wonder if he’d changed his profile pic.

He hadn’t.

It was still Luke solo, on a climbing trip in Wales, his face turned away from the camera, so it was hard to make out his features. Given his job, he used social media sporadically at best, the privacy controls locked down so tightly that she could see little else. It was probably for the best, considering she’d removed him from her friends list when they were going through their divorce to avoid moments of weakness like this one.

The clock on her laptop taunted her.

It was three in the morning.

She had to sleep if she had any hope of being productive tomorrow.

Margo closed the browser window, leaving her past firmly behind her where it belonged, and walked over to the front door, checking the flat’s locks once more.

The chair was still in place where she’d left it, everything unchanged.

She didn’t have an alarm, but maybe an email to her landlord asking about one needed to be next on her to-do list.

Margo left the lamp in the living room on, not quite ready to face her flat in total darkness. The moon was obscured tonight, no stars in sight, and London was eerily quiet. When she’d found the flat during her divorce from Luke, she’d been grateful for the central location as well as the fact that it was neatly tucked away in a residential neighborhood, limiting the amount of street noise she heard every night. Now she wished for a little more activity, anything to make her feel like she wasn’t quite so alone. She stared out the window. There was no one in sight, the street filled with her neighbors’ cars.

A light flickered in a parked car.

The controls on the dash? A mobile phone?

Margo peeled the curtain back.

Her heart pounded.

With the light, she could just make out the silhouette of a person sitting on the driver’s side of a dark sedan—was it a deep blue? Black?

It was hard to tell from the distance.

She was used to the cars that normally parked on her street, but she didn’t recognize this one. Her neighbors were largely creatures of habit who came and went around set work hours.

How long had the car been there, and if she could see the person’s silhouette, what could they see of her flat?

The light in the car turned off.

Margo jumped back from the window.

The drapes closed behind her.

She hurried over to the lamp and turned it off, plunging the flat into darkness and obscuring her from the window’s view.

Was someone out there watching her? The same man that she had seen on the Tube? Or was she simply so rattled by Mr. Thornton’s murder that she was now imagining danger where there was none? That was the trouble with living in a city; it was hard to know what was a coincidence and what was a threat.

Her phone rested on the table where Margo had left it beside her laptop, and she picked it up, gripping it tightly in her hand.

She crept back toward the window, the heavy velvet curtains too thick to see through. They weren’t a complete blackout, though, so whoever was down below would know that she had turned her light off.

In the distance, a car horn honked, piercing the quiet night.

Margo jumped.

Her cell phone slipped from her hand and hit the ground.

Damn.

Margo bent down and picked it up, peering around the edge of the curtain, staring out at the street below.

The car was gone.

She needed coffee. Two cups, at least.

After the car had freaked her out, she hadn’t been able to fall asleep until four in the morning, and when her alarm went off three hours later telling her it was time to get ready for work, it had taken every ounce of energy not to snooze the alert.

Despite the exhaustion, as soon as her alarm woke her, it all came flashing back in horrifying detail. Margo checked her email right after she woke up, but there was nothing from Greer and nothing from Luke. No message from the police, either.

Margo grabbed the detective’s card and dialed the number listed there.

“Matthews,” he answered.

“This is Margo Reynolds. I’m ringing to see if you have any new information about what happened.”

“We’re still investigating,” he replied after a moment. “If we have any more questions for you, we’ll be in touch.”

She opened her mouth to say something, to tell him about the flash drive, and Oliver Reston, and the strange car she had seen outside her flat, but he’d already disconnected the call.

For a moment, she could do nothing more than stare at the mobile in her hand, shock and indignation filling her. Maybe it was naïve of her, but she’d expected, hoped that the police would be a little more forthcoming, considering she’d been there when Mr. Thornton died.

Margo dressed quickly for work, going through the motions on autopilot, her mind reeling as she processed everything that had happened, trying to make sense of it all.

Her morning commute seemed to take twice as long as normal with Margo constantly looking over her shoulder, choosing the most circuitous route to the office. Luckily, her journey took her through well-traveled streets so she was never alone, but she still tensed whenever someone walked close to her, when an arm brushed against her or a loud noise sounded.

In short, her nerves were shot by the time she got to work.

Margo reached into her bag and pulled out her office keys, more than a little surprised to see that the door wasn’t already unlocked, and that Bea hadn’t beaten her there, given the late start to the day. She and Bea had a playful rivalry over who got into work first, and up until today Bea had been leading.

Margo stared at the keys for a moment, her gaze lingering over the key ring.

Luke had given it to her the day that she secured the office space in Chelsea. They’d celebrated with a bottle of champagne and sex on her new desk, and life was heady with promise—in her marriage, in her career, in the sense that she was growing into the person she had always wanted to be.

Eight months later, she told Luke she wanted a divorce.

Margo shook off the memory, the pain of seeing Luke last night bringing so many emotions bubbling to the surface. It was easier when she didn’t think of him, when he was buried beneath the layers of all the things she focused on instead. But she’d reopened the wound by going over to his flat last night, and now she struggled to not think of him.

Margo grabbed the doorknob, ready to fit the key into the lock—

The door pushed open beneath her palm before she even had a chance to slip the key inside.

She froze.

“Bea,” Margo called out.

No one answered her.

Margo stepped forward, pushing the door open another inch, a chill sliding down her spine.

Their beautiful, cozy office, every inch of space painstakingly designed by Margo, from the pale Farrow & Ball paint that adorned the walls to the antique desk Bea sat behind, was destroyed.

Bea’s desk rested on its side, the drawers gaping open, a couple strewn about the ground. Papers littered the floor; the cushions from the little settee near the front door where clients could wait before meeting with Margo were slashed open, feathers cast out on the floor.

Bea’s computer was on the floor, the phone next to it.

Her assistant was nowhere to be seen.

Margo glanced through the reception room to where her own office door was ajar, the sliver of her office showing the same destruction as Bea’s.

This time, she didn’t hesitate, didn’t take the chance that the perpetrator might still be there.

She pulled out her phone to call for help and got the hell out of her office.

“It’s all clear,” the police officer confirmed. “We’ll pull the CCTV footage and see what we can find. It would help if you could go through and let us know what, if anything, is missing.”

The fact that this was the third police officer she’d met in two days didn’t bode well.

“And my assistant?” Margo asked.

She’d called Bea a dozen times, but Bea had yet to answer.

“We’ll send someone by her flat, but it looks like she wasn’t here. There’s no sign that anyone was working.”

“How can you tell in this mess?” Margo fought to keep her voice calm, panic rising.

“Well, her purse isn’t here. And you keep calling her mobile, but that clearly isn’t here, either. She’s lucky she didn’t come in. This would have been a lot worse if she’d interrupted the middle of the robbery.”

Margo leveled him with a look. “You can’t seriously think this was a robbery. And you say there’s no sign that Bea was here, but what about the fact that the alarm was off? What if Bea put in the code, what if they forced her to?”

“We’ll investigate all of this. We can check on the security system. The most important thing is not to panic. We see burglaries all the time.”

“The night after an associate of mine was murdered in Notting Hill? What are the odds that those two things aren’t connected?”

Margo took a deep breath, trying to keep from losing her temper even though it was beyond frustrating the way they were placating her.

The first thing Margo had done when the police arrived on the scene was to tell them about Mr. Thornton’s bookshop, about the man she thought was following her, and the man she thought she had seen parked in a car outside her apartment last night. In hindsight, she wasn’t sure if giving them that much information off the bat had helped or hurt her, considering the skepticism she could feel coming off the officer in waves, but she was done taking chances. The police may not be ready to believe her yet, but there was no doubt in Margo’s mind that this was absolutely tied to A Time for Forgetting.

Anger lanced its way through her, the emotion sharp. This was her office. The one she’d built with little more than what at times had felt like an impossible dream. She’d agonized over whether she was going to be able to stay in business that first year, had worked more hours than not, had sacrificed so much in the pursuit of this goal, this company that she had built on her own. And now seeing what someone had done to the space—

She’d worked too hard to let someone come in here and smash up her life.

“Margo?”

She whirled around.

Luke walked through the doorway of her office. His gaze swept the room and the destruction before settling on her.

“Are you alright?” Luke asked her.

“I’m fine. What are you doing here?”

His voice lowered. “I wanted to talk to you. To follow up from last night. What happened?”

“I don’t know. I came in this morning, and it was like this.”

“Where’s Bea?”

“I keep calling her and it keeps going to voicemail. I’m worried—Bea wouldn’t just blow off work like this. After what happened last night—”

“We sent a couple officers to her flat to check it out,” the police officer interjected. “Like I told Ms. Reynolds, she probably just took the day off or decided to work from home.”

Annoyance flashed in Luke’s eyes. “No, not Bea. She wouldn’t do that to Margo.”

“That’s what I told them,” Margo interjected.

“Give us a minute,” Luke said to the officer, not waiting for permission before drawing Margo out into the hall.

“Have you noticed anyone else following you since you came to my flat last night?” he asked her.

She hesitated. “I thought I saw someone parked outside of my flat last night,” Margo said, filling him in on the details.

She hadn’t cried since she found Mr. Thornton’s body, but the grief was building inside her like a crashing wave, mixing with her fear over the possibility of something having happened to Bea.

“I don’t know if it was related or not,” Margo added. “I’ve been on edge since I found Mr. Thornton’s body, and now, I’m worried about Bea. I talked to her yesterday, and she never mentioned that she was going to work from home today. You know how she is—”

“I know. I’ll go by her flat myself and check things out if you want.”

“Are you sure? I feel bad dragging you into this.”

“I care about Bea, too. It’s no trouble.” Luke raked his hand through his hair. “I was worried. This can’t be a coincidence.”

“No, I don’t think it’s a coincidence, either. I started doing some research last night on Eva Fuentes and A Time for Forgetting .” Margo hesitated for a beat. At this point, it seemed like the best course of action was to include Luke. “Before he died, Mr. Thornton gave me a flash drive. It had his notes on the book—and Eva.”

“You didn’t tell me that last night.”

“No, I didn’t. I wanted to see what was on it.”

“Or you were deciding whether or not you were going to trust me?”

“It isn’t about trusting you. It’s about my business. Protecting my reputation, which includes being discreet.”

“I know how much your business means to you. And I understand the need for discretion.” He frowned. “But Margo, this situation is out of control. You can trust me.”

After the divorce, she’d started seeing the therapist she probably should have been seeing after her parents’ divorce as a kid, and one of the things she’d learned about herself was that she tended to try to manage everything on her own, that she was hesitant to let others in, to ask for help, to trust someone else.

I’m not surprised, given your childhood. You didn’t have the stability you needed when you were young, so it’s understandable that you would believe that you can only rely on yourself. But no one can shoulder everything, Margo, no matter how capable they are. Eventually, life will wear them down. It’s not a sign of weakness to ask someone for help, to trust someone to carry some of that responsibility , her therapist had advised. It had been too late for her to rectify the mistakes she’d made with Luke, but she’d taken the words to heart. It wasn’t easy—and she still struggled to fight her impulses—but she tried.

“What was on the flash drive?” Luke asked.

“Not as much as I’d hoped.”

She told him what she’d discovered about Eva Fuentes and Reston Brothers Publishing.

“There was also a mention of a website that tracks stolen and missing Cuban property. When Cuban families fled Cuba after the revolution in 1959, their property was seized by Fidel Castro’s government. Some pieces of artwork and books have later come up for sale and the families have disputed the ownership. There are some major pieces worth a lot of money that are being contested. There’s a Cuban woman here in London—Natalia Evans—who has been tracking the items. Mr. Thornton had tried reaching out to her to see if she’d heard of A Time for Forgetting .”

“Was he successful?”

“His notes didn’t say. It’s a long shot, but right now it seems like there’s little to go on. I sent her an email through the contact form on her website, but I haven’t heard anything.”

“Do you think your client is responsible for this?” Luke asked, glancing back at the office door.

“I don’t know. I tried to fire them last night,” she admitted finally. “Maybe they didn’t take it well?” She met his gaze. “And your client? Have you had a chance to talk to them yet?”

Luke nodded. “She’s in Scotland. I’m going to see her.”

“Scotland?”

“I thought about doing it over the phone, but I want to see her in person, get a feel for the situation given its gravity.”

“Do you think she could be behind all of this?”

“Honestly? I would be surprised. She said she had a family connection. She’s a restaurant owner in Edinburgh. She owns a Spanish restaurant with her husband near the Royal Mile.”

“What’s the name of the restaurant?” Margo asked.

He hesitated for a moment. “The Red Bull. Her name is Adriana Josephs.”

Finally.

Margo searched for both “Adriana Josephs” and “The Red Bull” on her phone.

Adriana’s bio was on the restaurant’s website. It said that she was of Cuban descent. She was born in Madrid. She’d studied architecture at the University of Madrid and met her husband there when he was studying Spanish cuisine. They married and moved to his hometown of Edinburgh, where they opened a Spanish restaurant that had apparently become quite successful.

“Hardly seems like the website of a criminal mastermind,” she admitted.

“I agree. Surveillance is expensive. Hiring people to commit crimes can be expensive. I don’t get the impression that she has those kinds of deep pockets.”

Margo’s mobile rang.

Her heart pounded. “Maybe that’s Bea.”

Her assistant’s name flashed on her phone screen.

“It is.”

Relief crossed Luke’s face.

“Bea, are you okay?” Margo asked after she answered the call.

“I am,” Bea replied. “I’m so sorry. I just got all your messages; I was in a yoga class, and I had my phone off.”

Confusion filled her. She tried not to micromanage Bea’s schedule, and the nature of their industry meant they often didn’t keep traditional office hours, but it was completely unlike Bea to blow off work and not at least tell her.

“What happened?” Bea asked.

“Someone broke into the office. When I got here, it was completely trashed. The police are here now.”

“What?!? I’m so sorry. Are you okay?”

“I’m fine. I was just worried about you—when I got here and you weren’t here, I was afraid something had happened.”

“I’m sorry that I scared you. When I got your email telling me to take the day off, I decided to go to yoga this morning.”

“Wait. What email?”

“The one you sent me last night.”

Margo’s heart pounded. “I didn’t send you an email last night.”

“What’s wrong?” Luke mouthed.

“Bea, can you forward me that email?”

“Of course. I thought it was you; your name was on it.”

“I didn’t send you an email. It sounds like someone wanted the office to be empty this morning. Okay, listen, now I do want you to take some time off. There’s not a lot going on right now anyway. Maybe go see your parents for a few days.” Bea’s parents had moved to the coast of Spain in their retirement. “Going forward, let’s not do anything unless we talk to each other over the phone, since it sounds like our email is compromised.”

“Alright. I’m worried about you, though. Is there anything I can do to help?”

“One thing—I need to return the client’s money. There’s no way I’m going to stay on this case. Things are getting too out of control.”

“Done.”

“Thanks, Bea. Besides that, I’m okay for now, but I’ll keep in touch,” Margo added. “And listen—the past few days, I’ve noticed someone following me. Be careful.”

“You, too.”

Margo ended the call, and immediately pulled up her email. There it was, Bea had just forwarded the message that it looked like Margo had sent.

She handed the phone to Luke.

“Bea’s fine. She was at a yoga class. She said that she got an email from me telling her to take the day off. She forwarded it; obviously, I didn’t send the message.”

Luke scanned her phone. “This was sent at three in the morning. Isn’t that about the time that you saw the car parked outside your flat?”

“Yes.”

He handed the phone back to her. “I wonder if they hacked your Wi-Fi to get into your accounts. Or maybe they just cloned your email. I don’t know. But it looks like they wanted to make sure Bea was out of the office.”

“It seems like it. Maybe they didn’t want to hurt her. Maybe they didn’t mean for things to go as far as they did with Mr. Thornton. At the same time, though, they didn’t do anything to make sure I wasn’t in the office. Seems to me that means they knew where I was already.”

Margo’s phone rang again, surprise filling her as she read the name on the caller ID.

“It’s Natalia Evans,” she told Luke. “The woman who maintains a database on lost and stolen Cuban items.”

Margo answered the call, hesitating for a moment before she placed it on speaker so Luke could hear, too.

“Hello,” Margo answered.

“Good morning, my name is Natalia Evans, and I received a message from you on my website’s contact form.”

Margo glanced over at Luke—despite their divorce, she knew him, trusted him more than she trusted any other person on this earth. He could handle himself better than anyone she knew, and she had no doubt that she was safe with him. And even though they were divorced, even though she no longer had a place in his life, there was a part of her that would always worry about him, always care about him. After what had happened to Mr. Thornton, how would she bear it if Luke continued investigating this book and something happened to him? Maybe the best thing was to team up.

Margo reiterated the information she had given Natalia on the contact form—that she had been hired by a client to find a lost novel written by a Cuban author and that she had found Natalia’s website and was wondering if she might have heard of the book.

“I’m not familiar with the title,” Natalia replied, “but I can certainly go through my records and see if anyone has reported it missing. I can let you know what I find. If you’re available today, we could meet. I live in Knightsbridge if that’s not too far for you.”

“It’s not at all. I can be there soon. I’m very interested in the work you do. Any background information you could give me on the book would be wonderful. We believe that there was a copy of the book that was lost during the revolution.”

“Well, you’ve come to the right place, then. I’ve made a mission out of trying to track down lost or stolen items.”

Natalia gave Margo the address of the flat and said to come around at noon before she disconnected the call.

“I thought you weren’t going to work on this anymore,” Luke said. “Not after everything that has happened. Margo, your office was broken into, your friend was killed—”

“I know what the stakes are. But my friend was killed. Because of something I asked him to investigate. And now you’re involved in this.”

“What does that mean?”

“I can’t—are you going to tell your client you’re done looking for the book for her?”

He didn’t respond.

“That’s what I thought,” Margo replied.

“So, you’re—what—worried about me?”

“I don’t want to see something happen to you because of this,” she answered, neatly sidestepping the question and the awkward emotions it evoked.

“I’m coming with you to see Natalia.”

“Okay.”

“What happens after we talk with Natalia?” Luke asked. “Are you going to put yourself in danger over this?”

Margo glanced back at her office. “ ‘Put myself in danger’? I think I’m already there, and whoever is looking for A Time for Forgetting isn’t going to know whether I’ve decided to stop looking for it or not. It’s not like they’re going to come up and ask me. They’re going to keep searching for it. Up until now, I’ve been playing catch-up. I want—need—to understand what’s going on. For Mr. Thornton and for myself.”

And for you , Margo added silently.

Luke studied her for a moment. He sighed. “I guess we’re going to Knightsbridge, then.”