The Lost Story of Eva Fuentes - 20

Boston

2024

As soon as they landed at Logan, Margo began scanning the crowd, searching for the man she had spotted in the airport in Edinburgh. It was a repeat of the process she’d gone through during their layover in Heathrow. They hadn’t spotted him there, either, but Margo couldn’t shake the feeling that he was somewhere out there waiting for them, watching them.

How had he known they were in Scotland?

“Do you see him?” Luke asked her.

“No. Maybe he got on a later flight?”

“Maybe. There were a few flights that left after ours.”

They’d been some of the last ones to board their flight to Boston, but the man had never gotten on the plane. After she’d seen the glimpse of him at the airport, they’d lost him in the crowd.

“I didn’t see him in Edinburgh,” Luke replied, his voice tight. She could tell he felt like he had somehow let her down by not being stealthier.

“I didn’t, either. And I looked—a lot.”

Was the man so good that he’d been tailing them the whole time and they hadn’t noticed?

They hurried through the airport, making their way toward baggage claim and then out to the street to grab a taxi.

They still had a few hours before the public library closed, and given how much time they had lost traveling, they’d decided to head there first before checking into the hotel Luke had found them in Beacon Hill.

They arrived at the public library in Boston with two hours to spare. A librarian was kind enough to set them up in one of the library’s private study rooms before bringing the papers the Reston family had donated to them.

When the librarian left them alone with the materials, Margo and Luke exchanged worried glances.

“I don’t know exactly what I was expecting, but this is certainly more than I anticipated,” Luke commented.

“Same. They weren’t in business for long, and from what I can tell, they didn’t publish that many titles. Do you think we’re going to be able to get through all of this in two hours?”

“I don’t know. Worst case, I guess we come back tomorrow. Shall we divide and conquer?” He gestured toward one of the far boxes. “Why don’t I start with that one and you can tackle one of these,” he said, pointing at another stack. “They’re not labeled with years or anything, are they?”

“Not that I can tell. Let’s do it.”

Margo spent an hour poring over the storage boxes full of documents related to Reston Brothers Publishing, Luke doing the same thing in the chair beside her.

Neither one of them had found anything on Eva Fuentes or A Time for Forgetting .

They’d spread everything out on the desk in the study room. The papers that the Reston family had chosen to donate to the library about their ancestors’ business were an eclectic mix, and given the haphazard nature of the collection’s contents, Margo would have bet a great deal that Oliver Reston with his meticulous genealogical recordkeeping hadn’t been as involved as he would have liked. There was an air of someone who had just gathered up everything they found in an old desk and shipped it away without going through the contents.

She picked up the next paper in the stack—

She scanned the words written there, her heart pounding.

“I found something. It’s a letter from Eva Fuentes to Reston Brothers Publishing. She submitted it along with the manuscript for A Time for Forgetting .”

Luke dropped the papers in his hands, looking over her shoulder as he read the words contained there.

Eva Fuentes had typed the letter, her name signed at the bottom. She introduced herself and said that she was a Cuban teacher who had traveled to the United States a year prior to attend the Cuban Summer School at Harvard.

For her contact information, she listed a return address in Massachusetts.

“Did she stay the whole time in the U.S., then?” Luke mused. “Or did she return to Havana and then come back a year later?”

“I don’t know. But look at this.” Margo pointed to the second paragraph. “She describes the plot of A Time for Forgetting . It looks like it was a love story between a Cuban teacher who traveled to Boston to study and a young American writer that she met while she was at Harvard. She describes it as fiction, but I wonder how much of it was inspired by her own life and studies. It’s impossible not to draw parallels between what we know to be true about Eva’s life.”

Luke frowned. “There’s still nothing in here that seems like it’s worth killing for, though. What possible secret could be hidden in the pages of this book, especially if it was fiction?”

“I know. I just don’t get it. What are we missing?”

“Your client must know more than they’re letting on. We’ll go to Flintrock’s offices in the morning when they’re open, see if we can find anything on William Greer and who hired him. Has he responded to any of your messages since you last spoke on the phone?”

“No, nothing. The bank details for the deposit aren’t traceable, either.” Margo grabbed her cell. “At least we have an address for Eva during her time in Boston. Maybe we can figure out who she was staying with and why she was here a year after the summer school ended.”

Margo put the return address on Eva’s letter into her phone’s search engine.

The search results pulled up an old house in Lowell, Massachusetts. Margo clicked on the link, reading through the information contained there.

She glanced up at Luke, her heart pounding. “I think I just figured out one of Eva Fuentes’s secrets. That return address on her letter to Reston Brothers Publishing asking them to publish A Time for Forgetting ? At the turn of the century, it was a home for unwed mothers.”