The Lost Story of Eva Fuentes - 27

London

2024

Margo sat beside Luke at the auction house, nervous energy filling her. After everything, it seemed hard to believe that they had finally found A Time for Forgetting , that the book was waiting for them.

Her phone pinged with text messages from Bennett, who had already sent nearly a dozen asking her if she had the book, what it looked like, how much it would cost. After they’d gotten permission from Adriana, they’d given Bennett her contact information so that they could connect.

Waiting to see it now , Margo texted back.

The sound of footsteps approached, and then Porter Cavendish, Luke’s friend at the auction house, entered the room, a book in his hand.

Margo and Luke leaned forward in their chairs.

“Here it is,” Porter said, setting the novel down on the table in front of them.

The cover was a pretty green leather, the title etched in gold, Eva Fuentes’s name below it in a gold font. It looked old and slightly worn in places as though it had traveled a great distance to be here.

“May I?” Margo asked.

Porter nodded.

She gingerly examined the cover, flipping through the pages. There was no dedication, the first chapter starting out with the story of a young woman attending a party at a house in Havana.

She wished Mr. Thornton was here beside her.

“How much does she want for it?” Margo asked. “I have a client who is interested.”

Her phone pinged again, likely with a message from Bennett.

Very interested .

“We haven’t started putting minimum bids on the items. It’s part of a larger collection of items—books and art. All Cuban if your client is interested in art as well.”

Surprise filled her. Where had the art come from? Was it Pilar Castillo’s personal art collection?

“We’ll see. Right now, the book is of primary importance. And we’d like a meeting with Pilar if possible.”

He hesitated. “I’m not sure if she would be willing to meet with you.”

“Could you contact her? Please? My client has a personal connection to the book. He’s very much interested in knowing more about it and he believes Pilar could help him understand some things.”

She’d probably just given away far more than she should if she wanted to keep the price low, but she wanted to speak to Pilar, to meet her, to finally fill in the blanks of all the things they hadn’t understood up until now.

“I’ll check with her. One moment, please.” Porter excused himself to make the call, leaving Luke and Margo alone with the book.

Luke’s phone rang.

“I’ll be right back,” he mouthed to Margo, rising from his chair.

She stared down at the book, a wave of emotions filling her. The sense of satisfaction she usually found when she sourced a particularly difficult item was curiously absent. When she stared at A Time for Forgetting , she couldn’t get past the fact that the cost had been so high, couldn’t forget the sight of Mr. Thornton’s dead body lying on the ground or the memory of him drawing his last breaths in the back room of his shop.

Luke walked back into the room. “Sorry about that. That was the police. They want to speak with me.”

“About what?”

“They’ve been reviewing the CCTV footage around Thornton’s Bookshop and saw me on it. They want to know why I was there. I answered their questions on the phone, but they want me to come in.” He shrugged. “It’s fine. Maybe it’ll give me a chance to see what I can find out.”

Worry filled her. “They can’t actually think that you had something to do with it, can they?”

“I doubt it. I’m not concerned. On the bright side, maybe they’ll finally start taking what we said seriously and look into the connection between A Time for Forgetting and Mr. Thornton’s death.”

“What happened to the robbery theory?” Margo asked.

“Alibi. They have him for the bakery robbery, but he was at a pub with two dozen witnesses and camera footage when Mr. Thornton was killed. It’s ironclad. I don’t think the detective even would have told me, but for a mild sense of professional courtesy since I used to be a detective. They’re back to the beginning now, looking at the case with ‘fresh eyes’ as he said. It happens. Sometimes you can’t make the easiest answer fit so you have to go with the hard one.

“Also, Adriana Josephs called. She’s sending over screenshots of her message chats and the list of usernames of people she interacted with. She’s been in contact with Bennett, too. I guess they’re setting up something to try to meet up in Edinburgh.”

Porter returned. “I spoke with Pilar Castillo. She’s willing to meet with you tomorrow at nine in the morning here in the office. We can discuss terms on the book then.”

It was longer than Margo wanted to wait, but if it was the best they could do, at least it was something.

“We’ll be there,” she confirmed.

Margo unlocked the door to her flat, closing it quickly behind her and turning the lock.

A text came in from Luke.

Almost done here. Will be at yours soon. Adriana sent me screenshots from her message board chats. Maybe Bea can start running some of the usernames? Xxxx

Margo opened her email, clicking on the one Luke had just sent her and opening the attachment. The file was large, the images screenshots of conversations Adriana had with various people on the message board. It looked like it was a site for primarily tracing genealogy, but also people searching for lost items and property that had been taken.

There were a few people Adriana corresponded with regularly, and Margo made note of those usernames—

She walked farther into her apartment, flipping on the light next to the couch, her phone in hand as she read the messages—

A creak sounded in her apartment.

Margo froze, déjà vu catapulting her back to that night in the bookstore.

And then she saw it—

There was a soft light coming from her bedroom, the light of her laptop screen—

She hadn’t left it on.

Heart pounding, she took a step back, and then another, desperately trying to not make any noise.

Another creak.

Followed by footsteps. The sound of boots on the hardwood floors of her flat.

She hit the “emergency call” button on her mobile.

Natalia Evans walked out of her bedroom.

Natalia looked no less glamorous than she had that day they met her in her apartment in Knightsbridge. Today she wore a black turtleneck sweater, black leggings, and a killer pair of black boots.

She held a gun in her hand, Mr. Thornton’s flash drive in the other.

“Toss your phone onto the floor,” Natalia instructed.

“What are you doing here?”

Her mind raced, going back to that day in Natalia’s apartment, to all the things Natalia had told them—

“Your phone. Now,” Natalia said, her voice hard. “I will shoot you if I have to.”

Margo’s hand shook as she did as Natalia demanded, praying that the emergency call had gone through.

And then it came to her, the memory of their meeting in Natalia’s apartment, when Margo had told her about the flash drive and the information it contained—the reference to Natalia’s website. Had she set Natalia breaking into her apartment in motion when she told Natalia about the flash drive? When she mentioned that Mr. Thornton had research on her?

But why? Why did she want the book? How had Natalia become entangled in all of this?

Stall. Stall until help can come.

That was—if the call had gone through.

Or if Luke was close to the flat.

“You’re here because of the flash drive, aren’t you? That’s why you sent someone to Thornton’s Bookshop that night—because you had been corresponding with Mr. Thornton about A Time for Forgetting, and you wanted to know what he had on you. Did you mean for Mr. Thornton to get killed, or did things just go too far?”

Margo took a step back, moving closer to the front door.

“I wouldn’t advise it,” Natalia said. “I would shoot you in the back before you even managed to get the first lock undone. And I wasn’t corresponding with your Mr. Thornton. Not under my real name, at least. I had an associate—the gentleman who was following you—go to see him. I didn’t even know Mr. Thornton knew who I was until you told me about the flash drive. Bad luck, I suppose, that he found my website, although unsurprising given the overlap in our interests.”

Luke had said he was almost done at the police station. Could she stall long enough for him to get there?

“How did you get involved in this? Why do you want the book?”

Did she know that A Time for Forgetting was at an auction house now as they spoke? Was that why she was trying to take the flash drive now, because she wanted to tie up any loose ends?

“I don’t care about the book. This is about the librarian. I want the list.”

The librarian? What did Natalia want with Pilar Castillo?

“Pilar Castillo?”

Keep her talking .

“What did she do?” Margo asked. “What list?”

“She ruined my father’s life. Eventually killed him. After the revolution, the librarian’s husband was arrested for subversive political activities. There were concerns about her, that she was involved in her husband’s business, but there was no proof. The police eventually deemed that she wasn’t a risk, and they let her go.

“But there were whispers, rumors that someone was hiding books, helping smuggle them. Those books belong to the state, not to the worms who left Cuba. Some of the books were quite valuable. She was hiding them and stealing them. It was discovered by one of Fidel’s military officers, and when he went to confront and detain her, she tried to kill him, but not before he discovered that she had written a list of the books she had hidden and their locations and kept it in a copy of A Time for Forgetting . Those books were worth a fortune then. They are worth millions now.”

This whole time they had tried to understand what it was about A Time for Forgetting that made people willing to kill for it. Natalia just gave her a million reasons—

It still didn’t make sense, though.

“How do you know they were still even in Cuba? What if the books were taken out of the country?”

“How would she have gotten them out of Cuba without anyone realizing? It would have been difficult. Besides, the police had an inside man, someone who worked with her at the library, knew her habits, knew her well. He said that she never would have risked damaging the books and the circle of people she could rely on was incredibly small. She didn’t have a way to get the books out of Cuba.”

“How did you get involved? You wouldn’t have been alive back then.”

Just keep her talking. Keep her talking until help comes.

“The military officer was my father,” Natalia answered. “He was never the same after she tried to kill him. He told me the story when I was growing up. You don’t know what it was like in Cuba. He had a promising military career, and she stole all of that from him when she attacked him. He was never the same after his injuries.”

“So, it’s not just about money for you, is it? It’s personal. Your website, tracking stolen Cuban property, it’s all a lie. Everything you told us that day in your apartment was a lie. The things about your parents, about your family? This whole time you were working for the people you professed to hate.”

“A cover,” Natalia corrected. “One that has served me very well. I collect information. Pass it on to the right people. The website was the perfect way to help me reach exile circles, to get people to trust me.”

“And you betrayed their trust.”

Natalia shrugged.

“We have the screenshots from Adriana Josephs’s message board conversations, the usernames she corresponded with—I bet we’ll find you behind one of those, won’t we?”

“I wanted to see who was tracking the book,” Natalia said.

“But how did you know to have him follow me?”

“He wasn’t following you; he was following Greer. He was asking questions about the book. When I realized you were searching for the book for him, you became interesting.”

“And you had him kill Mr. Thornton.”

“I didn’t have him do anything. He made a mistake there. Sometimes the people you hire don’t do the job they’re paid to do. He was just supposed to get information about the book. He got sloppy and made this business far more complicated than it needed to be.”

“Why now? Why after all this time?” Margo thought back to all the events that had led up to this, to the rumors she’d heard, to Bennett’s concerns that someone else was searching for this book. “Was it the whispers that the book was coming up for auction?”

Natalia smiled. “Who do you think started those rumors?”

It took her a moment—

How would you draw out someone you were searching for?

“That’s not A Time for Forgetting in the auction house, is it?”

“No, it’s not. What easier way to get what I wanted than to pretend I was Pilar Castillo, that I had A Time for Forgetting ? Adriana Josephs gave me the idea actually, indirectly, when she started searching for it on those message boards. She was the one who started this whole business when she started asking about it online. I remembered the story my father had told me. No one alive had seen the book, so it was easy enough to fake.”

“And Pilar Castillo?”

“She disappeared after that night with my father. She never returned to her apartment. Never returned to the library where she worked. There was no record of her in Cuba, no record of her leaving. It was like she became a ghost.”

“If she’s even still alive,” Margo mused, doing the math in her head. “Did you think to draw her out, too, when you put the fake book up for auction?”

There was no chance for Natalia to answer her. The sound of sirens filled the air, low and insistent, somewhere on the street outside.

It was London, so those sirens could have been for anyone, but it offered the chance Margo needed—

Natalia turned to the side, her attention drawn to the sound of the sirens.

How far away was help? Was it coming at all?

She had one chance.

In the time since they had started talking, Natalia had approached her, closing the distance between them sentence by sentence, reveal by reveal.

Margo lurched forward, crashing into Natalia.

Pain splintered into Margo’s body as she landed on top of Natalia.

A siren wailed in the distance.

Margo kicked out with her free leg, connecting with Natalia’s stomach.

Natalia shrieked, and then she reached up, bringing the gun down on Margo’s temple.

An explosion of pain assailed her, her vision blurring as dark spots floated in front of her.

A crash sounded behind her, darkness closing in on her, and then she heard footsteps and shouts, police officers bursting into the room.

She could feel herself drifting in and out of consciousness, the sensation of her head splitting open overcoming her.

Someone took her hand, Luke’s voice in her ears.

“Stay with me. You’re safe now.”

Margo’s eyes fluttered open. Luke leaned over her.

“It was Natalia Evans this whole time,” Margo murmured as he lifted her up off the ground. “She’s responsible for Mr. Thornton’s death. The copy of A Time for Forgetting is a fake. Natalia was pretending to be Pilar Castillo.”

As Luke carried her out of the flat, Margo’s gaze met Natalia’s across the room when the police slipped handcuffs onto her wrists.