The Lost Story of Eva Fuentes - 4

London

2024

Margo paused in front of the Notting Hill bookshop, juggling her phone in one hand, coffee in another. Mr. Thornton had changed the books displayed there since she was in the shop yesterday.

Her phone pinged with an alert, and she scrolled through the email that had come in, reading the message from a longtime client whose husband had absolutely adored the painting they had found for him. The couple had honeymooned at a villa in Italy three decades prior and had fallen in love with a framed painting in the master bedroom. At the time, the artwork hadn’t been for sale, but decades later, the villa’s owners long gone and the heirs more concerned with unloading the property and raking in the profits, it came up for auction in Rome.

Sometimes, this game she played—securing and sourcing the rare and obscure—was a cutthroat one ruled by avarice and ego. Other times, though—her favorite times, if she was being honest—she had the opportunity to reunite families with possessions that had been lost through generations, to find items whose emotional value transcended their monetary one, to bring joy and appreciation to people’s lives.

In undergrad, she’d majored in business because she’d been cognizant of the need to get a job that would pay enough to address her student loans as well as the fact that, unlike many of her peers, she didn’t have a safety net to fall back on. When she graduated, she didn’t have an option of moving home to save money or someone she could go to if things fell apart. But despite the practical considerations, she minored in art history because those classes were some of her favorites, a welcome respite from accounting courses and the like that sometimes made her want to pull her hair out.

She’d graduated with debt and the not-so-welcome realization that the job market was more competitive than she’d ever realized, and no one was particularly impressed by her undergraduate degree in a market where so many of her peers had more advanced degrees, so on she’d gone to grad school.

A master’s degree in Art Business was the perfect way to merge the practical and the emotional, the program’s location in London and the connections it provided an added bonus. She’d already started a side hustle of antiquing in undergrad to help pay for her living expenses, her business’s social media presence growing at a time when people were drawn to images of beautiful objects that they could save as inspiration for items they wanted to have in their own lives. Grad school had enabled her to level up her business, giving her the confidence, connections, and knowledge to turn Reynolds Acquisitions into something she was immensely proud of.

Striking out into business for herself turned out to be the best decision she’d ever made. Terrifying, yes, but rewarding in the sense that it put her in the driver’s seat. If she was going to succeed or fail, it was going to happen on her terms.

Her life was spreadsheets, not canvases, and she often wondered what all those columns and numbers would amount to. Eventually, they would cease to matter, but the items she tracked and located—the works that artists poured themselves into, the cherished items passed from one generation to the next—that was the impact she wanted to have. She played a small part in people’s lives, their histories, and that was enough.

Margo tucked the phone back into her bag, some of the day’s frustrations fading away.

With her free hand, she pushed open the door.

The little bell jingled above her, announcing her presence, but she called out to him as well.

“It’s Margo.” She glanced down at her watch. “Sorry, I’m a bit early. Things finished up at the office and I thought I would come over here.”

None of the auction houses she had reached out to had heard anything about A Time for Forgetting coming up for sale. None of them had even heard of the book or Eva Fuentes. Hopefully, Mr. Thornton had something for her to go on, because so far she’d wound up with a lot of dead ends.

Margo turned toward the table in the front. He curated his titles the same way gardeners lovingly toiled over their flowers, and she could easily envision him rotating the selection with enthusiasm as he engaged in a bit of matchmaking between the titles and his customers.

The book she had picked up at the bookshop yesterday had indeed been a delight—a mystery set in Barcelona that had left her guessing until the very end. She’d read until nearly two in the morning. She’d sat down in bed intent on reading only a few chapters before she fell asleep, but once she started, she’d been unable to stop. The detective had been a cantankerous sort whose holiday was abruptly cut short by murder, and she’d sped through the pages feeling very much like she needed a holiday to Spain (without the dead body, of course) and determined to read more, considering the pleasure it brought her when she did.

It was the same when she did Pilates—getting to her studio for class was always a struggle, a myriad of excuses coming to mind when her day went off the rails as it inevitably always did. But on the days that she did go, she was always immensely grateful for the effort, for the fifty minutes when she could lie back on the reformer and close her eyes, feeling the breath flow through her body, the tension seeping out of her.

Reading was like that, like falling into another world, mind and body consumed. She’d needed it more than she realized.

A thud sounded somewhere in the back of the shop.

“Mr. Thornton?” Margo called out, walking toward the noise.

Margo had only been in his inner sanctum a time or two, but she had seen the towers of books and boxes that occupied the workspace. She’d teased Mr. Thornton that he should find an assistant to help him with the shop’s operations, but he’d grumbled that no one knew his bookstore as well as he did, and considering her own reluctance to hire someone to help with her business, she couldn’t blame him. Bea was a rock star, but not everyone was lucky enough to find someone like her.

Margo stopped in her tracks.

Books spilled out onto the floor from one of the bookshelves, their leather spines resting on the ground. Some of the books yawned open, yellowed pages facing out.

Margo bent down, setting her coffee on the ground, and scooped up the books, putting them back on the shelf. The order was wrong, undoubtedly, and Mr. Thornton would likely want to fix it as soon as he could, but—

“Mr. Thornton?” she called out again. “Is everything alright?”

Had something happened? The back room might normally be a mess, but the bookshop was always immaculate. She could no sooner imagine him allowing books to rest on the ground than she could envision him running stark naked through the shop.

Margo pulled her phone out of her purse, and continued walking toward the back, scanning her surroundings. There were more books on the ground, but this time she didn’t stop to pick them up. Her heart pounded, her limbs feeling heavy as dread flooded her body.

She froze.

For a moment, she was having an out-of-body experience, like she was in a movie or in the pages of the novel she’d been reading last night, mentally yelling at the character not to take a step forward, not to investigate when all the signs indicated that something was seriously wrong.

But maybe there was a reason that they always took another step forward in the movies, why they didn’t do the sensible thing and go for help when things seemed off. It was human nature to be curious, to question, to wonder, and also perhaps a misplaced sense of invincibility that suggested the bad things one experienced in fiction couldn’t—shouldn’t—happen in real life.

She walked toward the back room.

The smell hit her first.

It was the scent of coffee mixed with something else, something she couldn’t quite identify, but it made her stomach roil just the same.

“Mr. Thornton—”

The formality seemed incongruous with the reality of the situation, but he’d always been Mr. Thornton to her, a man she’d treated deferentially, formally, because there was a quality about him, a gravitas of sorts.

His name died in her throat.

A glass coffeepot lay on the floor, the carafe shattered, liquid spilling out all over the parquet.

It spread toward a growing liquid of something dark, red—

Margo screamed.

Mr. Thornton lay on his stomach a few feet beyond the coffee spill, a pool of blood surrounding him.

She raced toward him, dropping to the ground, her legs shaking, heart pounding.

His head was turned to the side, his eyes closed, and she reached out, placing her fingers to search for his pulse.

“Please, please…”

It was there. Faint, but it was there.

Her hand fell away, relief flooding her.

Using one hand to brace Mr. Thornton and the other to move him onto his back, to search his wounds, Margo gently rolled him over.

The scream died in her throat.

His white collared dress shirt was covered in red, a nasty gaping wound near the vicinity of his heart.

He’d been stabbed.

Her mind raced, all the order and logic that normally defined her world absent now. It was hard to think through the panic consuming her.

Margo’s fingers trembled as she dialed the number for emergency services. With that much blood—

She rattled off the address to the emergency operator, struggling to keep her voice calm as she relayed the nature of her emergency and answered the operator’s questions.

“I’m getting help, I promise,” Margo urged Mr. Thornton.

Could he hear her?

“They’re five minutes out,” the operator said in her ear.

Margo took a deep breath, trying to still her racing nerves. Adrenaline coursed through her body, taking over when the truth was that she had absolutely no idea what she was doing.

Margo set the phone down, putting it on speaker as the woman walked her through what to do until medical services arrived.

Margo reached out, pressing her hands to Mr. Thornton’s wound, following the instructions the operator gave her over the phone, trying to stanch the bleeding with little success. The blood was coming rapidly now, far too quickly for her to do much good. She grabbed at the scarf around her neck, yanking it off and pressing it to Mr. Thornton’s chest.

The stench hit her again, her stomach roiling.

His eyes were closed, but he winced slightly as she applied more pressure.

“I’m sorry—I know it hurts. We need to stop the bleeding. Help is almost here.”

A thud sounded somewhere in the shop, then another.

Thank God.

“I hear them—the emergency services,” she told the operator. “They just arrived.”

“We’re in the back room,” Margo called out. “Help.”

“They’re three minutes out,” the operator replied, her voice so calm in the face of Margo’s panicked one. And then her tone shifted, like a warning bell tinkling in Margo’s mind. “Is there someone else in the shop with you?”

The stillness of the shop—

The books on the floor—

The thud she’d heard in the back room—

The shattered coffeepot on the floor—

The blood covering her hands now, her palms slick with it.

“I—I don’t know,” she whispered, a hitch in her voice.

“They’re two minutes out,” the operator intoned. “Stay on the line with me.”

Two minutes seemed like an eternity.

What if they weren’t alone?

A jingle filled the air, the happy bells incongruous with the grimness of the back room.

Her heart pounded.

It was the front door. The informal system that Mr. Thornton had installed to alert himself of the arrival of customers. The same bell that had just jingled when she walked into the store.

Was someone leaving or arriving? Were they alone or was whoever did this out there in the main part of the store?

Margo struggled to remember if she had looked down every row of bookshelves—could someone have been lurking around a corner? It was a small shop, but that didn’t mean there weren’t plenty of alcoves where a person could hide.

She glanced around the messy storeroom, searching for a weapon to use in case she had to defend them. There was a box cutter resting on one of the metal bookshelves near the back of the tiny storeroom, a couple of open boxes of books nearby as though Mr. Thornton had been in the process of unpacking a shipment and had set the item down when someone had come into his store. Had he known the person? Or had he thought it was merely a customer looking to buy a book?

Margo rose from her position on the ground and grabbed the box cutter, clutching it in her hand. It wasn’t much, given her limited experience with defending herself, but at least it was something.

Mr. Thornton’s eyes fluttered open.

Relief filled her.

“Stay with me,” she urged him. “You’re going to be fine. Help is coming. Just stay with me for a few more minutes. You’re not alone. I’m here with you. You’re going to be okay.”

“Ma—Margo,” he croaked.

“Yes, it’s Margo.”

“Is he conscious?” the operator asked.

“Barely,” Margo replied, lowering her voice.

She didn’t want to say the words out loud in front of him, didn’t want to scare him for fear that panic would make everything worse, but with the rate of blood he was losing—

“They’re on the street,” the operator said in that same calm tone, as though she knew Margo was on the verge of completely losing it.

“Help is almost here,” she urged Mr. Thornton. “It’ll be alright.”

He took a deep breath, his chest heaving with the effort, a cough rattling out of him.

A trickle of blood escaped his mouth.

How much blood could he lose and still survive? She had no idea. It seemed like he had already lost a great deal.

Who did this to him?

“Margo.” Mr. Thornton’s voice was stronger now, her name urgent, insistent coming from his mouth. He grabbed her free hand, pressing something into her palm.

“I’m here. I won’t leave you,” she promised, holding his gaze.

“Be careful,” he whispered, the words coming out garbled.

“They’re in the store,” the operator said. “You’ve done great, Margo.”

“They want the book,” Mr. Thornton whispered.

The storeroom doors burst open.

The room filled with paramedics, a stretcher. Margo could hear the operator talking to her in that same measured voice, could feel hands gently pulling her away from Mr. Thornton, lifting her up to her feet, but the whole thing was beyond surreal, and she couldn’t escape the sensation that she was living through a particularly bad nightmare.

Margo shoved her hands into her coat, the metal edges of the object Mr. Thornton pressed in her hand biting into the skin of her palm, a chill seeping into her bones. Her arms shook, the tremors moving all the way to her fingertips.

“Did you find him?”

Margo blinked, focusing on the man in a police uniform in front of her asking her questions.

Margo nodded. “Yes. I—I found him. I came into the shop because we had a meeting. When he didn’t greet me, I walked back here in search of him.”

What if she had arrived earlier? Would she have been able to do something to help? Or would she have ended up on the floor beside him?

The policeman pulled a notebook and pen out of his pocket. “And your name is?”

“Margo Reynolds.”

She gave the officer who identified himself as Officer Matthews her information, explained her relationship with Mr. Thornton.

“Was there anyone else in the shop when you arrived?” Officer Matthews asked her.

“I don’t know. I didn’t see anyone. But I wasn’t looking, either. A few minutes ago, when I was on the phone with the emergency operator, I thought I heard a noise from someone out in the main part of the shop. If there was someone out there, they would have had to have walked out the front door. Maybe they were on the street right before you came in. I heard the jingle of the front door, too. I wasn’t sure if it was someone leaving or arriving.”

Officer Matthews jotted down some notes. “You’re lucky—there have been burglaries in some of the surrounding shops lately. It sounds like you may have interrupted them. Next time, call for help first before going to investigate. You might be lying there next to him if you had come a few minutes earlier.”

A chill slid down her spine.

“I didn’t—I didn’t know anything was wrong. I figured he was just in the back room working. I didn’t realize there was trouble until I saw his body.”

Should she have called for help earlier? As soon as she saw the books on the floor? Had she realized the danger then? She’d pulled out her mobile; she remembered that. Knowing what she did now, it was hard not to go back through her steps earlier and question the decisions she’d made—

It had just seemed so unbelievable that something horrible had happened in the shop—until she saw Mr. Thornton.

Another policeman walked up to where they stood.

“Looks like the same crew that robbed the bakery last week,” he said.

Officer Matthews nodded in acknowledgment.

“He told me to be careful,” Margo interjected, the memory coming back to her. At the time Mr. Thornton had said it, she’d been so grateful that the medics were finally arriving, so filled with worry about whether he would be alright that his words had barely registered with her. But now—

Both men turned toward her.

“Mr. Thornton told me to be careful.” Margo tried to keep her voice steady, to push the panic out. She could tell they weren’t taking her seriously, could read it in their body language, in the expressions on their faces. “He said that they want the book—”

The look Officer Matthews gave her was skeptical at best. “Who wants the book? What book?”

“I don’t know who—this book called A Time for Forgetting . Mr. Thornton was helping me track it down for a client. That’s why we were meeting tonight.”

“Did anyone know you were meeting?”

“I don’t know. My assistant. I don’t know who she told.”

“And your assistant’s name is?”

“Bea Carlyle. But Bea didn’t have anything to do with this.”

He ignored her, writing something else down in his notebook.

“And this book is valuable?” Officer Matthews asked her.

“Not particularly, when you consider the value of rare books—I don’t think so, at least.”

The other officer and Officer Matthews exchanged a look. It was a look she recognized instantly because she had been the recipient of it more times than she could count. They were dismissing her.

“Are you sure that’s what he said?” Officer Matthews asked. “After all, there was a lot of commotion. You might have misheard him.”

Was she certain of what Mr. Thornton said? She thought she was, but now that they were looking at her like she was unreliable, she was questioning herself. Had she heard Mr. Thornton say that? She had been so scared, so panicked, and everything had happened so quickly, Mr. Thornton struggling to speak. But Officer Matthews was continuing—

“Look, these robberies—the behavior has been escalating. The woman at the bakery said they threatened her with a knife if she didn’t open the till for them. I don’t know that anyone is entirely surprised we’ve ended up here. It was only a matter of time before they stabbed someone. People panic, act in unexpected ways, and then a bad decision becomes a tragic one.”

“Yes. I’m sure,” Margo interrupted, answering more confidently now. “You can ask him yourself when he’s better. He’ll tell you.”

A sudden flurry of activity filled the storeroom.

The officers shifted from Margo, their attention focused on what the paramedics were doing.

Margo hovered on the periphery, her heart in her throat.

The tenor in the room had shifted, a pall settling over the crowd as everything stilled, a silence stifling the room.

Someone cursed.

The paramedics moved away from Mr. Thornton, and a sinking feeling filled her, a heaviness settling in her stomach.

Margo knew before anyone said a word that he was gone.

“The bookseller that I approached to help me find A Time for Forgetting is dead,” Margo announced, unable to keep the anger and grief from her voice.

Silence greeted her on the other end of the line.

Margo ducked into a coffee shop, her mobile pressed to her ear, heart pounding. Ever since she left Thornton’s Bookshop, she’d been glancing over her shoulder, searching the crowded London street to see if the man who she had noticed in the Tube station yesterday was still following her.

She didn’t see him, but that hardly provided comfort considering she didn’t know who or what she was up against, only that they were capable of murder.

Margo took a deep breath, and then another, steadying herself.

She’d told herself that she would stay professional on the call, that she wouldn’t fall apart, but her best-laid plans were quickly going awry.

“Excuse me?” Greer said, the note of surprise in his words unmistakable.

She’d wondered on the walk from Notting Hill if her client could be behind Mr. Thornton’s death. Given how little she knew about him coupled with Mr. Thornton’s ominous last words, how could she not consider it? But it didn’t make sense—why go to the trouble to hire her and then work against her by killing her best chance at a lead?

The object Mr. Thornton had pressed into her palm—a flash drive—weighed heavily in her coat pocket.

“He was murdered in his bookshop in Notting Hill tonight,” Margo bit out.

Murdered.

It didn’t feel real saying it. Didn’t feel possible. And if Mr. Thornton was killed because of the book, because she’d asked him to search for it—

“And why do you think this has something to do with the book?” Greer asked her.

He was testing her. She could hear it in his voice, in the hesitancy there balanced with a curiosity to know more. He was surprised, but he wasn’t shocked, which told her they knew way more than they’d been letting on.

“Because I found him after he’d been stabbed to death. His last words to me before he died were warning me to be careful and telling me that someone wants the book.”

Another pause filled the line. “He said that specifically? That someone wants the book?”

“Yes. When we met, you told me that you had concerns that someone else was after the book. Who is it? If you have any information surrounding who killed Mr. Thornton, then you need to go to the police.”

She didn’t tell him the rest of it, about the police dismissing her or considering this to be a robbery.

“I need to speak with my employer.”

“No. You’ve put me in a dangerous position; you owe me an explanation. I think someone is following me. I noticed a man in a black jacket trailing me after we met last night. My fee doesn’t cover my life being at risk.”

“Do you want more money, then? What if we double your fee?”

He said it so easily. To give her more information, he needed to consult with his boss, but he was apparently authorized to pay her forty thousand pounds.

How far would he go?

“It’s not about the money. A man has been killed because of this book,” she hissed.

One of the baristas glanced over at her uneasily.

“Let me talk to my employer,” Greer responded. “We’ll reach out to you soon.”

“There’s no need. There is nothing you could say to me that would entice me to keep working for you. Not after everything you’ve withheld. Not after my friend was murdered .”

The barista walked over to a coworker who was working the coffee machine, glancing back at Margo huddled near the door.

“I wouldn’t be so sure about that,” Greer responded. “The situation around A Time for Forgetting is complicated.”

A buzz came through the line, the sound of an incoming text message.

“I sent you a picture, Ms. Reynolds. I think you’ll want to learn more about the book before you decide to walk away.”

“I—”

He’d disconnected the call.

That he thought she would continue to search for the book after everything that had happened—

He’d texted her a picture.

Margo clicked on it, watching as the image filled her phone screen.

It was a photo of a London street, one she recognized immediately, the familiar awning of a store peeking out from the corner.

A man was exiting the bookshop. He was tall and muscular, the grainy photograph capturing him moving mid-stride.

A curse fell from her lips.

She recognized him instantly.