“When did you first notice your wife was missing?” Axel asked.
“The school called to say that Julia hadn’t picked up Mystery. She never missed that time with our daughter. Nannies took care of her when we traveled or attended evening events, but Julia did her best to revolve her schedule around picking Mystery up and having a little girl time before homework, bath, and bed. So when the teacher called, I knew something was deeply wrong.”
“Keep going,” Axel encouraged. “Tell me everything else that happened.”
“I left the set and picked Mystery up. I called the police, but of course there was nothing they could do for twenty-four hours. I couldn’t wait that long, so I came home and started looking through Julia’s things to see if I could find any clues. I called her friends, her sister, even her yoga studio. All I could see was that most of her belongings were packed. She’d bought two plane tickets to Kansas City, departing the next day, and she and some of her personal effects were gone.”
Mystery remembered that day—the panic, the fear, the uncertainty. She’d gone to bed knowing deep in her heart that the worst had happened. Her mother would never have abandoned her, and her heart went out to Axel. Yes, they’d both lost mothers, but hers had been taken. His had just walked out as if he didn’t matter. Yet despite the fact that Mystery had left him last night, he sat beside her, comforting her.
He’d proven it the day they’d met and he kept proving it all over again—Axel was a man of strength, integrity, conviction. It hadn’t been fair to assume he had the same roving eye as her father and accuse him. Thank goodness he understood that she had difficulty with trust and had given her a great deal of patience.
“Personal items?” Axel asked.
“Her purse, her car, her laptop.”
Beside her, Axel stiffened, then turned to Heath, who suddenly scrambled to scroll through his tablet. She leaned over to read whatever he acted so desperate to retrieve. What the hell was going on?
The police report, she realized a moment later. They had an electronic copy of it.
They intended to do everything possible to figure out this cold case, and Mystery didn’t have any illusions why. They were doing it to save her.
Even as the realization humbled her, warmth spread to every corner of her body. She was beyond lucky to have them both in her corner. She felt even luckier that Axel cared enough to forgive all her stupid, rash actions over the past eighteen hours. And Heath . . . Mystery hated to think of a man as strong and wonderful, who’d already survived such shock and grief, not finding a happy ending for himself.
“Where did you get that police report?” she asked the pair of them.
“The sheriff’s department,” Axel answered grimly, then he addressed Heath. “Do you see it? Anywhere?”
He scrolled up, then back down, his dark eyes and big fingers moving over the screen. “I don’t.”
Mystery didn’t understand at all. “What? What are you two all agitated about?”
“Did you find something?” her dad asked over the line.
“Your wife’s laptop,” Axel finally answered. “The police found her car and her purse, both intact. There’s no record of them recovering a laptop at the scene. For that matter, why did she take it way out there? There wasn’t an electrical outlet for dozens of miles.”
“At that time, the battery life on those machines was next to nothing,” her father added. “I never thought about it. With so much else going on and the investigation, my grief, Mystery’s upset . . . I never pursued that.”
“What did your wife keep on that laptop?” Heath asked.
“I don’t really know.” He sighed, and Mystery heard her dad’s strain. “She asked for one. She almost never asked me for anything for herself, so I had an assistant find the best money could buy at the time and . . .”
He’d hoped it would make him feel less guilty. Mystery could hear that subtext in his unfinished sentence. “You never saw her type on it? She never told you about anything she was working on?”
“She e-mailed. She’d joined one of those sites where you kept up with your old classmates. We didn’t talk much about it.”
Mystery would bet they hadn’t talked about a lot of things, and that’s how their marriage had fallen apart. Her father hadn’t felt connected enough to his bride to be faithful, and she’d been unable to truly express her sadness and resentment until she’d had enough.
“I remember asking her once what she did with the laptop,” Mystery added. “She said she was keeping a journal.”
“Like a diary?” Axel asked, frowning.
“Yeah.” She nodded. “That’s how she described it.”
“Did she know something that could have gotten her killed?” Heath asked.
“Well . . .” Her father hesitated.
Trepidation iced through Mystery’s veins. Had her mom stumbled across dangerous information that had provoked someone to silence her for good? But what? Mom’s past hadn’t been shady. She hadn’t worked on films anymore or rubbed elbows with politicians.
“If Julia knew as much about all my affairs as she did the one she confronted me about, then she knew about my relationship with the wife of a powerful, dangerous man,” her father admitted. “Actually, it’s possible she knew a lot of secrets. I can’t say more than that. I’m heading into a conference call. Kiddo, stay near Heath and Axel. The fact they’re with you is the only reason I haven’t boarded a plane and rushed to the States myself. I love you. Be careful where you dig. Stay safe.”
Then her father hung up.
As if sensing her distress, Axel curled his arm around her. Mystery melted into his side. What wouldn’t her dad admit? Was he keeping quiet because he worried it would get her killed if he told her?
“Breakfast, anyone? I’m starving. I’ll cook,” Heath offered into the sudden silence.
She appreciated his attempt to lighten the mood but suspected it had far more to do with distracting her so she didn’t ask tough questions about her mother’s murder. With new information coming to light, she wished she’d jumped in with both feet and solved the woman’s killing sooner, rather than following her father’s advice and moving on, tucking all those terrible memories away in a box marked “painful” and letting it gather dust.
This trip to the States had been about more than experiencing Axel so she could get him out of her system. Instead, she felt as if she’d finally come into her own and figured out what she wanted. Now she just had to execute it.
“He knows something he’s not telling us,” she murmured.
Axel and Heath exchanged glances. They didn’t really know or like each other, yet they had some silent communication. Mystery didn’t comprehend precisely what that look said, but she got the gist.
That she was right.
“I’ll try talking to him in a bit,” Heath offered. “You know, man to man. He may have felt as if he’d already said too much in front of his little girl.”
By discussing all the sleazy bimbos in his life willing to cash in on their morals to either sleep with someone famous or land a role? Too bad. “Give me your phone. I’ll talk to him.”
“Princess.” Axel turned her to face him. “You’re the one he’s protecting. He loves you. He’s not going to divulge more to you. Seriously. Let us handle it.”
As much as she hated it, Mystery suspected they were right. It pissed her off again to be left out of the big-boy penis club or whatever the hell they had going on. “Fine. I’ll have my hands on the items my mother saved for me this afternoon. Maybe I’ll find something helpful there.”
“Don’t be upset. We’re in this together,” Axel assured.