Noa had tried to win Jule over with Dickens. And a sick dad. And godforsaken cats. Because she knew all those things would lure Imogen Sokoloff into conversation.
“Noa!” Jule said, smiling, returning to the BBC English accent, her back against the door of her room. “Oh, wow, you surprised me. I can’t believe you’re here right now.”
“I want to talk to you about the disappearance of one Julietta West Williams,” Noa said. “D’you know a young woman by that name?”
“I beg your pardon?” Jule shifted her handbag so it went across her body and wouldn’t easily come off.
“You can cut the accent, Imogen,” said Noa, standing up slowly to keep her coffee from spilling. “We have reason to believe you’ve been using Julietta’s passport. The evidence points to you faking your own death in London a couple months ago, after which you transferred your money to her and took over her identity, possibly with Julietta’s cooperation. But now no one has seen her for weeks. She’s left zero footprint from shortly after the execution of your will until you started using credit cards under her name at the Playa Grande. Does that sound familiar? I wonder if I could have a look at your identification.”
Jule needed to think through all this new information, but there was no time. She had to act now.
“I think you must be confusing me with someone else,” she said, keeping the BBC accent. “I’m sorry I didn’t come to trivia night. Let me get my wallet out and I’m sure we’ll get this all sorted right away.”
She faked as if to look into her bag, and in two steps, she was on top of Noa. She kicked the coffee up from underneath. It was still hot and it splashed in the detective’s face.
Noa’s head jerked back, and Jule swung the suitcase hard. It hit Noa in the side of the skull, knocking her to the floor. Jule brought it up again and slammed it down on Noa’s shoulder. Again and again and again. Noa hit the floor and scrabbled for Jule’s ankle with her left hand while she reached toward her pant leg with the right.
Was the woman armed? Yes. She had something strapped to her leg.
Jule stamped her boot down hard on the bones of Noa’s hand. There was a crunching sound and Noa cried out, but her other hand was still trying to grab Jule’s ankle, to tip her off balance.
Jule steadied herself against the wall and kicked Noa in the face. As the detective coiled back, bringing both hands up to protect her eyes, Jule yanked the leg of Noa’s jeans up.
A gun was strapped to Noa’s calf. Jule pulled it off.
She held the gun on Noa and backed away down the hall, dragging her suitcase as she aimed.
When she hit the stairway, Jule turned and ran down it.
Out the back entrance of the inn, she scanned the trash cans and the cars packed in the back lot. There were bicycles leaning against the back of the building.
No. Jule couldn’t take a bike, because she couldn’t leave the suitcase.
Farther down the hill, the street opened onto a plaza with a café.
No, that was too obvious.
Jule ran through the inn’s parking lot. When she turned the corner of the building, she saw a window into a guest room along the side wall. It was tipped open at the top.
Jule looked into the room.
Empty. The bed was made.
She yanked the screen out of the window and threw it into the room. She pushed her suitcase into the open top—it barely fit—and banged it through the cheap venetian blind. She threw her shoulder bag in and vaulted herself over the windowsill. She scraped her skin going over and landed hard on the floor. Then she shut the window, adjusted the blind, threw her things and the detached window screen into the bathroom, and closed herself in there as well.
The inn was the last place Noa would look for her.
Jule sat on the edge of the bathtub and forced herself to breathe slowly. She unzipped the suitcase and pulled out her red wig. She took off her black T-shirt and put on a white top, then slid the wig onto her head and tucked her hair inside. She closed the suitcase.
She picked up the gun and shoved it down the back waistband of her jeans, like she’d seen people do in the movies.
A couple of minutes later, she heard Noa walk past the window of the hotel room. The detective was talking on her phone and moving slow. “I know,” Noa said. “I underestimated the situation, I know that.”
A pause. “It was a lightweight thing, an heiress who ran away, you know?” Noa had stopped walking and was easy to hear. “A silly rich girl on a spree. Evidence so far makes it seem like she and her friend staged a suicide that was gonna let them both live large. The two figured to run off together. They wanted to escape the usual—obsessive ex-boyfriend, controlling parents. The friend thought they were going to share the heiress’s money, but the heiress does the double cross. She takes her friend’s ID as planned, and then she gets rid of the friend entirely….A contract hit’s our best guess, probably in the UK. The friend is now missing, last seen in London back in April. Meanwhile, the heiress, using the friend’s details, runs away with all that money and would be living happy, except the obsessive boyfriend can’t believe she killed herself, so he keeps hounding the police. Finally, they come to think he’s got a point. They look into it, and eventually they find the friend’s credit card being used at this Mexican resort.”
Another pause while Noa listened. “Come on. A girl like that, a Vassar girl, you don’t expect an offensive. No one would. She’s barely five feet tall. She wears three-hundred-dollar sneakers. You can’t call me out on that.”
Another pause, and Noa’s voice began to fade as she walked away. “Well, send somebody, because I need medical attention. The kid has my weapon. Yeah, I know, I know. Just send me some local help, comprende?”
Forrest had sent detectives. Jule understood it now. He had never accepted Immie’s suicide, had suspected Jule from the get-go, and what had all his vigilant questioning turned up? He’d been told that Imogen had committed fraud to get away from him, and that poor, dead Jule had been nothing but a gullible victim.
Jule left the bathroom, crawled across the floor, and crouched beneath the window to look out. Noa was walking down the hill, clutching her arm and shoulder as she went.
There was a supercabos bus coming down the road. Jule grabbed the suitcase and rolled it into the hall, then stepped out of the inn through a side door. She walked calmly onto the edge of the road and put her arm in the air.
The bus stopped.
She breathed.
Noa did not turn.
Jule stepped into the cab of the bus.
Noa still did not turn.
Jule paid her fare, and the doors of the bus closed. A car pulled up to where Noa stood, cradling her broken hand. The detective flashed ID to the person inside.
The bus pulled away in the opposite direction. Jule sat down on the worn seat nearest the driver.
It would stop anywhere she wanted to get off. That was how the supercabos worked. “Quiero ir a la esquina de Ortiz y Ejido. ?Puedes llevarme cerca de allí?” Jule asked. Ortiz off Ejido—that was where the hotel clerk had told her a guy sold used cars for cash. No questions asked.
The driver nodded.
Jule West Williams leaned forward in her seat.
She had four passports, four driver’s licenses, three wigs, several thousand dollars in cash, and a credit card number belonging to Forrest Smith-Martin that would do for buying plane tickets.
In fact, there were a number of things Jule could do with that Smith-Martin credit card. She could pay Forrest back for all the trouble he’d caused her.
It was tempting.
But she probably wouldn’t bother. Forrest was nothing to Jule, now that she didn’t need to be Imogen Sokoloff any longer.
The last bits of Immie that had been inside her slipped away, like pebbles washed off a shore by a tide going out.
Going forward, Jule would become something else entirely. There would be other bridges to walk across and other dresses to wear. She had changed her accent, had changed her very being.