Not Quite Right (A Lowcountry Mystery) (Lowcountry Mysteries Book 6) (23 page)

Beau looks too dumbfounded by coming face to face with Lucy’s past to forge ahead, and even though Brick is here, his mind is on other things. So is mine, but Leo sitting across from me reminds me that he and Mel are important, too, and that Amelia would want me to take care of them.

I blow out a breath and take over. “We’re here because we know what Allied Pharmaceuticals has been doing abroad, testing drugs on human subjects without authorization, and we want to stop them.”

Her eyes go wide. Her mouth opens and closes a couple of times while I hold my breath, waiting to find out if she’s going to help us or deny any knowledge of the whole debacle.

“We know that your agency filed a complaint against them with the WHO, but that you withdrew it several months later.” Brick pushes, because that’s his way. “Right after you received a hefty, anonymous donation that gave you the ability to fund twenty new schools in Iran and Afghanistan.”

Marcia manages to close her mouth. Her head bobs up and down in what could be a nod, but it’s not until she speaks that we know for sure. “Yes. I never agreed with taking the payoff, and I’m sure you know that Lucy didn’t, either.”

“Who made the decision? Weren’t you in charge?” Beau asks. He’s coming around now, and I know he’s dying to hear every single detail of the events that preceded Lucy’s disappearance in Iran.

“The board. They got to them, or at least some of them. Enough of them, I guess.” She pinches the bridge of her nose, looking tired all the way to her bones. “The reasoning was that only a handful of girls had been hurt by Allied’s testing—which they swore they would stop, by the way—while we could change the lives of
hundreds
with the donation they promised us.”

“Jeremy Bentham. Utilitarianism,” Leo murmurs, surprising all of us. He makes a face. “What, a guy can’t be hip to the old-school philosophers?”

“Jeremy Bentham, and later John Stuart Mill, had a theory on ethics that the right thing to do is whatever provides the most good for the most people,” Marcia chimes in, her eyes far away. “That whether we know them, or they’re terrible people, or whatever the specifics, it doesn’t matter.”

“What do
you
think?” I ask her.

“I think that taking that money made us as dirty as Allied. I think we knew they wouldn’t stop, not when it’s so easy to buy their way out of trouble. I think now there’s nothing to stop those poor girls we educated from being harmed by another corporation who thinks they don’t matter. That’s what I think.”

My heart hurts at her hard words. She’s so right, and even though I’ve thought about the people Allied is harming overseas, they haven’t seemed real to me until now. I still don’t buy Bentham’s theory—I care about finding Amelia, about keeping Mel and Leo out of prison, so much more than helping nameless women overseas—but now I realize that it doesn’t mean we can’t care about them, too.
 

If we can find the proof we need to get the Middletons to back off their cases against my friends, that doesn’t have to be the end of it. We could help those kids, too.

“Can you tell us what happened to Lucy?” Beau’s voice is gravelly and halting, as though he’s not sure he wants to know the answer now that we’re here, facing it.

I know that he does, though. It’s a way to honor her, to stand strong and hear the truth. Based on the sadness covering Marcia’s face like a mask, I think witnessing it must have changed her, too.

“I can. I think she would want you to know, honestly, but I never had the courage to look you up myself. If you’d moved on, if you were happy… I don’t know. Some people do better with forgetting.”

“I could never forget her.” His hands are clenched into fists.

I try to send signals to Brick, encouraging him to reach out to his brother, to help him the way I would if I were sitting there.

Okay, not
exactly
the way I would, but geez. Brick is like a statue.

Marcia nods, bringing my attention back to her, and takes a deep breath before diving into the story we all came to hear. “We had a meeting after the board made their decision to withdraw the official complaint with the WHO. No one was very happy about it, but Lucy was irate. I…I’m afraid I made a mistake.”

“Why?” I’m on the edge of my seat, wishing she would tell the story faster but also praying she doesn’t leave anything out.

“She asked for the file we’d prepared because she wanted to know who was behind it. I thought…” She shakes her head. “I thought she wanted to know so she could warn the girls in the school to stay away, something like that. I never thought she’d start looking for proof on her own.”

Brick’s ears perk up. “What do you mean? What kind of proof?” This is why he’s here, and now I really get it: he promised Amelia he would help. So he’s helping.

“She hired an investigator, someone local that could earn the trust of the girls. The ones who had been a part of the trial talked to him, and he traced their clues backward to the location and beyond that, I think.” She bites her lip. “Lucy disappeared a few weeks after that. People saw a group of four men in black masks grab her while she walked to school. They threw her in the back of a van and drove off. End of story.”

“There were never any ransom demands.” Beau’s fingers are twisted together so tight his knuckles are white. “That’s what my investigator said.”

“Not that we or her parents ever received, no.” Tears gather in her dark eyes. It’s clear that she cared about Lucy as more than an employee.
 

Despite the fact that my boyfriend had been in love with the woman, I wish I could have met her.

“Was there an investigation?” Leo asks.

Marcia snorts. “Yes. The kind of investigation the Iranians conduct when an American aid worker goes missing, which is to say, not much of anything. The embassy looked into it and came up dry. We were all bound by a confidentiality agreement and couldn’t mention the debacle with Allied and that Lucy was looking into it on her own.”

“So no one ever looked into them as a suspect in her kidnapping,” Beau surmises, his cheeks red with anger.
 

Thunderclouds roll over Brick’s face, too, reminding me how much all of the Drayton siblings liked Lucy. They’ve intimated more than once that the breakup between her and Beau had been hard on them all. I can’t say it will be the same with us, if we can’t work this out.

“No. Honestly, even with everything that happened, I think the chances are far greater that she was grabbed by one of the local Taliban groups who are against educating girls.”

We sit back as she falls silent, and I absorb the story in bits and pieces. It sounds as though we already knew most of the details, except for the key fact that Lucy was actively investigating Allied before she went missing. Despite Marcia’s assessment of the situation, I’m not so convinced her disappearance isn’t connected. Maybe I would have been if Paul Adams hadn’t been killed. And if Amelia weren’t gone, too.

All together, it has to add up to something. I’m just not sure what.

“Where did she get the money?” I ask. All of their eyes turn to me, vague confusion as to what I’m asking. “To hire the investigator, I mean. Lucy didn’t have family money, and I’m guessing her work at the agency didn’t pay enough for that kind of thing.”

Marcia’s expression twists in thought. “You know, I’m not sure. She never brought it up and we were so busy over there, I never thought to ask. It would have been expensive, too, because of the risks people like that run in the Middle East. Most of them are half-in with the terrorists themselves.”

Cold fingers wrap around my spine at the thought that Lucy’s determination to do the right thing could have gotten her killed. It’s curious where the money came from, but maybe not all that important. The Draytons would be an obvious guess, but the shattered look on Beau’s face and the sick shade of Brick’s skin promise they aren’t lying about the last time they heard from Lucy.

I can’t imagine Mrs. Drayton giving a rat’s ass. If I know her, she was as happy as anyone to be rid of the little do-gooder stealing her son’s heart.

“I do have his files, though,” Marcia adds. “Or at least, I can get them for you.”

It’s like all of the oxygen is sucked out of the room. None of us responds for at least ten seconds, but it feels like much longer.

Once again, it’s Leo—the one with the most reason to hold on to his focus—that wraps his head around our good fortune first. “The investigator’s files? How?”

“Lucy left a note, hidden in one of her case files. The envelope said only to open it if something happened to her, and there was a key and an account number for a safe deposit box at a bank in Turkey.” Marcia shakes her head with a small, impressed smile. “I don’t even know when she found the time to sneak away to Turkey, but I did, too. The files on her investigation into Allied were there, including all of the reports from the investigator.”

“What do they say?” I’m breathless to get my hands on those things. “Where are they?”

“I never read them. I didn’t want to…after what happened to her.”

“Can we have them?” Beau asks, a glint in his eyes that means he’s on the scent of something.
 

“I keep them in a safe deposit box, too. With my parents’ will and other important papers.” She gives us a small, sheepish shrug. “I guess after what happened to Lucy, I’m a little paranoid. To tell you the truth, I’ll be glad to get rid of them. I can go tomorrow.”

Beau makes arrangements to meet her tomorrow morning after the bank opens while Brick and Leo get up and wander off to grab our coats from the closet. My mind reels over what we’ve been told and keeps coming back to one thought: if Lucy felt the need to hide those files so well, and to leave a note about what to do if anything happened to her, we have to at least consider that she thought those two things would be connected.

Chapter Fourteen

M
y whole body thrums with unspent energy by the time Leo and I get back to Market Street in Charleston. We have forty minutes before we’re supposed to meet the woman who knows where to find Odette, so we duck into a bar and grab a couple of mojitos. It’s the wrong drink for the season—the mint-and-rum concoctions speak of lazy summer nights in sundresses and sandals—but for some reason, it sounds good. The two of us pick at a cheesy crab dip appetizer without talking, having exhausted most of the conversation about Lucy and what could have become of her in the car.

I try not to think about Lucy still being gone. I don’t want to think about what happened to her and how no one knows and they might not ever find out, because with Amelia gone and the same awful people lurking on the edges of our lives, it’s too much.

“Are you ready for this?” Leo asks, dropping a piece of uneaten pita bread back onto the tray.

“As ready as I’ll ever be.” What I
want
is to drive back to Heron Creek and have Amelia be waiting for me. I want to crawl under the quilt my grandmother made, in the house she shared with my grandpa, and for the world to be tipped right side up when I wake. “I need to find Odette. I need to know about the curse.”

“Haven’t you asked her about it before, though? And she said she can’t help.”

I press my lips together. “She says she’s not powerful enough, that the curse is too strong. It’s not Gullah. It’s something else. I’ve done a little research on my own, and to last through the centuries the way it has, the woman who cast it must have made a powerful sacrifice.”

“Maybe you have to make a similar one to break it?” Leo guesses.

The way he avoids my gaze tells me he feels idiotic for even discussing such a thing. It’s a hard thing to
believe
, and even though he trusts me, curses and evil spirits are something else.
 

I reach out and cover his hand with mine, then force a smile when he meets my gaze. “Thanks for being here, Leo. I know this is a lot.”

“Hey, you don’t have to thank me. You’re going out on a limb to get Mel and me out of trouble, even when Amelia is missing, and you’ve gotta be a mess.”

My throat burns and I look away, taking a couple of deep breaths and pulling myself together. “I’m pretty good at living life as a mess. I’ve had practice,” I whisper.

“You are not a mess, Gracie. You’re
real
. Nobody has it all together, but there aren’t many brave enough to show that fact to the world. You don’t hide. You have courage, more than anyone I’ve met.”

His blue eyes shine bright when I meet them again, and confidence flows from him into me. I nod, sucking in more air, and try to believe what he says. It almost works. Being around Leo makes me feel like it’s okay that I’m a mess, and that’s an interesting concept, to say the least.

“It’s just…I don’t know how to break the curse without Mama Lottie. I can read about voodoo and hoodoo and Gullah and any other number of religions on the Internet, but the people who understand how to connect to it, how to make it work, it runs in their blood. It has for generations. It’s not… I can’t do it on my own.”

“You’re not on your own. I’m here. We’re going to find Odette and see what else she can tell us, if Mama Lottie has decided she prefers throwin’ shit fits as opposed to followin’ through on her word.”