Multiples Mystery. Alice Sharpe

stayed at the place once, on his honeymoon a decade before. The hotel had thrived—the marriage had not.

      He showed his badge again at the front desk and asked in which overpriced room they’d stashed a guest named Anthony Capri. The clerk was a young woman with a lilting accent and a name he couldn’t pronounce. She tapped a few keys, informed him they didn’t have a guest by that name. He asked if they’d had one with that name within the past two months. The woman shook her dark head and asked if he wanted to speak to the manager.

      “Absolutely,” he said.

      The manager was a middle-aged woman with heavy black frame glasses and earrings shaped like miniature Space Needles. She was obviously fighting an allergy as she sniffed every twelve seconds. Zac knew this as he surreptitiously timed her with his watch. After much computer time, she informed him they had never had a guest named Anthony Capri, not at the Marina Inn, not even at their smaller branches, Marina Overlook and Marina Cove.

      Zac went back outside and stood for a moment, taking in the fresh wind wafting off the water, the snapping flags atop masts of million-dollar yachts, the tangy, salty taste of the air. Now what?

      He finally took out his cell, punched in Faith’s number and left a message. She called him back a few minutes later after she’d checked with Olivia. Yep, he had the right hotel. Which must mean Anthony had lied about where he was staying.

      Why would he lie about something like that? What if the hospital had tried to reach him, what if they’d called the front desk and asked for him by name?

      Hadn’t Faith done that very thing and assumed the hotel was the one with the problem? A would-be caller would proceed to leave a message on Anthony’s cell and sooner or later, Capri would check his messages. Zac would bet a million dollars that if questioned, Capri could come up with a perfectly reasonable sounding explanation for the confusion.

      He got back in the car at last. Olivia must know something else that would help him figure out what was going on. She’d been defensive when he asked her questions, reminding him of when she’d been a kid and he’d caught her in his bedroom with Faith. The two of them had dug around in his closet until they found his stash of X-rated magazines. Faith had had the grace to turn bright red and stutter. Olivia had turned the tables and chided him for looking at pictures of naked women.

      The memory of her distant fierce stance still made him smile, but now was not the time for false bravado. Now was the time for candor.

      Part of him said he should find someone else in the department to look for this guy, someone not fond of the man’s wife.

      Someone who wasn’t involved.

      Someone who didn’t die a little inside every time he saw her.

      He gritted his teeth and tossed that kind of thinking aside.

      He’d do this as her friend in an unofficial way. He’d do whatever he could to give her back to the man she’d chosen.

      The phone rang and he flipped it open, expecting Faith with news about Anthony. Instead he learned his snitch—the guy he’d been going to meet within a few hours—had just taken a knife in the gut down near the shipping docks. He got in the car, put the flashing light on the roof, turned on the siren and pulled into the late afternoon traffic.

      The mystery of Anthony Capri would have to wait.

      

      THE SPECIAL CARE NURSERY looked like something out of a sci-fi movie to Olivia, with machines and tubes and isolettes that resembled miniature spaceships. To her relief, on this, the second day of their lives, all four of her children were doing well.

      True, they were all under UV light as a precaution for jaundice, but that was to be expected. They all also wore tiny nose prongs for oxygen and Brianna’s heart rate tended to drop on occasion, so she’d acquired an additional monitor; but the consensus seemed to be her condition wasn’t life-threatening and was nothing that would keep them from taking her home.

      Taking them all home.

      The first time Olivia had come into this ward, she’d been afraid to touch her children and had stared at them for several moments before tentatively running a finger along Juliet’s tiny arm. Twenty-four hours later, she was comfortable with them, used to how petite they were, knowledgeable about how much they needed loving strokes despite the tubes and other paraphernalia.

      Snuggling them against her bare skin as she took turns nursing them felt natural and healing. Faith and her mother helped feed them with bottles, doing what Anthony should have been doing if he wasn’t still MIA. All three of them sang to the babies, caressed them, and talked to them. Olivia’s love for her children, as well as admiration for her selfless family and her best friend, Faith, grew with every hour.

      The good news was that thanks to Zac, the police had made inquiries. Anthony wasn’t in any hospital or morgue in the state. The bad news was the same. If he wasn’t dead or dying, then he’d decided to cut his losses and leave. And though she hadn’t seen Zac since he showed up in her room, she’d spoken to him on the phone. He was in the middle of a case, he explained, and promised he’d come talk to her as soon as he could. Something in his voice warned her she better be prepared for news she didn’t want to hear.

      There were only a couple of possibilities, really. Either Anthony’s dead body remained undiscovered or he’d taken off. As he wasn’t exactly the kind to hike into the wilderness, get bitten by a snake and crawl under a bush to die, that left the other.

      She caught sight of her hand and the big Asscher-cut platinum diamond engagement ring she’d just slipped back on her finger that morning. Talk about impractical for a new mother. Why had Anthony insisted on such an outrageous ring? Better question—why had she swallowed her own modest taste and agreed to it?

      She couldn’t think about any of that now. Instead she gazed down at Antoinette’s downy head and admired her seashell ear and her velvety skin and tried to project reassuring, calm thoughts.

      The doctor said they could leave in three days. Again, she tried to clear her mind but the fact was irrefutable. The day she’d longed for was quickly approaching. Very soon, she would return home to Westerly with four small but healthy babies.

      And no husband.

      

      ZAC ENTERED the hospital lobby to a crowd consisting of a couple of camera crews and a slew of reporters, one of whom he recognized from the Westerly Herald. He found Faith standing near a wall and joined her.

      “Any news about Anthony?”

      “No. Any news here?”

      “Nothing.” She glanced forward. He followed her gaze to a long table behind which sat Olivia flanked by her mother on one side and her two youngest sisters, Megan and Tabitha, on the other.

      Olivia wore a red sweater with a scooped neckline. Her throat looked like satin, her breasts larger than they’d been before, filling the sweater in such a way it was hard not to gape. She was wearing more makeup than he’d ever seen her wear—he detected Megan’s liberal hand with eyeliner and lipstick. Her hair glistened under the lights and although her mother and sisters were attractive women, Olivia outshone them by a million watts.

      “You look like hell,” Faith said from his side.

      “Thanks.”

      “That’s the same suit you were wearing the day before yesterday.”

      “Tell me something I don’t know.”

      “Did you catch the guy who knifed your guy?”

      “We think his wife did it. Hard to blame her. The guy was cheating on her with two different women. It isn’t my problem anymore, though.”

      Faith was silent for a moment and then gasped. “You took the sheriff’s job in Westerly!”

      “Accepted this morning.”

      “That’s great.