The Billionaire's Eighth Widow

Chapter 4

Ivy stood in front of her bathroom mirror at seven in the morning, rehearsing a sentence she'd already rewritten six times.

"Detective Alvarez, I have reason to believe-"

No. Too formal. He'd retired years ago; he wasn't a detective anymore, and starting with a title he'd probably shed on purpose was a good way to lose him before she'd finished a single sentence.

"Mr. Alvarez, I know this is going to sound-"

She stopped, looked at herself, and made herself say it out loud one more time, watching her own mouth form the words the way she used to watch her bow arm in the mirror before a performance, checking for anything that gave away the nerves underneath.

"My name is Ivy Calloway. My sister was Rosalind Ashcroft. I think you already know what I'm about to ask you."

That one, she kept. It had the virtue of being true, and of not asking him for anything yet - just laying a fact on the table and letting him decide what to do with it.

She'd found Frank Alvarez the way she'd found everything else lately: methodically, patiently, through the kind of research that made her eyes ache and her fingers cramp around a pen. A retired homicide detective, name buried three layers deep in an old news archive covering the investigation into Beatrix Lowell's death - wife number two, the balcony fall - quoted exactly once, in a single line that read more like something a lawyer had negotiated down to nothing: Detective F. Alvarez of the county homicide division confirmed the department found no evidence inconsistent with an accidental fall. No evidence inconsistent with. Not the same as no evidence of foul play. It was the kind of sentence a careful man wrote when he wanted the record to say one thing and the truth to say another, if anyone ever bothered to read closely enough.

Ivy had bothered.

His address hadn't been hard to find once she had the name - public records again, a modest house two counties over, the kind of place a pension bought you if you'd never made captain and never particularly wanted to. She drove out on a gray Tuesday morning, rehearsing sentences the whole way, and by the time she pulled up outside a small brick ranch with an American flag hanging slightly crooked from the porch, her hands had gone cold enough that she had to sit in the car for a full minute before she trusted herself to knock.

The man who answered the door looked exactly like his one quoted sentence had sounded - careful, closed, a face that had learned a long time ago not to give anything away for free. He was in his sixties, broad through the shoulders in a way that had probably been muscle once and was mostly just solid now, gray stubble he clearly hadn't bothered shaving that morning, eyes that went sharp and assessing the second they landed on her.

"Whatever you're selling," he said, "I don't want it."

"I'm not selling anything." Ivy held his gaze, the way she'd practiced. "My name is Ivy Calloway. My sister was Rosalind Ashcroft."

Something moved behind his eyes - not surprise, exactly. Recognition. The look of a man watching a bill come due that he'd been quietly dreading for longer than he'd admit.

He didn't slam the door. That, Ivy would think later, was the first real piece of information she got from him - that a man with nothing to hide and nothing to fear would have shut it in her face immediately, and instead he stood there for a long three seconds, jaw working, before he stepped back and said, "You'd better come in, then."

The inside of the house was tidy in the specific, over-controlled way of a man who lived alone and needed order to feel like he still had a handle on something. Frank led her to a kitchen table with two mismatched chairs and didn't offer her coffee, which she understood, correctly, as him keeping this short on purpose.

"I know why you're here," he said, before she'd even sat down. "I've been half-expecting somebody like you to show up for about four years."

"Then you know the case was never actually closed. Not really. Just - filed."

"I know a lot of things I'm not going to say out loud in my own kitchen." He sat across from her, arms crossed, a wall going up in real time. "What do you want, Ms. Calloway?"

Ivy pulled the folder from her bag - the one she'd built over the last week, photocopies of her wall condensed into something a stranger could hold in his hands without needing three days of context. She slid it across the table. Frank didn't touch it.

"Seven wives," she said. "Seven different causes of death. Every single one, eleven months, almost to the week, after the wedding. I know you worked Beatrix Lowell's case. I know what you told the papers, and I know it isn't what you actually believe, because a man who believed what he told the papers wouldn't still be flinching every time somebody says the name Ashcroft."

Frank's jaw tightened. For a moment she thought he might actually reach for the folder, and something in her chest lifted, dangerously close to hope.

Then he pushed his chair back and stood.

"I worked that case seventeen years ago," he said. "I worked it for eleven days before I got a call from my captain telling me the file was being reassigned to a detective with more - his word - bandwidth. Eleven days, Ms. Calloway. I hadn't even gotten the full toxicology back. And when I asked why, on paper, in a memo I still have a copy of, I got told the family had concerns about the department's handling and had made those concerns known through channels well above my captain's pay grade."

"So you know."

"I know I got reassigned. I know a woman died falling off a balcony she'd stood on a hundred times sober as a judge, and I know the case got closed inside three weeks by a detective who never once returned my calls afterward, and I know that if I so much as breathe the word pattern to anyone with a badge, I get a very polite, very expensive letter from a law firm I can't afford to fight." He looked at her, and for just a moment the wall cracked enough that she saw something underneath it - not indifference. Old, banked fury, gone cold from years of having nowhere to go. "You're asking me to reopen something that ended my career the last time I got close to it. I'm sixty-three years old. I have a pension I need. I have a daughter getting married next spring and I would like to walk her down the aisle without a lawsuit hanging over my head."

"Seven women are dead."

"I know how many women are dead." His voice cracked, just slightly, on the last word, and he turned toward the window rather than let her see the rest of whatever had moved across his face. "I've known the number for seventeen years. It doesn't get easier watching it climb from wherever I'm standing, believe me."

Ivy sat very still, feeling the shape of what she'd walked into - not a wall of indifference, which she could have pushed against, but a wall built entirely out of grief and fear in equal measure, which was so much harder to move.

"Then help me," she said quietly. "Not officially. Not on paper. Just - tell me what you know."

"What I know," Frank said, still facing the window, "is that the last time I got curious about this family, I lost my career in eleven days. What do you think happens to someone with no badge and no institutional protection at all?"

"I don't have anything left to lose."

He turned back to look at her then, and something in his expression shifted - not softer, exactly, but sadder, the particular sadness of a man watching someone walk toward the exact ledge he'd once stood on himself.

"Everybody thinks that," he said, "right up until they find out they were wrong."

He walked to the front door and opened it, and the gesture was final enough that Ivy understood the conversation had ended whether she was ready or not. She stood, gathered her folder - he still hadn't touched it, hadn't even looked at the photographs - and paused in the doorway.

"If you change your mind," she said, "you know where to find me. I'm not going to stop."

"I know," Frank said, and there was something almost like pity in it. "That's what worries me."

The door closed behind her, not slammed, just closed, quiet and complete, and Ivy stood on the porch of a stranger's house in a neighborhood she'd never been to before, feeling the particular flat coldness that came after hope collapsed rather than the hot flare of anger she might have expected.

She'd gotten something, at least. Not what she came for, but something real: confirmation, from a man with nothing left to gain by lying to her, that the Ashcroft family had reach enough to end a homicide detective's career in eleven days simply for asking the wrong question in an official capacity. That wasn't nothing. It was, in fact, the most useful thing anyone had told her since the package arrived on her doorstep - because it told her, with total clarity, exactly which door was closed to her and why.

Official channels were closed. Badges, warrants, subpoenas, the entire machinery of institutional investigation - all of it ran through people the Ashcrofts could reach with a single well-placed phone call, the way they'd reached Frank's captain, the way they'd no doubt reached whoever signed off on seven different coroner's reports without once laying them side by side.

Which meant the only way in was the one door that machinery couldn't touch, because it wasn't outside the house at all.

It was inside it.

Ivy walked back to her car with her folder under her arm and sat behind the wheel for a long moment without starting the engine, watching Frank's crooked flag shift slightly in the wind, turning the thought over until it stopped feeling reckless and started feeling, instead, like the only logical conclusion left standing.

She couldn't investigate the Ashcrofts from outside. Nobody could - Frank had just spent fifteen minutes proving that with the specific, weary authority of a man who'd tried and paid for it. But wives had access. Wives got keys, got rooms, got seven decades of family history handed to them in wedding gifts and household inventories and long empty afternoons alone in a house full of secrets nobody official was ever allowed to see.

Rosalind had gotten close enough to hide letters somewhere in that house before she died. Close enough to notice a locked door in a wing nobody talked about. Close enough to write I keep thinking about the others in a diary meant for no one but herself.

Ivy started the car and drove home with the folder on the passenger seat and a single, cold, clarifying thought sitting underneath everything else, the kind of thought that didn't arrive with fanfare so much as settle into place like a key finding its lock.

If I want inside that house, I don't need a detective. I need an invitation.

She was still turning that thought over three nights later, half-heartedly scrolling a gossip blog she'd bookmarked weeks ago for exactly this reason - one of a handful of society sites that covered the Ashcroft family with the breathless, vulture-eyed attention usually reserved for royalty - when a headline stopped her scrolling cold.

ASHCROFT HEIR QUIETLY RESUMES SEARCH FOR EIGHTH WIFE - SOURCES SAY VETTING PROCESS ALREADY UNDERWAY

Ivy read it twice. Then a third time, her pulse picking up in a way that had nothing to do with grief and everything to do with the sudden, vertiginous sense of a door swinging open exactly when she needed it to.

It had been seven months. Seven months since Rosalind's funeral, and here was Lucien Ashcroft - the man her sister had loved, the man whose house had swallowed seven women whole - already, quietly, methodically, looking for the eighth.