Chapter 16
Ariel Vargas was a very pretty woman in her early forties, and her sixteen-year-old daughter Kayla showed echoes of that prettiness as well, in her big brown eyes and sculpted little cupid’s bow of a mouth. However, both of them looked as though something had been slowly draining their lifeblood and energy away, eyes smudged with dark circles, faces pale.
Audrey and Michael sat opposite mother and daughter at the big oak table in the dining room of the Vargas house, surrounded by antiques that matched the Italianate splendor of the large Victorian home. While not as big as the Whitcomb mansion, in many ways it felt far more gracious, possibly because it was obvious that Ariel and her husband — who was conspicuously absent from this meeting — had put a great deal of care into m
