Shannon couldn’t have ever guessed at the contents of these pictures.
The first photograph in the stack was of Dina, Shannon’s old roommate and friend. Shannon flared her nostrils. “Oh. It’s her,” she said.
Why would Russell bring Shannon a stack of photographs of Dina?she wondered.
But Russell urged her on. “Keep going.”
Shannon continued to flip. The next photograph was of Dina wearing a fabulous black silk dress. She was seated at a fancy restaurant, a spoon in her hand as she prepared to crack a crème brûlée. She was gazing across the table at whoever was taking the photo in a way that told Shannon that she was in love with that person.
Shannon remembered the brooding man they’d run into in the woods near campus, Dina’s new boyfriend. She imagined that she’d find a photo of him in the stack soon.
Instead, she flipped two more photos and found a picture of her father.
Shannon’s heart stopped. There he was, Fred Peters, wearing a suit jacket and a pair of Levi jeans, grinning in what looked to be a luxurious hotel room. Shannon sputtered and looked up at Russell, whose eyes were wounded. “What is this?” she breathed. “What is my father doing in this photograph?”
Russell seemed unable to speak. Shannon continued flipping through the photographs, finding many more of her father. In all of them, he looked handsome and happy and well-dressed. He drank beers and fabulous wines. He opened his mouth, as though he was in the middle of saying something. And sometimes he was featured in selfies—with Dina on his arm. In many of them, Dina pressed a kiss into him, both of them with their eyes closed.
Shannon felt all the blood rush to her feet. Her hands shook so violently that she struggled to hold the stack of photographs. Eventually, Russell rushed over to her, took the pictures away, and wrapped his arms around her. He kissed her forehead, her ear. He whispered, “It’s okay. It’s okay.”
But Shannon didn’t understand. “Dina? And my father?” She shook her head, trying to remember a time she’d seen her father and Dina together. She remembered how strange Dina had been with her the previous couple of years—ever since they’d started grad school—but Shannon had assumed that that had more to do with Dina having cheated on her final experiment in undergrad using Shannon’s research.
“Why would he do something like this?” Shannon whispered. “Why would she?”
Russell held her tighter. “I didn’t know what to do when I found them.”
“It’s good you showed me,” Shannon breathed. Softly, confusedly, she explained what had been going on with her mother’s blackmailers. “It’s why I’ve spent so much time back in Nantucket rather than heading back to New Haven.”
Of course, another reason she’d remained here had more to do with Russell and their kiss. But she didn’t need to get into that, not now that she and Russell had confessed their feelings.
“Do you think Dina’s the one blackmailing my mother?” Shannon asked.
Russell’s eyes widened. He clearly hadn’t reckoned for such an enormous story.
“It sounds to me like she’s your number-one suspect,” he said finally.
“Dina and that cagey-looking boyfriend of hers,” Shannon whispered.
She knew she had to get to the police right away. Finally, she had a clue beyond the vague details she’d found in her father’s emails.
But she knew, beyond anything, that she couldn’t show the photographs to her mother. She didn’t want Arietta to know that the previous couple of years of her life had been a lie.
Nobody deserved to know that about their life and their love.
23
Maybe it shouldn’t have surprised Shannon to learn that the cops couldn’t help. After all, they’d been useless when she and her mother had gone to see them before. And now, faced with the photographs of Dina and Fred, loved-up in various hotels around Yale and elsewhere, gazing into one another’s eyes as though nobody else in the world existed, Officer Turnwell shrugged and said, “This doesn’t prove that this young lady is attempting to blackmail your mother. What’s more…” He raised his eyebrows and looked at first Shannon, then Russell, as though he were instructing them in school. “Your mother should not have sent money to whomever it is who’s ‘blackmailing’ her. It brings me back to the same question. Why would she send the money if she’d done nothing wrong?”
Russell’s hand was in a fist that he didn’t let go of anywhere. “She was frightened,” he stammered. “She just lost her husband to a stroke. She wanted to preserve the life they had together. She didn’t want to know his secrets. Is that so hard to understand?”
Officer Turnwell looked annoyed and also eager for the conversation to be over.
“We’re asking you to interview her,” Shannon said. “She obviously knows something.”
Officer Turnwell handed the photographs back to Russell. “This seems like a domestic problem rather than one requiring police intervention,” he said. “Here’s a question. Have you shown these photographs to your mother yet?” He blinked at Shannon expectantly.
Shannon couldn’t believe the nerve of this man. But before she fought back, Russell took her hand and told the officer, “We’ll be talking to your supervisor about this.”
“Good luck to you,” Officer Turnwell scoffed. “It’s smack-dab in the middle of summer on Nantucket Island. Our problems are miles long. Get in line.”