Chapter 4 - WHAT CLAIRE HID
The code led us to a storage locker.
Not a dramatic vault.
Not a cemetery.
A climate-controlled storage facility outside Evanston.
Mom had rented it for seventeen years.
Inside were Christmas decorations.
My childhood drawings.
Noah's baby clothes.
Three boxes of tax returns.
And a sewing machine.
I started laughing.
Daniel looked concerned.
“This is what normal people store.”
“I know.”
“You look disappointed.”
“I expected something more criminal.”
“You spend too much time with me.”
“It's been two days.”
“Exactly.”
Then we found the wooden sewing box.
Inside were spools of yellow thread.
Beneath them was a false bottom.
A ledger.
Original.
Not a copy.
Mom had lied on the tape.
Daniel stared.
“She said she burned it.”
“She wanted anyone forcing us to listen to the tape to think the original was gone.”
He looked at me.
“Your mother was very good.”
“Yes.”
I smiled through tears.
“She was.”
The ledger contained names.
Politicians.
Police officers.
Businessmen.
Union leaders.
Carter associates.
Some dead.
Some powerful.
And Samuel Ashford.
But beside his name was another.
Thomas Ashford.
The supposedly dead brother.
Payments continued for twenty-seven years.
Then stopped six years earlier.
The year Mom died.
No.
The year we'd been told she died of cancer.
I remembered Daniel's reaction.
Claire Bennett didn't die of cancer.
“What did you mean at the gala?”
Daniel hesitated.
“My people checked after you said her name.”
“And?”
“There is no death certificate for Claire Bennett.”
I stared.
“There has to be.”
“There isn't.”
“She died at St. Catherine's.”
“No Claire Bennett died there that month.”
I backed away.
“I saw her.”
“What?”
“I saw her body.”
Daniel stopped.
“Where?”
“Funeral home.”
“Open casket?”
“No.”
The question hit me.
No.
Mom had requested cremation.
We'd been told the chemotherapy had changed her appearance badly.
I had never seen her after her final hospitalization.
Noah hadn't either.
Hope rose.
I killed it immediately.
“No.”
“Emma—”
“No. Don't do that to me.”
“I'm not saying she's alive.”
“Good.”
Because false hope can be crueler than grief.
Marco interrupted.
“We have a location for Noah.”
A text had arrived from his phone.
One photograph.
Noah tied to a chair.
Alive.
Holding today's newspaper.
Below it:
BRING THE LEDGER. EMMA ALONE.
Daniel read it.
“No.”
I took the phone.
“Yes.”
“Absolutely not.”
“Daniel.”
“They'll kill you.”
“They have my brother.”
“I'll get him back.”
“How?”
Silence.
I stepped closer.
“You don't get to make promises because you're powerful.”
He looked at me.
“Then what do you want?”
“The truth.”
“You have it.”
“No.”
I pointed toward the ledger.
“I want all of it.”
Daniel's expression changed.
I understood.
There was something else.
“Tell me.”
He looked at me for a long time.
Then said:
“Your mother didn't disappear after my father died.”
My pulse slowed.
“She worked for me.”
“What?”
“For seven years.”
The room went silent.
“Doing what?”
Daniel's answer broke something open inside me.
May you like
“Keeping people like me from becoming people like my father.”
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