Page 151 of Dying to Meet You

Inside, it’s dim and quiet, as it should be. The lights are off and workers have gone home for the day. Still, the mansion feels extra desolate.

“Beatrice?” I call as I walk through the empty atrium. Aside from the clicking of Lickie’s nails on the bare floors, there’s only silence.

I head to the library, but find the same quiet darkness.

Confused, I retrace my steps. “Beatrice?”

Then I hear a sound upstairs. Footsteps.

Lickie freezes midstride and flattens her ears.

“Come on, girl,” I say, shortening the leash and leading her toward the staircase. We start the climb, and as the stairs curve, I see light shining from above. It’s coming from the third-floor gallery. “Bea?”

“I’m up here,” she calls, her voice strained. “But that baby won’t stop crying. Don’t you hear it?”

I pause on the steps and listen, trying to hear anything besides Lickie’s panting.

Then it comes. A thin wail. And the hair on my neck stands up.

57

Natalie

Natalie stares at the photo of Beatrice for so long that she forgets to breathe.

She can’t make sense of what she’s seeing. In the first place, Beatrice’s last name is Chambers. Not Vespertini. But more importantly, what is Beatrice—the Beatrice she and her mom know so well—doing in this report?

What the hell does this mean?

Natalie literally runs to get her laptop. She’s typingBeatrice Vespertiniinto a search bar almost before her bottom hits the couch again.

The search turns up nothing.

Okay. That’s frustrating. Maybe she changed her name a long time ago? But why? And how does any of this fit together?

She searchesBeatrice Chambers Portland Mainewith predictable results. She finds a few pictures of Beatrice at various charity events around Portland and a profile on LinkedIn that reveals nothing.

Natalie grabs her phone and opens Instagram, where she’s already following Beatrice’s private account, and where Beatrice follows Natalie, too. But Beatrice’s list of followers is unremarkable. No Vespertinis.

She sorts through everything she knows about Beatrice, and it doesn’t amount to a lot:

She’s younger than Rowan, so she was born in the early nineties. This was after the maternity home was closed, but in the photo, she wears a Saint Raymond medallion.

Beatrice said her mother died when she was a little girl—probably before this picture was taken.

Her father was somebody who thought he was “too good” for her.

And Vespertini appears on that list of four names. Why?

She grabs her mother’s notes and sifts through them again. The only other Vespertini her mother found was a name on a University of Maine flyer for a choral production. There was a Vespertini in the alto section.

Natalie looks at Beatrice’s LinkedIn profile. She graduated from the University of Maine.

Her mother needs to see this.

She types a text.

Natalie: Hey, where are you? I found something.