Page 142 of Nobody's Fool

“I heard the car pull up, yes.”

“Did you see them?”

“I saw Victoria. She came in, said, ‘Happy New Year, Dad.’ Then she kissed me on the cheek.”

I am not sure I have ever heard a sadder voice than Archie Belmond’s right now.

“What happened after that?” I ask.

Silence.

I switch gears. “I know the woman I met in Spain wasn’t your daughter, Victoria.”

No reaction.

“Her name was Anna Marston. She grew up in Spruce Creek, Pennsylvania. She looked like your daughter. Not exact or anything. But the two of them probably could have gone to bars and switched IDs and nobody would have noticed.”

Silence.

“So the woman found in the diner in Maine wasn’t your daughter. It was Anna pretending to be Victoria. It was a setup. Another scam, I guess. But of course, she couldn’t pull that off on her own. Even after eleven years, you’d know she wasn’t your daughter. You’d run a DNA test. There is only one way this fraud could work—”

I pause. I hope they will say something. They don’t.

“—and that’s if you set it up yourself. Not her. You.”

Still nothing. So I push on.

“And that’s what you did. I don’t know all the details, but you were smart about it. You shaved her head. That’s what people noticed first. It made a casual observer think that’s why she looked different. You pretended to be super protective of her—so no one would get too close. You threw in that nonsense about ‘the Librarian’ to distract. You had Anna play mute, so no one would notice the different voice. You insisted on getting her to your doctors right away, so she’d be under your supervision, not the FBI’s. You used your money and influence to isolate her from scrutiny, and if anyone noticed that she looked a little different, well, eleven years had passed. People change in eleven years, especially if they’ve been held hostage. Anna was a little thinner than Victoria, but that also made sense if she’d been held against her will. You had your people work the search engines—if someone searches for ‘Victoria Belmond’ the photos that pop up are blurry Photoshopsyour people made up and paid to get higher engagement. Those look more like Anna than Victoria. And then the kicker. You ran a DNA test. Or least you claimed to. Did you fix the results or just lie about taking it?”

“Lied about taking it,” Archie says right away. “The FBI wanted to do their own, of course. I said I wouldn’t trust the results unless my own lab ran it. We just made it up. Who would question a father about something like that?”

I stop my pacing again. I give him a few seconds.

“Just so we are clear,” Archie continues, “lying about a DNA test is not against the law. None of what you are describing is. There is no law against pretending someone else is your daughter. That’s not an arrestable offense.”

I am not sure how to respond to that. It’s true, I guess. What would be the charge? But it’s also beside the point. And I don’t want him or Thomas defensive. They know I have them. That’s clear. They’ve calculated the pros and cons and realized with my NDAs and their power and money and influence and all that, it is probably better to give me at leastsometruth to control the situation.

But I need it all. I just have to tread gently to get it.

“How did you find Anna?”

Archie smiles. “Kismet.”

“What do you mean?”

“When Victoria… vanished, we founded a charity in her name.”

“Vic’s Place,” I say.

He nods. “My wife runs it. She goes often. Do you remember how I told you Talia started imagining she was seeing Victoria? Like at Starbucks?”

“Yes.”

“That’s what happened again. Talia rushed home from the charity one day saying the same thing about Anna. She swore she’d finally found Victoria, that I had to see for myself. By now, it had been elevenyears. And Talia…” He closed his eyes, took a deep breath, started again. “I drove down to Vic’s Place. I met Anna. And even I—I mean, she really reminded me of Vic. I sat with her in Vic’s Place for hours. We really connected. It was like…”

He stops, shakes his head, starts again. “She opened up to me. Told me how she ended up here—her single mom getting beaten to death by some drunks when she was a kid, her neglectful aunt, all the abuse she suffered. She’d ended up in Spain—you know that, of course—but she’d crossed the wrong people and had to get out. She stole enough money to buy a ticket to JFK, but once she landed, she had nowhere to go. Someone on the street told her about Vic’s Place, so here she was. She was grateful to be here. I asked about her plans. She had none. I know how this will sound, but I really liked her. She was a survivor. She had such strength. You met her. You know.”

I remind myself that I need to tread gently here. “So you, what, decided to make it appear that she was your daughter?”