Page 33

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

Underneath it all, I’m a cop. Now. Before. Prenatally, I sometimes think.

That’s the funny thing about my life trajectory. I was supposed to be a physician. That had been my plan from as young as I can remember. If I hadn’t gone to Spain and met Anna, I would have gone to Columbia University medical school that fall. I’d have done the four years. I’d have picked a specialty—I was interested in cardiology—and gone on to my internship and residency and would have never crossed paths with Nicole or met Molly and there would be no Henry.

I would have never become a cop.

All pretty obvious.

But now I wonder—because another part of me feels, knows , I was always meant to be a cop. It’s in my blood, even now, even after getting thrown off the force and knowing that I will never be able to return. I’m not saying it was God’s will or any of that. I don’t think I’m that important. I don’t think any of us are. We human beings are startlingly, amazingly, narcissistic. I remember my father, the amateur scientist, pointing this out to me once:

“Earth is 4.6 billion years old, Sami. If you scale that down to forty-six years, do you know how long human beings have been here?”

“No.”

“Guess. It’s important. How long out of those forty-six years have humans roamed the earth?”

“Twenty years?”

“Less.”

“Ten years.”

He smiles and shakes his head. “Four hours. Out of forty-six years, we humans have been on this planet for a mere four hours. The industrial revolution started a minute ago. Yet we humans believe God created all this just for us.”

I think about that a lot. It keeps me humble, I guess. Our insignificance in the scheme of things. That doesn’t make life less valuable to me. It makes it more.

Okay, enough with the philosophical meandering. My point is, I don’t want to sound too self-serious, but maybe I was destined to be a cop. I can’t let that part of me go, which is why I am teaching a course on criminology. Now that the clues are starting to pour in, now that I feel the answer is tantalizingly close, I need to step up.

I can’t have my students figure it out before me.

Not out of ego. My students have been amazing and more than proved themselves. They should be proud of what they’ve done. But it has to be on me at the end. There’s no other way. So I’ve divided them up. One hand won’t see what the other is doing. They will report their findings only to me. We have all worked this case hard and like real cops. Maybe harder. We have no agenda other than solving the case. We may not have a badge but in today’s world, perhaps that’s an advantage not a hindrance, especially since I also have Marty, whom I’ve nicely bullied into running certain tests for me.

This takes a week.

I remained patient. I gathered all the findings. I analyzed the data in private.

I’ve come up with the answer.

When I do, I call Archie Belmond and tell him I need to see the family. He knows it is something big. I can hear it in his voice or maybe he hears it in mine. We set up a time to meet at the Belmonds’ estate.

Marty insists on driving me. I would argue, but I know he won’t listen. This is the deal I made with him and Molly. I would argue, but my body is still sore, and I need someone to drive me anyway, so what’s the point?

Besides, to be fair, I really can’t predict how the Belmonds will react. I’m about to pull the pin out of a grenade and toss it at them. You know what they say: You never know who is going to make the sacrifice and jump on the grenade, who is going to panic and run—and who is going to pick it up and toss it back at you.

Or something like that.

When Marty pulls through the gate and up to the front of the house, I’m barely surprised to see Arthur standing there. I get out of the car and tell Marty to stay here. He nods. He has done all I’ve asked and then some.

“Marty?”

“What?”

“Thank you.”

He nods again. “I’m going to leave the car windows open. Scream like a lunatic if you need me.”

Arthur waits at the same spot he’d stood when last we were here together.

“What are you doing here?” I ask him.

“As your attorney, I’m supposed to remind you of your legal commitments and responsibilities.”

“You drove all the way up here to tell me that?”

“What part of ‘billable hours paid by the Belmonds’ is confusing to you?”

I put a hand on his shoulder. “It’s all good.”

“It’s not though. These people have lawyers who can crush you.”

“My lawyer is way better.”

Arthur smiles. “Truth.”

I tap his shoulder again and move past him. As I do, I look up and see Talia Belmond standing by a window. She looks down at me. Our eyes meet. I don’t know what to do. I raise my hand and give a small, stupid wave. She just stares back. I don’t know what to make of that.

I go inside where Gun Guy awaits me. He has one of those metal detector wands, though it looks slightly more high tech. “Empty your pockets,” he tells me, pure Airport-TSA in his tone. I do. He waves the wand over me. He pats me down, checking for a wire. I don’t have one. He is thorough. He knows what he’s doing.

“They’re waiting in the conservatory,” Gun Guy says.

“Does anybody not rich refer to a room as a conservatory?”

“I’ll keep your phone and belongings safe for you.”

“Afraid I’ll get robbed?”

Gun Guy shakes his head.

“What?”

“I’m disappointed. I expect wittier rejoinders from you.”

“If it helps,” I say, “I’ve let myself down too.”

As I head toward the conservatory, I walk past Lenore Spikes. She doesn’t say anything either, just gives me a solemn look. I guess that I’m supposed to get some deeper meaning from this look too, but I don’t, so I give her a semisarcastic salute and enter.

Archie and Thomas, father and son, stand shoulder to shoulder, primed for my entrance. I get why. I have been joking around because that’s what I do, but I know that when we leave this room (er, conservatory)—and not to sound overly melodramatic—but our lives will never be the same.

“Where’s Talia?” I ask.

“She won’t be joining us,” Archie says. “Please have a seat.”

“You two sit,” I reply. “I need to stand and pace.”

Here we are, in this decked-out “conservatory,” and I can’t help feeling like I’m Hercule Poirot gathering all the suspects, except that there are only two in the room, and with the way I dress and act, the more probable detective hero I’m emanating here is Columbo. Like in that show, we all know the guilty parties. Sort of. With Columbo, he knows it right away. That’s the fun. We just wonder how he will catch them. I’m not that quick, but I catch on eventually.

The two men do sit. Thomas is wearing a white Oxford cotton shirt, khakis, loafers. Archie has a gray sweater vest over a blue shirt. Both cross their legs the same way, left ankle over right knee. I see the father-son echo in their faces, in their mannerisms, in the way they cross their legs.

I see no reason to ease my way into this. Not yet. So I start with Thomas.

“You lied about the night your sister disappeared,” I say without preamble. “You didn’t drop her off at McCabe’s Pub and head home. Victoria took your keys, so you couldn’t drive back, even if you wanted to. So instead, you sat in a bar down the street. Is that about right?”

Thomas looks over at his father. Archie says, “We know you’ve talked to Caroline Burkett.”

I’m not surprised. I figured at some point he would put people on me too. “I don’t care,” I say. I look back at Thomas. “Is that what happened? You stayed at a bar down the street? Victoria had your keys?”

Thomas simply nods. I start pacing.

“You told me before that you’d broken up with your girlfriend. A Lacy Monroe. You said she dumped you and you weren’t taking it well. That part was true. You also claimed that your sister called you, per the phone records at 11:04, and that her call went to voice mail. But it didn’t go to voice mail, did it?”

He looks at his father. His father nods at him.

“No,” Thomas says, “I sat on a barstool at that bar and I was getting drunker and drunker. The bartender told me I should leave. So I called her to tell her I had to go, but she didn’t answer. So I hung up. That’s why there’s no record of that. But a few minutes later, she saw my missed call on her phone.”

“And she called you back.”

“Yes.”

“What did she say?”

He swallows. “She asked me if I was okay.”

“And what did you say?”

“Nothing coherent. I just blubbered.”

“So your sister left her party to check on you?”

“Yes.”

“Because she was worried about you.”

Thomas squeezes his eyes shut and doesn’t answer. Archie fights to keep his expression blank.

“You were in bad shape.”

“Yes.”

“So I assume Victoria drove you home.”

Thomas manages a nod. “We wanted to get back in time to watch the ball drop. There was no traffic on the road, so we thought we could make it. I remember the car radio was on. An AM news station—1010 WINS.” He deepens his voice and mimics a radio announcer. “‘You give us twenty-two minutes, we’ll give you the world.’” Thomas looks up at me. “They still around? That station?”

“I think so,” I say.

“Victoria drove. I was slumped next to her. I was pretty out of it, but I remember that radio station. She was staring at the road. You know. Concentrating. And I say to her, ‘I’m sorry I’m such a fuckup,’ and she says that we’re about to enter a whole new millennium, and we both need to make resolutions. I said okay, like what? She said I had to stop drinking and doing drugs. Pleaded with me, really. I said I would. But I didn’t mean it. She probably knew that. Wasn’t the first time we had this conversation. She said she was going to be stronger too. More honest. And even in my state I could tell something had happened at the party. I asked her what was wrong, and she just said, ‘Caroline, everyone knows about that now.’”

I stop midpace. “So you already knew about your sister and Caroline Burkett?”

“Yeah,” Thomas says. “I was the only one she told. That’s what we were like, Vic and me.” He gets lost in that thought for a moment or two, but then he shakes it off. “Anyway, we were on Route 95 listening to that radio station when it got to midnight. I remember watching her face as she counted down out loud with the radio. I tried to count out loud too, but I was so wasted. I just sat there and smiled instead. Here I am, on the biggest party night of the year, and I’m watching my sister’s face going light and dark in passing headlights.”

I nod and start pacing again. “So then you two arrived home.”

“Yes.”

“What time?”

“Don’t know. A little after midnight, I guess.”

“And then what happened?”

Silence.

I can feel the entire room shut down. I turn to Archie. “You told me you were home that night.”

“I was.”

“How did you welcome in the new year?”

“Watching Dick Clark on TV with our dog Winslow.”

“Just you two?”

“Just us two. I told you. I was worried about Y2K.”

“Did you hear them come home?”

“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 Photoshops your 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 least some truth 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 eleven years. 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?”

“Yes,” Archie says.

Just like that. I knew it, of course. Had figured it out a while back. But to hear him just say it like that still hit me anew.

“As you pointed out, she wasn’t an exact match but they resembled each other, like sisters maybe. We also had eleven years of aging to explain that. Plus the shaved head, yes. Plus, right, we paid search engines so that the photos you’d get if you searched for Victoria would be ones we recently photoshopped. It was enough.”

“Seems like a big risk,” I say.

“What do you mean?”

“That someone would see through her.”

“No, not really. For all the reasons you mentioned. We had the resources to keep the media and law enforcement at arm’s length. We used her supposed fragile mental health to get her home right away. The FBI and press might have wanted us to cooperate more, but when the family tells you she doesn’t remember, what can you do? You move on to other cases.”

Archie sits a little straighter, warming up to the story now. “But even if someone did figure it out, so what? Suppose we were somehow caught. What laws were we breaking? It might be weird or even unethical, but if you found out we wanted someone to pretend to be our daughter—that’s not against the law.”

I had no answer to that.

“Even if you left here now and defied the NDA and told the world about it—well, for one thing you could never prove any of this. But even if you could, what could you charge us with?”

“But I could prove it,” I say.

“What?”

“I got DNA from Anna’s body during the recent autopsy after she was killed.”

“You what?”

“I also swiped Thomas’s glass of iced tea when I was at his house. I tested his DNA against the DNA from the police morgue. There’s no sibling match.”

For the first time I see the pain leave Archie’s face and the cold businessman emerge. He points a finger at me. “Now that—stealing DNA from a corpse—that’s against the law.”

“I know,” I say.

“And she’s now been cremated.”

“I know that too. You cremated her in case someone wanted to exhume the body for the DNA. You were smart. You were careful.”

“We broke no laws,” he says again.

“True,” I agree. “You just paid a woman to pretend to be your missing daughter.”

Archie’s eyes widen, and I worry I’ve gone too far.

Thomas speaks up. “It wasn’t like that.”

I turn to him. “So what was it like?”

“You won’t understand.”

I spread my hands. “Try me.”

“I thought the whole idea was crazy too, but—and this is going to sound even crazier—it worked. Once she came into our lives, we all grew to love Anna. She became my sister. Not just playing a part. She was my sister. I loved her like that. I confided in her. Like I used to with Victoria. You met my daughter at my house. Vicki. We named her for my real sister—but for both my daughters, she was their favorite aunt. Hell, their favorite relative. They traveled together. She took them out on their birthdays. My daughters—her nieces—haven’t stopped crying since she was murdered.”

“Do they know the truth—”

“No, of course not.”

“—that she wasn’t really their aunt Victoria.”

“But she was,” Thomas insists. “To them. To me. To all of us. That’s the point. I loved her. And she loved us. I know that with every fiber of my being. You may not believe that—”

But of course, I do believe it.

Anna’s last words still ring in my ear:

“I love them with all my heart, Kierce. Mom, Dad, Thomas, Maddy, my nieces—especially my nieces. I love them. And I love my life.”

“—but we became a family,” Thomas says. “A good family. A loving family. She brought us together. Healed us.”

“I didn’t force her into this,” Archie says. “I told her she could change her mind at any time. We’d let her go. But she didn’t want to leave.”

I see Anna’s pleading face in the park again:

“I love them. And I love my life.”

“She was happy,” Archie says. “We were happy. That’s the crazy part. We all became better people for it. And as for my wife—” He stops here, bites down on his knuckle, closes his eyes. When he starts up again, his voice has a choke in it. “It saved Talia’s life. I can’t put it any plainer than that. My wife lived through eleven years of hell. Every day waking up and wondering what had happened to her daughter. She imagined fresh hells every single morning. You spoke to Judith Burkett. I’m sure she told you about my wife’s suffering. The pain and guilt of not knowing—and now suddenly she had her daughter back. Don’t you see?”

But suddenly I didn’t see it.

How had I missed this?

“Hold up,” I say.

I thought I had it. It’s why I wanted to see the whole family. Including Talia.

But I was wrong. I had put so much of it together but not this part.

But it makes sense, doesn’t it?

It is all starting to fit.

“Your wife didn’t know,” I say.

“Of course not.”

“She wasn’t in on this.”

“Don’t you see?” Archie says. “Talia was the whole motivation for doing this.”

I shake my head in disbelief. “She was the mark.”

“No, not like that,” he says. “Don’t you get it? My wife was drowning every day. For eleven years. Every day she woke up crying, wondering where Victoria was. I tried everything to comfort her. But nothing worked. Until this. Until I made ‘Victoria’ come home to her.”

My brain is swirling. “So the reason you hired Anna to play Victoria—”

“ Hired isn’t the right word.”

“Whatever the hell you want to call it,” I snap. “The reason was… to fool your wife?”

“Not fool her. Give her back what she’d lost.”

It’s starting slowly to sink in.

“And your wife was skeptical at first,” I say. “I remember she told me that. Then, what, you told Anna to ask her to read that kids book?”

“ Are You My Mother? ”

“Right. Jesus. That’s so damn manipulative.”

“I was trying to save her life,” he says. “Talia was in such pain. I was trying to end it for her.”

“By lying?”

“We all live a lie, Kierce.”

“Oh, please don’t hand me that bullshit.”

“It worked,” Archie says again. “Don’t you see? You can call it whatever you want, but it eased her pain. Talia was happy again. We all were. Even Anna. You told me so yourself.” He gestures toward his son. “Tell him, Kierce. Tell Thomas what she made you promise before she died.”

I look at him. “She wanted me to protect you.”

“Our feelings were not a lie,” Archie says. “They were reality.”

“So where did it go wrong?” I ask. “You are all living in this fantasy world for thirteen years. What happened?”

Thomas takes that one. “You, Kierce.”

“Me?”

“She recognized you in the news,” Archie says. “All those articles about your fall from grace. It unnerved her. You’d been fired. Disgraced. She felt responsible. She said it was the same way Talia had been tortured by not knowing—you were suffering the same thing. She wanted to make it right.”

This fit in with what Anna told me in the park. “So she came to my class,” I say.

“Yes. She thought that would have been the end of it, I think. None of us counted on you being resourceful enough to track her down. And once you showed up, I knew you’d never let it go. You’d keep digging.”

“So you decided to, what, control the situation?”

“As much as I could, yes,” Archie says. “That’s what I do. For the best of reasons. Let’s face it. I was right, wasn’t I? You’d have never let it go.”

Probably true, I think.

“At least by hiring you, I had some leverage and protection. The NDA. The money. You’d have to tell me all your findings. Like right now. Whatever else you might think this is, this is you doing your job. I hired you to investigate. Now you are simply reporting your findings per your employment contract.”

“Wow, that’s some spin.”

No reply.

“That only leaves us with one question,” I say.

I wait. They wait.

We are at it now.

I’ve been intentionally circling because I didn’t want them to shut down too early. Like I said, there are a lot of avenues to the truth. I just had to be careful not to force my way through barriers. But now, to keep within this piss-poor metaphor, we are on the final road and there is still a big roadblock ahead and sadly, I have no choice.

I have to ram through it, consequences be damned.

I know it. And they know it. Thomas closes his eyes and tightens his fists, as though bracing for the blow. So I lower the boom.

“What happened to Victoria?”

Their heads drop. Like father, like son. Their eyes stay on the floor. I will have to do the talking here.

“She’s dead, isn’t she?”

Silence.

“She died that night. On January 1, 2000.”

Silence.

“How did it happen?”

Silence.

“I have a theory if you’re ready to hear it.”

They are not. I don’t care.

“It starts with your alibis. Thomas, you said your girlfriend, Lacy Monroe, called you to reconcile. According to the phone records, that would have been at 1:21 a.m. That sound right?”

He still looks down, but he nods.

“I found Lacy,” I tell him. “She lives in Portland now. She confirmed for me that she did call you then, just like you said, but that you didn’t get to her place until five a.m., some four hours later. But she only lived two miles from you. The FBI noticed this discrepancy too, by the way. Part of why people had doubts about you. But they figured maybe you were so drunk you passed out again, so they dismissed it.” I turn to his father. “Archie, you originally had no plans to go to Chicago. But suddenly you wanted an alibi, and what better one than surprising your wife on your private plane?”

“I don’t see your point,” Archie says. “This proves nothing.”

“True,” I say. “Not on its own. But it makes one wonder. All that commotion—all of those time gaps and the need to fill them with alibis—leads me to believe that Victoria died that night, sometime after she drove Thomas home on New Year’s Day. It begins to create a timeline. Shall I go on?”

Silence.

“New York started E-ZPass in 1993. Believe it or not, they still have electronic records going back that far. That night, Thomas, you and your sister drove your BMW E36 with a license plate KTR-478 into the city. Just as you said. E-ZPass has a record of it. In fact, during the months before, you used the car a lot—it shows up on a ton of E-ZPass records. But guess what?” I move closer to Thomas. “After that night, it was never used again. Not one toll crossing. My theory? You got rid of the car because it was evidence. Do you see how our timeline is starting to take shape?”

They still won’t look up, but I know that I’m close.

“So now I ask myself, what happened? You and Victoria arrive home. I believe that. It fits. So how did she die? Well, we know it’s related to your BMW E36 because you got rid of it. Could Victoria have crashed the car herself? No. If she did, well, to parrot your father, there’s no law against that. You would just have called the police.” I turn now back to his father. “And it doesn’t make sense that you, Archie, would have been behind the wheel. Again same thing: If you were driving and she ended up dead, it would just be a terrible accident.”

I pace again. I pace back and forth and then I stop so that I’m looming over Thomas, so close to him that he is staring down at my shoes.

“So it had to be you, Thomas. That’s the only thing that makes sense. You told me you had four DUIs. I checked the records—it was actually six. You had seriously injured two people in a drunk driving incident just two months earlier, on November eighth. Your father’s money got you off. But it wouldn’t this time, not again. Not if you killed your own sister.”

Silence.

“You’ve kept this secret for too long,” I say. “Tell me what happened.”

From behind me, I hear Archie say, “It can’t leave this room.”

I spin toward him.

“What we are about to tell you is just a hypothetical,” Archie continues. “That’s all. We admit nothing.”

“Archie,” I say, “I don’t have any listening devices. I can’t prove any of this. You’ve made that abundantly clear. You want to control me, but you’re smart enough to know right now that the only way to do that is to tell me the truth. Because if you don’t, I’ll just keep coming at you.”

He knows I mean it. He looks over at his son. Thomas’s shoulders go slack. Now he too finally looks up at me. Thomas wants to tell me. I can see that now. He needs to do this, to unburden himself in some way.

I move away from him now. I give him space.

“We got home,” Thomas says in pure monotone. “Just like I told you. We pulled up to the front door. It was freezing out. Victoria turned off the car. She kissed my cheek and told me she was going inside to see Dad. I sat there. I was drunk. There were also drugs in the car. A lot of them. I opened the glove compartment. Some spilled out onto the floor. Coke. I took a few snorts. That woke me up. But I didn’t leave the car. I called Lacy on my phone again. She still didn’t answer. I’m sitting in the cold and I’m drunk and I’m jealous. I know Lacy is out with Jim DeLapp and I can’t stand the thought of them together. I’m losing my mind. So I take another snort. And another. I call Lacy again. And again. It’s so cold I can see my breath. In my head, it was like I became a giant fire-breathing dragon. I remember thinking that. And then finally my phone rings. And it’s Lacy.”

Thomas looks across the room. I sneak a glance at Archie Belmond. His face is covered in tears.

“So I answer it. And Lacy is hysterical. She’s telling me she loves me, that she was just using Jim DeLapp to make me jealous, that she needs to see me, that I’ve always been the one. I tell her I’ll be right there, don’t move, don’t worry, I’m coming. So I hang up and slide over to the driver’s side. I start up the car. Lacy needs me. I’m getting her back. I gotta get there fast. I hit the gas pedal and the car accelerates. I can’t slow down. I won’t slow down. I have to get to Lacy. So I press down on the gas again, pedal to the metal, and I’m flying down the driveway and it’s cold and maybe it’s slippery, I don’t know, but I’m going so fast now, out of control, but I don’t care and I take the turn too hard and the car goes off the pavement, onto the grass, and I can’t stop and suddenly, in the headlights, I see Victoria staring back at me.”

I close my eyes.

“She’s just standing there. Frozen. You know. Like they say about a deer in the headlights. And she’s right by that tree, the old one we used to have in the yard. See, after she kissed Dad, she decided to take Winslow for a walk. That’s the kind of person she was. She took Winslow for a walk and now it’s like she’s trapped in the car headlight beam and everything slows down and ramps up and so I slam on the brake except it’s not the brake, it’s the gas pedal again and I speed up and crash and wrap the car around that big oak tree. The airbag explodes in my face and I can hear the car hissing. I open the door and fall out and look at the hood of the car and the top half of Victoria is lying flat on it. Winslow is licking her face. Her eyes are open, staring, unblinking, just like when I saw her in the headlights. And I start to scream and scream…”

He stops. We all stop. I’m holding my breath. It feels like the entire room is. I can see it now. I can see it all in my mind’s eye. And part of me swears it can still hear his screams. Like they’re still echoing and if we stay still enough, they’ll get louder and louder.

But we aren’t done yet.

I turn to Archie. “Did you hear the screams?”

“I heard the crash,” he says, the tears cascading down his face. “I ran outside. I ran down the hill. I see my daughter. My beautiful, perfect daughter, the one who just a few minutes earlier had kissed my cheek and wished me a happy new year…”

He starts to lose it.

“Don’t,” I warn. “Not now. We have to get through this.”

“That’s it,” Archie manages to say.

“No, it’s not.”

“You know the rest.”

“I need to hear it,” I say.

He finally nods, wipes his face with his sleeves, tries to gain some composure. “I rush over to her. I’m trying to fix her, you know, like maybe there is some way to make this not have happened. I’m a fixer. It’s what I do. I control things. I can… But she’s… she’s dead. There’s no doubt about it. And Thomas is screaming we need to get help, we need to call someone. He takes out his phone…”

“I was going to call nine-one-one,” Thomas adds.

“And suddenly I hear myself say, ‘Wait.’” Archie sits up, looks at me. “I don’t remember my brain telling me to say it. There I am, standing over my dead daughter, lost, devastated—but it was like I could suddenly see everything so clearly. Like seeing the worst thing imaginable had honed my mind, gave me clarity. And do you know what I asked myself?”

“No,” I say. “What?”

“I’d lost one child. Do I want to lose two?”

It’s as though the room temperature drops twenty degrees.

“I could see three or four moves ahead,” Archie Belmond continues. “We would call the police. They would arrive en masse. Victoria would be dead. Thomas would be arrested. He had a record. Like you said. Including drunk driving for the seventh time. There would be a maximum vehicular manslaughter charge at a minimum. Drugs were in the car. Cocaine. Add that charge on too. Can’t sweep this one away. Even with money and influence, Thomas would be in prison for years. No way around that. They’d make an example out of him, I bet. And what good would that do for Victoria? She loved Thomas. She wouldn’t want that for him. And no matter what—and this is the key—Victoria would still be dead. We couldn’t bring her back. Death is final. What good would it do to destroy her brother too?”

He says it again: “I’d lost one child. Do I want to lose two?”

I nod. “So you didn’t call the police.”

“No.”

“What did you do with her body?”

“We buried her. In our woods. We burned it later. There’s no trace anymore, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

“That’s not what I’m thinking.”

“It was the worst thing I ever did. Thomas and I, we found shovels in the garage. We buried her. I buried my own daughter. I still don’t know how. The ground was hard. But I was in a fugue state. We both were, I guess. I can’t describe it to you. I had become like a machine. Maybe because it hurt too much to feel. I just kept saying to myself, I’d lost one child, I can’t lose another. We cleaned up the scene. We put the car in the garage. You’re right. We never used it again. A few months later, we took it to a salvage yard in Vermont. Had it crushed and shredded and recycled. I was so analytical about it all. I told Thomas to go to Lacy’s. That was important. Act normal. Give us alibis. I woke up my pilots. Got my plane ready. I used the excuse that Y2K hadn’t caused any problems, so I needed to see my wife. You know all this.”

I nod again.

“I’m still seeing three or four moves ahead. Victoria was supposed to be away with her friends after the party. We could use that. Everyone knows about trails going cold, that when time passes, it makes it harder on the police. So I tried to maximize that. I sent those texts from her phone to explain why we didn’t report her missing for so long. Then I realized the police might be able to triangulate the phone. I destroyed it with a hammer.”

He stops. “Kierce,” he finally says. “You have a son.”

“Yes.”

“What wouldn’t you do to save him?”

I don’t reply.

“And it worked. You know what I mean? Thomas didn’t go to jail. He got the help he needed. He turned his life around. His sister—I know, I know—but Vic would be so proud of the man he’s become.”

Sure, it worked, I think to myself. All you have to do is kill your own sister to hit rock bottom. They should contact rehab centers and tell them they’ve found the cure.

I think this. I don’t say it. I need him to keep talking.

“So you fly to Chicago,” I say.

“Yes. I was going to tell Talia what happened. I mean, how could I not? I thought she would understand because it was the same for her—do we lose one child or both? But when I landed, something changed.”

“She was with the other man.”

“Well, yes, that was part of it, though in truth, I barely cared. It was nothing in the grand scheme of things. But even before that, I’m sitting on the plane and I’m rehearsing in my mind what I’m going to tell Talia, and it sounded reasonable in my ears—we have a chance to save one of our children—but once I was there, once I saw Talia’s face, I mean, how could I tell her? How could I know how she’d react? She isn’t much of an actress, my wife. It’s what I love about her. She didn’t have that kind of guile. How could I be sure she wouldn’t turn Thomas in? Could she really pretend well enough to fool the police or her friends or her family for the rest of our lives? And when I thought about the pain I was in—the pain of losing my daughter—could I maybe spare her that too?” He glances away briefly. “I love my wife. I didn’t want that for her.”

“So you didn’t tell her.”

“I didn’t tell her.”

“You just made her live with the lie.”

“Don’t you see? She would have to live with a lie no matter what. If I tell her what I’d done, she’d be forced to live with the same lie Thomas and I had to live with—pretending her daughter had been kidnapped or run off. If I don’t tell her, she lives with the lie of not knowing the truth. You tell me, Kierce. Which is better?”

I don’t reply.

“Those were my options that night. Do I lose one child that night—or do I lose two? Do I make my wife part of my lie—or do I let her live with what I thought was a more comforting lie? I did what I thought was best. And if I could go back in time and do it again, I don’t know if I would change much. Thomas is strong and healthy now. My wonderful granddaughters, the apples of our eyes, would not be here. You’ve heard the expression that you have to break a few eggs to make an omelet? I don’t know about that, but the eggs were broken anyway—I could leave a mess or I could try to make an omelet.”

I can’t help but frown at that. “Jesus, is that what you tell yourself?”

“Tragedy is a hell of a teacher. It’s just too damn cruel.”

I remember Thomas telling me the same thing.

“But I was wrong on one thing,” Archie continues. “Dead wrong. Or so I thought for a long time.”

“That being?”

“Maybe I should have told Talia the truth,” he says. “By not telling her what really happened, I gave her hope. People think hope is a good thing, but it’s not. Every day my wife woke up and hoped—hoped—that today would be the day we would find Victoria. The not-knowing was debilitating.”

I understood this. I had said something similar to Talia.

“Nothing heals trauma better than resolution and closure.”

“I am a problem solver,” Archie continues. “I never give up. I keep searching for solutions. But I didn’t know what to do. I couldn’t solve this one. Not for a long time.”

“And then you met Anna.”

“Yes.”

“Problem solved,” I say.

“I know you don’t believe that, but—”

I hold up my hand to silence him. I don’t want to hear it again. “And how about now?”

“What do you mean?”

“Will you tell Talia the truth now?”

Archie Belmond frowns. “What sense would that make? Can you imagine the additional pain it would cause?”

“The truth will set you free,” I say.

“You’re not that na?ve, Kierce.” Archie clears his throat, and I can almost feel a shift in the room. He stands now, sturdy on his own two feet. “I can help you and your family more,” he says, his voice returning to normal. “You’ve done remarkable work. I think a bonus—”

“I want the money I’m owed,” I say. “Not a penny more from you.”

He nods and wisely chooses silence.

I don’t know what to do here anyway. I can’t prove any of this. Archie knew that coming into this meeting. He’s still in control. There is no real evidence. It was all so long ago. Even if I could prove it, the statute of limitations on vehicular manslaughter has passed. Thomas wouldn’t serve any time.

What would be the point?

To be fair, I understand the terrible choices Archie as a father faced that night. I’m furious about what he did, but I also get it. Lose two kids or lose one. That was how he saw it. A cold calculation—but was it also an accurate one? Suppose Henry had a sister, and something like this happens? What would I do? Not what Belmond did, I hope, but I get it. What happened broke them all—maybe Archie most especially.

I turn to leave now.

“What are you going to do?” Archie asks.

I don’t respond. I just hear Anna’s words ring in my ear.

“Promise me first.”

“Promise you what?”

“That you won’t hurt them. That you’ll protect them.”

I think about that. And then I walk away.