Chapter 5 - What a Father Sold
Richard Carter answered the first call from Hannah Vale by saying his daughter had always been dramatic.
He answered the second by asking how much money she wanted.
By the third, Hannah had secured a meeting at her office, not at the Carter home and not on DeLuca property. Emily chose to attend. Nicholas offered to wait in the hallway. She asked him to remain in Chicago and let her handle the conversation.
“Your father knows how to wound you,” Nicholas said.
“He’s had practice. So have I.”
She was twenty-seven weeks pregnant when she walked into the conference room carrying the old plaid bag. Its torn zipper had been repaired with a safety pin. She had wanted to throw it away after the hotel, but it held her medical records and a copy of the first ultrasound. She was tired of being ashamed of things that had carried her through hardship.
Richard arrived in a navy suit. Patricia followed, wearing cream silk and a look of offended dignity. They sat side by side across the table. Hannah placed a recorder in plain view and asked everyone’s permission before starting.
Emily did not greet them.
“Did you receive two hundred thousand dollars to put me out?”
Patricia gave a theatrical sigh. “We are not doing this here.”
“We are,” Emily said.
Richard rubbed his forehead. “It was a consulting payment. Nothing to do with you.”
Hannah slid a photocopy of the transfer across the table. Its memo field was not subtle.
Richard’s expression changed. He glanced at Patricia, and that was answer enough to make Emily’s throat hurt.
“What did they ask you to do?” Emily whispered.
Patricia looked at the glass wall. “We were told you were involved with dangerous people. They said you were being watched. Getting you out of the house was supposed to protect us all.”
“Protect you,” Emily repeated. “Not me.”
“We had our reputation to think of.”
“I was carrying your grandson.”
Patricia looked down. “You were carrying a problem.”
Emily felt the old instinct to apologize rise within her. She had spent years smoothing over Patricia’s moods, asking for less, speaking softly to avoid anger. This time she let the words hang in the room.
Richard cleared his throat. “We needed the money. The business was failing. Your mother’s medical debts—”
“Don’t.” Emily’s voice sharpened. “Mom died eleven years ago. You cannot keep using her name to explain what you choose today.”
He looked as if she had slapped him. She had never raised her voice at him before.
Hannah asked who had arranged the payment. Richard claimed it had come through a firm called Bellwether Strategic Services. Patricia said the representative was an elegant brunette with a sharp voice. She had met the woman first, at a fundraiser. The woman promised that Emily would be “taken somewhere appropriate” once she was forced out.
“Did you ask where?” Emily said.
“No,” Patricia admitted.
“Did you ask whether I would have food?”
Silence.
“Did you know I’d come to the Goldcrest?”
Patricia folded her hands. “They said a car would pick you up there.”
Emily leaned back. The cruelty had been organized with the care of a dinner reservation. Somebody had expected her to walk toward the hotel, a place she knew because her father sometimes attended events there. Had the surveillance begun before she reached the shelter? Had the entire scene been staged to make her desperate enough to disappear into a waiting vehicle?
“Who was driving the car?” Hannah asked.
“I don’t know,” Patricia said.
“You expect me to believe that?” Emily asked.
“Your father made the arrangements,” Patricia snapped.
Richard’s face reddened. “Patricia!”
They began arguing, each trying to hand the greater portion of blame to the other. Emily watched their performance with a strange distance. She had been waiting for one of them to say they were sorry. Neither seemed able to find the word.
She reached into her bag and placed a photograph on the table. It showed her mother holding Emily at age six, both of them laughing in the yard behind the Carter house. The corners were soft from years of handling.
“I came because I wanted to believe there was still someone in that house who loved me,” she said to Richard. “You don’t get to make me feel foolish for that.”
He opened his mouth, then closed it.
“I am not coming back,” Emily continued. “I’ll talk to investigators. I’ll make sure you don’t decide who gets my child. And I want you to stop using my mother as an excuse.”
Richard reached toward her, then dropped his hand. For one instant Emily recognized the man who used to carry her on his shoulders at county fairs. It would have been so easy to take that memory as proof that everything could be repaired. But he had watched her kneel in the rain with his grandson inside her and had chosen not to move. A good memory could not rewrite a bad decision. She picked up the photograph of her mother, slipped it back into her bag, and left the bank transfer on the table for him to contemplate.
She stood. Hannah stopped the recorder and walked her to the elevator.
Only there did Emily allow her hands to shake.
“You did well,” Hannah said.
“I feel sick.”
“Doing something difficult and doing it calmly are not the same thing.”
Downstairs, Naomi waited in an ordinary sedan. She had brought a sandwich and a ridiculous paperback with a shirtless cowboy on the cover. Emily laughed at the sight of it, then cried again.
On the ride home, Hannah called. Richard’s lawyer had just offered to surrender the banking records in exchange for assurances about criminal exposure. Hannah had made no promises. She could, however, confirm one detail: Bellwether’s paperwork bore the signature of a managing partner named Elias Voss.
Nicholas recognized the name instantly when Emily told him that evening.
“Voss used to work for my uncle,” he said.
“Used to?”
“He still does, if I’m reading this correctly.”
Emily leaned against the kitchen counter, trying to steady her breathing. “Then your uncle wasn’t just arranging a marriage.”
“No.” Nicholas’s face went flat with realization. “He was arranging your disappearance.”
At that moment Marco called from DeLuca headquarters. Richard had changed his mind about cooperating. A car had pulled up outside the Carter house, and a man wearing a Bellwether identification badge had gone inside.
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When he emerged, he carried a heavy document box.
Two hours later, the Carter house was empty. Richard and Patricia had vanished without telling anyone where they were going.
