Chapter 2 - The Blue Door on Hawthorne Street
Police entered the Hawthorne Street house without sirens.
Jonathan waited across the road with Lucy and Mrs. Alvarez because Detective Maria Santos refused to let him turn fear into recklessness.
“You’re not going inside until we clear it,” she said.
“That is my daughter’s house.”
“That is precisely why you are staying here.”
Jonathan disliked being told no.
Lucy, sitting beneath a blanket in the back of an unmarked police vehicle, said, “She’s right.”
Jonathan looked at her.
“You too?”
“Mommy says important men still have to listen sometimes.”
Mrs. Alvarez laughed despite herself.
Jonathan nodded. “Your mother remembers me accurately.”
The front door opened.
Two officers brought out Rebecca.
Jonathan had prepared himself for almost anything.
He had not prepared for how small she looked.
Rebecca was forty-five, but at that moment she seemed both older and younger. Her hair was unwashed. A bruise darkened one forearm. She wore a sweater over pajama pants and blinked at the winter sun as if she had not seen it in days.
Lucy screamed, “Mommy!”
Rebecca ran.
Mother and daughter met halfway across the lawn.
Jonathan stayed where he was.
Rebecca held Lucy, kissed her hair, checked her hands, her face, her knees.
“You did it,” Rebecca whispered.
“I found him.”
Rebecca finally looked at Jonathan.
Twenty-eight years stood between them.
He said, “Hello, Becky.”
Her face crumpled.
Nobody had called her Becky since her mother died.
“Dad.”
He took one step.
Rebecca took another.
Then they embraced.
It lasted only seconds before Detective Santos interrupted.
“We found the blue room.”
Rebecca stiffened.
“Was she there?”
Santos nodded.
A second ambulance arrived.
Paramedics brought out a teenage girl wrapped in a gray blanket. She appeared frightened and exhausted but alert.
Lucy whispered, “That’s her.”
Rebecca covered her mouth.
Jonathan asked, “Who is she?”
Rebecca said, “Her name is Molly.”
“How do you know?”
“Because I heard Cole call her that once.”
Santos explained that Molly was fifteen. A missing-person report had been filed in another county five weeks earlier.
Cole was not in the house.
Neither was his car.
Inside the blue room, officers found a cot, food wrappers, a padlock on the outside, and several boxes of financial records.
Rebecca sat in the ambulance while a paramedic examined her.
Jonathan remained beside the open door.
“Why didn’t you call me?”
Rebecca laughed without humor.
“I did.”
“When?”
“For years.”
He stared.
“I never received anything.”
“I know that now.”
Rebecca explained that her stepfather, Arthur Vale, had controlled communication after her mother remarried. Later, Cole somehow knew details from those old letters.
“Cole said you paid Mom to keep me away.”
“I never did.”
“He showed me bank records.”
“Fake.”
“I know.”
“When did you learn?”
“Three months ago.”
Rebecca’s eyes moved toward the house.
“I found a box in Cole’s office. Copies of my letters. Copies of yours.”
Jonathan felt cold.
“Why would Cole have them?”
“That’s what I was trying to learn.”
The forged cabin sale was only part of it. Cole had opened loans in Rebecca’s name, redirected money from Lucy’s education account, and repeatedly told Rebecca that challenging him would cause her to lose custody.
“He said nobody would believe me because I’d signed everything.”
“Did you?”
“Some of it. Not all.”
Jonathan remembered her note.
Believe Lucy before you believe anyone with my signature.
“What about Molly?”
Rebecca lowered her voice.
“Cole said she was his niece.”
Santos, standing nearby, shook her head.
“She isn’t.”
Rebecca closed her eyes.
“I suspected.”
“Why keep her there?”
“I don’t know. She arrived after she caught him going through the mailbox at an empty house down the street.”
Jonathan frowned.
“What empty house?”
Mrs. Alvarez answered from behind him.
“The Vale place.”
Arthur Vale.
Rebecca’s late stepfather.
The house had supposedly been vacant since his death.
Santos looked at Jonathan.
“We searched Cole’s desk.”
She held up an evidence bag containing an old brass key.
A paper tag was attached.
VALE HOUSE — BASEMENT.
Jonathan stared at it.
Rebecca whispered, “That’s where the letters are.”
“How do you know?”
“Because Cole said Christmas was the safest time to move them.”
Jonathan looked at the wreath on the Harper front door.
All those years he had believed silence meant rejection.
Now he wondered how much of his family history had been manufactured by people who profited from keeping everyone apart.
Santos’s radio crackled.
An officer had located Cole’s abandoned car near the interstate.
Inside was Rebecca’s phone.
And a boarding pass.
One passenger.
One-way flight to Toronto.
Departure time: 4:20 p.m.
Passenger name: Lucy Harper.
Jonathan looked at his granddaughter.
Lucy stared back.
“I’m not going to Toronto.”
“No,” Jonathan said.
Then Santos spoke.
“The ticket was purchased six weeks ago.”
May you like
Before Lucy had ever run through the Christmas barricade.
Whatever Cole had planned, it had begun long before that morning.
