A List of Children
Chapter 05 - A List of Children
Emma did not sleep. She read the notebook at the dining table while Rosa dozed in an armchair, refusing to leave her alone. The handwriting belonged to Thomas, but much of the content was technical shorthand. There were sketches of circuits, access panels, refrigeration units, and a row of dates that aligned with his trips to Albany. Between the diagrams were initials, ages, and medications, copied without explanation.
The phrase on the first page repulsed her. Children as inventory. She imagined worst things and then forced herself to look again at what the pages actually contained. One set of initials resembled Lily's. A birth year was one digit off. A medication was familiar from pediatric respiratory care. Others were drugs prescribed for conditions Emma knew nothing about.
Evelyn arrived at seven with a secure document pouch. She advised that the notebook be photographed and turned over to investigators. Before she sealed it, Emma asked to keep a copy of one page. Evelyn agreed, documenting the request. She had seen parents start to drown in speculation; she wanted Emma to retain facts, not become dependent on someone else's interpretation of them.
By afternoon they had a preliminary answer. The lists appeared to be patient billing rosters purchased from a medical data broker and improperly stored alongside shipping records. That was a serious privacy breach, Evelyn said, but not evidence that children were physically held at the warehouse. Thomas had used the word inventory because that was how the files were labeled on the server he inspected.
Emma sat in silence. The truth was less lurid than her fears and perhaps more appalling because it was so ordinary: sick children reduced to marketable data.
There was another discovery. One of the rows included Lily's name, birthday, and an incorrect address. Her records had been accessed through a billing vendor serving the clinic where she received asthma treatment. The company profiting from the records had links to Carter Clinical Logistics. Thomas had apparently learned the operation reached his own family.
“I think he was gathering proof,” Evelyn said, “not participating willingly. But the police will have to establish that.”
Lucas agreed to be questioned by investigators and opened his company's financial systems to an independent forensic accounting team. He also asked the board to suspend Adrian's access pending the review. Adrian responded with a lawyer's letter claiming professional defamation and threatening litigation. The board was split. Half its members had worked with Adrian for a decade and doubted that the man who brought them profits could also have hidden anything from them.
That evening Lucas called Emma from an unfamiliar number. “The doctors may have found what triggered the reaction,” he said. “A food component in a drink I was handed before the fundraiser. I'm severely allergic to it. They can't yet say how it got there.”
“Who handed you the drink?”
“A server. She said Adrian sent it.”
Emma closed her eyes. “Have you told the police?”
“Yes.”
He sounded wearier than he had in the hospital. She wanted to tell him something kind, but sympathy from her might feel like forgiveness on behalf of people who had been hurt by his organization. “Lily asked about you,” she said instead. “She wondered if you ate the soup.”
“I did.”
“Was it good?”
“Terrible.”
“That's what she predicted.”
They laughed, and the strange softness of that moment worried Emma more than it should have.
On Thursday, a woman called Rosa's landline. She introduced herself as Nora Bell, a former records clerk at the Albany warehouse. She claimed she had worked with Thomas. She had moved twice in three years and was afraid to speak on a recorded line. Emma gave the call to Evelyn, who arranged a meeting at a public library with an attorney present.
Nora was fifty-four and wore a cheap wedding ring on a chain. She described finding shipments billed as children's medical equipment that actually contained commercial electronics, sealed storage drives, and paperwork for private insurers. Thomas had repaired the cold-room circuitry. When he saw names of pediatric patients on the shipping manifests, he started copying records. Nora said she had helped him because her own son had been denied insurance after an unauthorized disclosure of his medical history.
“Did he know Lucas?” Emma asked.
“Not personally. He tried to reach him. Adrian intercepted the messages.”
Nora took a folded carbon copy from her purse. It was a handwritten receipt for a payment to Thomas, with Adrian's initials, dated two days before the collision. “He offered your husband money to leave it alone,” she said. “Thomas returned it.”
Before Nora arrived, Emma had asked to visit the patient advocacy office at Lily's clinic. The coordinator explained how health information could circulate between insurers, contractors, pharmacies, and administrators, and why misuse might not be visible to patients for years. She described the limits of the records available to families and gave Emma the procedure for requesting an accounting of disclosures. Emma took the forms home and filled them out slowly, asking Rosa to check every page. She would not wait for a billionaire's lawyers to decide what she was entitled to know.
Lily sat opposite her doing math homework. Every so often she asked a question about division. Emma thought the problems were wonderfully honest: numbers divided according to rules, mistakes that could be spotted, answers that did not change because a director wanted them to. When Lily finally solved the last problem, Emma made a small celebration out of two slices of toast with cinnamon sugar. She had been treating every normal pleasure as something to postpone until the investigation ended. It occurred to her that there was no promise it would end soon.
Lucas later sent a message saying he'd received an invitation to a gala in his mother's honor. The foundation wanted a public appearance before the audit findings became known. He had declined. His response was not heroic; he had allowed too much to happen already. Emma appreciated that he did not ask her to tell him he'd done the right thing. Her affection for him was emerging beside her suspicion, neither one canceling the other. It was an uncomfortable place to stand, and perhaps the only honest one.
Emma looked at the signature and saw a tiny indentation beside it, the mark Thomas made when a pen stopped working. She had never been so relieved to recognize something so insignificant.
May you like
Nora opened her mouth to say more, then stopped. At the other end of the library, an elderly man in a tan raincoat had stepped inside. Nora's hands began to shake.
“That's him,” she whispered. “The man who went to Lily's school. He's not called Thomas Carter. And he knows exactly where your husband died.”
