The Doctor at the Wedding
Chapter 04 - The Doctor at the Wedding
Ryan remembered Victor Hale's laugh better than his face. It was the kind of laugh that arrived half a second before a joke had finished, an advance payment on everyone else's approval. Victor was fifty-nine, handsome in the way of men who exercised during lunch and bought watches they pretended not to notice. When Emma was born, he had sent a silver spoon engraved with her initials.
“Why would Mara be afraid of him?” Ryan asked Serrano.
“Because he ran St. Brigid's when she delivered Lily. Because the clinic billed a charitable foundation that did not exist. And because someone used her signature on an adoption consent she never signed.”
Serrano placed a photocopy on the workbench. It was grainy but legible: Quinn, Mara, under the heading Voluntary Relinquishment. Ryan knew Mara's handwriting from the notes she used to leave in his lunch box. She made her capital Q in one sweeping curve. On the document it looked like two separate strokes.
“Why wasn't this in court?”
“It was. Briefly. A private placement proceeding was filed, then withdrawn. The records were sealed. When Mara tried to reopen it, the attorney who filed it claimed she had misunderstood the paperwork. Two weeks later she disappeared from her apartment.”
Ryan traced a knot in the maple worktop rather than touch the page. “Where was Lily all that time?”
“In two unregistered residential properties connected to Hale's network, from what Mara found. The house behind your wall may have been the last hiding place. We're still trying to reconstruct the rest.”
He had imagined Lily waiting behind that wall for months. The thought of years made his hands go cold. “You said Mara disappeared. When?”
“Eleven days ago, after telling me she'd finally located her daughter. I believe she went to your father. I think someone intercepted her afterward.”
Ryan went straight to the police station with Serrano. Ortiz listened without interruption, then showed Serrano the name of a detective assigned to look into Hale's nonprofit finances. There was already an investigation. Nothing Serrano had brought guaranteed a prosecution, and the more people who knew of it, the more likely someone would warn Hale.
At four, the DNA laboratory confirmed that Ryan was Lily's biological father. Ortiz called from her desk, her voice measured. “The result supports paternity to the laboratory's stated degree of certainty. It doesn't settle custody. But now we know something important.”
Ryan sat on the floor of his empty workshop, between cedar boards waiting to become a set of bookshelves. A man could make a chair, sand it until the grain seemed to glow, then deliver it to a house he'd never see again. He had somehow helped make a daughter who had been alive in the world for six years without his knowing. He pressed a fist against his mouth and stayed there until the shop lights came on automatically.
The following day he asked the hospital social worker what kind of contact was appropriate. He was told to keep visits predictable, bring no expensive gifts, and not make promises about where Lily would live. He brought a board game with missing pieces and a replacement he'd carved himself. Lily chose the piece shaped like a dog. They played for eighteen minutes, until she grew tired. He stayed while she drew on the back of the scorecard.
“Are you really my daddy?” she asked.
“Yes,” he said. “I found out yesterday.”
“Why didn't you come before?”
“Because I didn't know where you were. I wish I had.”
She considered this, not entirely persuaded. “Do you know how to make pancakes with chocolate in the middle?”
“Not yet.”
“You should learn.”
In the parking garage, Ryan found Natalie leaning against her car. She had called ahead and asked to meet him. Her face looked pinched from lack of sleep. “Emma asked why she can't see Lily. She thinks the police took her for breaking the wall.”
“Tell her the truth in words she understands.”
“I have.” Natalie hesitated. “Hale called me this morning.”
Ryan's throat tightened. “What did he want?”
“He asked whether Emma's school address was still current. Said his office was updating files.”
“Have you told Ortiz?”
“Yes. I called before coming here.” She held up her phone. “And there's something else. He told me to remind you of the evening at the lake.”
Ryan stared. Their wedding reception had been held beside Lake Winfield. Victor had proposed a toast. Frank, supposedly dead, had not been there. But Ryan remembered stepping outside to answer a telephone call he had never told Natalie about: a short, distorted call in his father's voice, warning him never to contact Mara again.
“He said that?” Ryan asked.
Natalie nodded. “Word for word. The evening at the lake.”
In a box at the back of his closet, Ryan found wedding photographs printed on heavy paper. Hale appeared in three of them, his hand resting familiarly on Frank's empty chair. There had been a place saved for Frank's memory at the reception, a candle lit in a glass holder. Hale had remarked that Frank would have been proud. Ryan studied the photograph and wondered whether Hale's expression showed satisfaction or whether he was merely projecting what he now knew. Photographs, he was learning, could tell the truth about where a body stood and almost nothing about what a person intended.
May you like
He put the pictures back. Outside, an early frost silvered the grass. He wanted his daughter to know the good parts of her grandfather if she ever asked, but he would not give her a polished lie. He could say that people sometimes do kind things and terrible things, and that the terrible ones must be faced. He practiced the sentence aloud, then was ashamed of how inadequate it sounded.
It had been a threat, though neither of them yet knew precisely what it threatened.
