The Woman in the Yellow Van
Chapter 02 - The Woman in the Yellow Van
Anthony Sarto liked to remind people that he had known Damian since he wore short pants. It was one of his ways of saying that certain doors belonged to him. He entered the kitchen as though my name were printed on the deed.
“June, dear,” he said. “What a commotion.”
He bent toward Mia. She buried her face against my shoulder so quickly that the toast slipped from her hand.
“Children take time to warm up,” I said.
“Of course.” His smile didn't change. “Who does she belong to?”
I had heard rich people use that phrase about dogs, boats, and children. It had always bothered me most when they meant children.
“We're finding out,” I said.
He reached for the rabbit. “May I?”
“No,” Mia said, loud enough to make the cook turn around.
Anthony drew back. “Well. Quite a voice on her.”
I picked up the toast and threw it away. When my hands stopped shaking, I made another piece and cut it into four squares. Mia ate three. The last she placed beside the rabbit, apparently on the theory that he might get hungry later.
Luca came into the kitchen with a tablet under his arm. His face had the careful blankness he used when he was angry. “Mr. Romano wants the staff to stay inside. Until we know who brought the child.”
“Did you check the cameras?” Anthony asked.
“The south gate stopped recording at eight seventeen.”
“Technical failure?”
“We're looking into it.”
Anthony gave a weary sigh, as if security failures were one more burden falling upon an already busy attorney. “Damian has a meeting about the Saint Agnes properties at noon. Tell him not to let this nonsense interfere.”
He left without touching his coffee. Mia watched until the kitchen door swung shut.
“His shoes squeak,” she told me.
“They do.”
“Even when he wants to be quiet.”
A strange thing for a three-year-old to notice, but Hannah had noticed everything as a child. She could identify our neighbors by the way their car doors closed. She knew when I was lying because I washed an already clean dish.
I had taught her to observe the world. I had not taught her what to do when the world proved dangerous.
I asked Luca to take me to the camera room. He hesitated, then looked at Mia. “Five minutes.”
I settled Mia with Rosa, the cook, who promised apple slices and a clean napkin for the rabbit. Rosa had worked beside me for seventeen years. I trusted her because she had once brought me soup when I was sick and sat through the entire afternoon without asking what was wrong.
In the security room, twelve screens showed gates, corridors, the pool, and stretches of garden path. On the feed from eight sixteen that morning, a yellow maintenance van rolled through the south entrance. The driver wore a cap and dark glasses.
The recording froze one second before the vehicle reached the gatehouse.
“That can't be all,” I said.
Luca rubbed his forehead. “The backup lost the same nineteen minutes.”
“Convenient.”
His mouth tightened. “Mrs. Mercer, I have a job to do.”
“So do I. And I've been doing mine long enough to know when somebody has pulled a plug.”
He moved to end our conversation, but a small image in the corner of the screen caught my eye. It showed the garden shed, an old camera with a faulty date that nobody remembered to replace.
At eight thirty-four, a woman came out from behind the shed. She wore a navy raincoat. One hand covered her face as she hurried along the path.
I leaned forward so hard my knees touched the desk.
“Go back,” I said.
Luca did. The woman turned for half a second, perhaps hearing someone call from behind the house.
Hannah.
Her hair was shorter, and she looked thinner than she had in the last picture I kept in my bedroom drawer. But a mother learns the shape of her child's walk. Hannah still favored her left leg, where she had injured her ankle at fourteen.
I pressed my hand to the screen. “That's my daughter.”
Luca didn't ask if I was sure. The fact that he didn't ask was the first thing I noticed after the shock.
“You knew,” I said.
He shut off the monitor.
“I'm trying to keep people alive, June.”
I had known Luca since he arrived at the house at twenty-three, with a boxer’s broken nose and two bad suits. I used to slip him extra slices of apple pie. Once, after his wife died, he sat at my kitchen table while I folded laundry, and we said nothing for nearly an hour. He wasn't a man who used a sentence like that to impress anyone.
“Where is she?”
“I don't know.”
“Look at me.”
He did, and I saw shame in his eyes.
“Who else knows she came through that gate?” I asked.
Before he could answer, Damian entered. He still held the pocket watch. His expression told me someone had given him bad news, though I suspected the day had only just begun.
“Anthony says the child may be a setup,” he said. “A distraction from the land deal.”
I could hear my own breathing. “Mr. Romano, that little girl is my granddaughter.”
For a moment the room was silent except for the hum of old equipment.
“Your what?”
“My daughter's child. I know her rabbit. I saw Hannah on that screen.”
He glanced at Luca. Luca did not deny it.
Damian looked down at the silver watch. “Your daughter was here?”
“Yes.”
He held the watch out to me. On its worn back was a faint engraving I'd never noticed before: an H beside a tiny four-petaled flower. Not the elegant initials his father had used on everything, but a mark scratched clumsily into the silver.
“Hannah?” he asked.
“She used to draw flowers like that in the margins of her schoolbooks.”
Damian turned the watch over. His voice lowered. “My father was wearing this when they closed his coffin. I saw it. I was twenty-one.”
“Then somebody opened the coffin.”
He looked at me with a kind of fury that wasn't really meant for me. “Or somebody lied about what was inside it.”
There was a knock. Rosa stood in the doorway, pale as the dish towels she carried.
“June? The little girl has gone to sleep. But she said to give you this when the men stopped talking.”
She held a narrow strip of paper folded four times. I recognized the tidy handwriting before I opened it.
Mom, if you're reading this, don't tell Anthony about the watch. He knows what happened to the real coffin. Ask Damian why his father sent me birthday cards after his funeral.
May you like
There was no signature. There didn't need to be.
And in the pocket of my apron, behind the paper, I felt the edge of a second message that Rosa swore Mia had pulled from inside the rabbit: a bus ticket dated for tomorrow, with my name written across it.
