A Voice from 1995
Chapter 05 - A Voice from 1995
For two nights Chloe slept in fragments. Whenever she woke, the word order waited beside her bed, as sharp and impersonal as a hospital instruction.
Elise Sterling gave the order.
She had been twenty-five when Chloe was born. She appeared in one photograph Arthur had shown her: a woman leaning against the railing of a sailboat, laughing at something outside the frame. No one could look that happy and plan to abandon her baby, Chloe thought. Then she caught herself. Photographs could prove a woman had once been happy. They could prove almost nothing else.
Arthur arrived on the third morning with a paper bag of plain toast and a jar of apricot preserves. "Marisol said this was what you liked when you were sick."
"Marisol also thinks toast can cure heartbreak."
"I've heard worse medical opinions."
He pulled up a chair. Chloe studied his silver hair and the pale scar along his jaw. He was a man who had survived other people's fear of him and perhaps enjoyed it once. He seemed unsure what to do with someone who wasn't afraid to be disappointed.
"Tell me about Elise," she said.
Arthur took his time. He told her about the way Elise stored receipts inside books, about her terrible singing voice, about the tulips she planted in places where the soil was too heavy. They had married late by the standards of both families. She was a public-school music teacher. He was already wealthy, already involved in businesses that sometimes crossed the line between influence and intimidation.
"She wanted me to leave it," he said.
"Did you?"
"Not soon enough."
Their daughter was born in January 1995. Five weeks later, Arthur returned from a trip and found the nursery empty. Elise told him there had been a fire at a private clinic where the baby had been taken for tests. He was shown a document confirming an unidentified infant's death. A burial followed. Elise stood through the service without speaking.
"You believed it?" Chloe asked.
"I wanted to believe I knew what grief was asking of me. The alternatives were worse. I'd already received threats against the family. I thought she couldn't bear to tell me the details."
"But she knew the truth."
"I don't know. She died three years later in a highway collision. By then we barely spoke about that day. Silence was the one thing we had in common."
He paused, looked at his toast, and set it aside. "I wish I could give you a story with a blameless father in it. I can't."
"I don't need you to be blameless," Chloe said. "I need you not to lie."
"All right."
That evening Ruth called with news: a woman named Anne Mercer was living quietly in a retirement apartment outside Milwaukee. She was sixty-four. Her handwriting resembled Anita's. The photograph Gabriel had kept showed a mark on her left wrist that matched a detail on her old employee record. More importantly, the woman had agreed to a video conversation after Ruth explained Chloe's identity.
Marisol sat beside Chloe when the call connected. The older woman on the screen had narrow shoulders, dyed chestnut hair, and the worn expression of somebody who had rehearsed an apology for years without believing she'd be allowed to give it.
"Mari?" she whispered.
Marisol made a sound Chloe had never heard from her. "Anita."
There was no dramatic reunion. The sisters looked at each other. Anita put a hand over her mouth. Marisol asked whether she had eaten properly. Both of them cried at that, for reasons Chloe understood more than she wanted to.
Anita explained that she had not worked in a clinic on the night the child vanished. She'd been a caretaker at the Sterling family guesthouse. Elise had called her because she trusted Anita's sister Marisol from an old neighborhood music program. Elise was frightened. Someone had threatened her daughter and supplied evidence the threat was real.
"She handed me a baby wrapped in Arthur's sweater," Anita said. "She told me to take her to Marisol if anything happened. She said Arthur couldn't know where we were going."
"Why?" Chloe asked.
"She didn't trust who was bringing him his information."
"Who was that?"
Anita closed her eyes. "His brother. Dominic."
The baby was supposed to be hidden for three days while Elise confronted Dominic with proof of a scheme involving family funds. Anita drove to the arranged meeting place. A man with a black stone ring was waiting there instead of Elise. He told her the baby was no longer needed and gave her money to disappear. Anita fled with Chloe. By morning, the news reported a fire and a dead child.
"Why didn't you tell Arthur?" Chloe asked.
"Because the man found my apartment within a day. He knew where my mother lived. He knew Marisol's address. He showed me photographs of your crib. I thought keeping quiet would keep you alive."
"You left Marisol to raise me without knowing whether you'd survived."
"I did. I made a coward's bargain. I stayed away because I was afraid, and afterward because I was ashamed."
Marisol turned her face toward the window. Chloe could see how much effort it took for her not to forgive instantly. She was the kind of woman who had always considered forgiveness a duty. But she said only, "You should have come home."
Anita nodded. "I know."
The conversation might have ended there, and perhaps some part of their lives could have begun again. Instead Anita asked if Arthur's brother still managed the waterfront properties.
"He's vice chairman of Sterling Shipping," Chloe said.
"Then he's still doing what he started. Elise had found money moving through charities into his private accounts. She was collecting documents. He was afraid she'd tell Arthur."
"Do you have any of them?"
"I kept one thing. A cassette tape Elise gave me before I drove away. She said to play it only if she couldn't come for the baby. I was too frightened. Years later, I couldn't find a machine to play it without damaging it."
"Where is it now?"
Anita lifted a padded envelope into view. "I mailed it to Ruth yesterday."
When the call ended, Chloe sat very still. The story of her birth had changed from abandonment to an act of desperate protection. It did not return Elise to life or erase the years Arthur had missed. But it changed something in the center of Chloe's grief.
She had not been unwanted.
Two days later, Ruth had the tape digitized by an audio specialist. Chloe asked to hear it with Arthur and Marisol present. The recording began with a click, followed by Elise's tired voice.
"Arthur, if you're hearing this, I have failed to come home. Don't trust Dominic with Clara. Don't trust the papers about the fire. And please, whatever they tell you—"
A door opened on the recording. A man's voice spoke from farther away.
May you like
Arthur gripped the arms of his chair. Chloe watched his face change, because he recognized that second voice before anyone else did.
It belonged to the lawyer who had told him his daughter was dead.
