Chapter 5 - Vanessa's Second Phone
I answered.
Nobody spoke.
"Dad?"
The word felt ridiculous.
Impossible.
Painful.
A breath came through the line.
Then a man's voice.
"Amelia."
My knees nearly failed.
Adrian grabbed the phone.
"Who is this?"
The caller disconnected.
Ramirez traced the number.
Burner phone.
Last signal near Union Station.
We arrived too late.
The phone was found inside a trash can.
But surveillance footage showed the person who discarded it.
Vanessa.
She had changed clothes and dyed her hair dark.
She boarded no train.
She simply wanted us to think she'd left Chicago.
Ramirez obtained her call records.
Vanessa maintained two phones.
Her personal phone was clean.
The second connected her to shell companies, the fake Amelia, and a private investigator who had followed me for years.
But one number appeared more than all the others.
Registered to Margaret Clark.
Margaret was alive.
Not only alive.
She had been in Chicago the entire time.
Her address led to a nursing facility.
We found an eighty-one-year-old woman with advanced dementia.
She couldn't have orchestrated the current scheme.
Someone was using her name.
Vanessa had inherited Margaret's machinery.
But not created it.
So who had?
Isabella supplied the answer reluctantly.
Vanessa's mother.
Celeste Clark.
The woman reflected in my newborn photograph.
Celeste had worked with Margaret.
She had also been my mother's closest friend.
"She's dead," I said.
Isabella looked away.
"No."
Of course.
At that point, I should have stopped believing anyone was dead.
Celeste had disappeared sixteen years earlier after a boating accident.
No body recovered.
Vanessa had inherited millions.
And apparently a family business built on stolen lives.
Adrian's investigators located a storage facility rented under Celeste's old alias.
Inside were boxes of forged records.
One box carried my name.
Another carried Daniel's.
The Daniel box was empty.
But taped inside the lid was a recent photograph.
My father.
Older.
Gray-haired.
Alive.
Standing beside a newspaper dated three months earlier.
I couldn't breathe.
"He's alive."
Adrian stared at his uncle.
"Looks like it."
On the back was an address.
Wisconsin.
We drove there before sunrise.
The house was abandoned.
Inside, dust covered everything except one chair.
Someone had recently sat there.
On the kitchen table stood fresh flowers.
White lilies.
My mother's favorite.
Beside them was a note.
AMELIA, IF YOU FOUND THIS, CELESTE KNOWS YOU'RE CLOSE.
DON'T TRUST THE WOMAN WHO BROUGHT YOU HERE.
I looked at Isabella.
She looked devastated.
Then we heard a car door outside.
A woman stepped onto the porch.
Blonde hair.
Powder-blue coat.
Vanessa.
She lifted both hands.
"I didn't come to hurt you."
Adrian moved in front of me.
Vanessa looked directly at Isabella.
"Tell her."
Isabella went pale.
"Tell me what?"
Vanessa's eyes filled with tears.
"Tell Amelia who actually signed her father's death certificate."
May you like
Isabella whispered one word.
"I did."
