Chapter 6
I showed the note to Elena.
“We’re not going there,” she said.
“I wasn’t going to.”
I had been thinking about it. She could tell.
We photographed the note and sent it to Ms. Price. She asked me to keep the original and said she would find out who might have left it. Ruth stayed with me that night because I did not want to be alone with every sound in my hallway.
Elena offered to stay too. I wanted her to, but I did not know how to ask her to sleep in the next room after seeing her again for only two days.
She seemed to understand.
“I’ll come by in the morning,” she said. “Call if you need me.”
Ruth made tea after Elena left. She told me how she had met my mother at a church food drive years earlier. At first she had not realized Elena was the woman from Dad’s old photographs.
“When she told me her name, I nearly dropped the box I was carrying,” Ruth said.
“Did Dad know you’d met her?”
“Not until last winter.”
Ruth had pushed him to tell me. She had also kept visiting Elena, listening to her plans and worries. I felt grateful for that. I was still angry she had waited months to tell me.
“You could have come to me,” I said.
“I should have. I kept hoping David would do it himself.”
“That’s what he kept saying too.”
Ruth nodded. “I made the same mistake on a smaller scale.”
I was relieved she did not defend it.
The next morning, Ms. Price called. Someone had dropped off a packet at her office before it opened. It contained a copy of a letter Evelyn had sent Martin during her last illness.
Ms. Price would not discuss every detail by phone. She asked Elena and me to come in.
The letter was brief. Evelyn told Martin she had kept the original transfer instructions and that, if he tried to claim she acted alone, they would become public.
I read the line twice.
“So he knew she used Mom’s name?”
“It appears he knew far more than he admitted,” Ms. Price said. “We need to establish where this copy came from and find the original records.”
The packet also included a business card for a woman named June Parker, who had worked in Evelyn’s office.
I recognized the name. June used to give me peppermint candy when Dad brought me to the store.
Ms. Price had already reached her. June was willing to speak that afternoon.
Elena and I drove there together. For the first few miles, we talked about the weather and the traffic because neither of us knew how to begin the questions that mattered.
Then I asked why she had kept sending letters when Dad never replied.
“I hoped one would reach you,” she said.
“Did you ever think I knew and didn’t answer?”
“Yes.”
I looked at her.
“It hurt,” she admitted. “Then I’d remember you were a child when we were separated. Whatever you had been told, I couldn’t hold it against you.”
June lived in a small house with flowers growing beside the steps. She hugged Elena as soon as she opened the door.
“I should have spoken sooner,” she said.
At her kitchen table, she told us what she remembered. Evelyn had asked her to file transfer slips under Elena’s name. June refused after noticing dates when Elena had not been at work. Evelyn took the slips back and told her it was an internal matter.
“I was scared for my job,” June said. “I told myself someone else would check.”
After Elena’s arrest, June had written down the dates in a notebook. She had kept it for years.
She brought it out from a cupboard.
I watched Elena turn the pages. June had recorded who entered the office, when Martin visited, and what Evelyn asked her to file.
“Why send the packet now?” I asked.
June looked confused. “What packet?”
She had not left the note at my apartment. She had not sent anything to Ms. Price.
We called the lawyer while still at June’s table. Ms. Price asked us to bring the notebook. She also told us to leave the question of the anonymous packet with her for now.
As Elena and I walked to the car, she stopped.
“Do you believe me?” she asked.
I turned to her. “About the money?”
“About wanting you.”
“Yes.”
She began to cry. I held her hand. It was the first time I had touched her since opening Dad’s front door.
We stood that way until we could both breathe.
My phone rang on the drive back. Dad was calling. This time I answered.
“I found out who left the note,” he said.
“Who?”
“Martin’s daughter. She contacted me too.”
I glanced at Elena.
May you like
Dad took a breath.
“She says she has the original instructions. She’ll give them to us if I tell the truth about what I knew before your mother went to prison.”
