Chapter 15 - Claire Was Alive
The call lasted eleven seconds.
That was enough to blow apart everything again.
Sheriff Molina traced it to a prepaid phone near the interstate. Useless.
All eyes turned to Dad.
He looked older than he had that morning.
“I saw Claire once after she disappeared,” he said.
I stood so fast my chair fell.
“You told us you never saw her again.”
“I said I never met her at the chapel that night.”
“That is not the same thing, and you know it.”
He flinched.
Two weeks after Claire vanished, Dad received a postcard with no return address. One sentence: Come alone if you want to know I’m alive.
He drove to a diner outside Montreal.
Claire was there.
Alive.
Bruised. Terrified. Without her baby.
“She told me Eleanor had Rebecca safe. She said Caleb believed she was dead and Richard needed to keep believing it too.”
Richard stared at him. “You knew?”
“Yes.”
“For thirty-seven years?”
“No. I saw her one time.”
“What happened after?” I asked.
“She said she was going to disappear until she had enough evidence to bring Richard and Caleb down.”
Richard gave a bitter laugh. “She never came back.”
Dad’s eyes sharpened. “Maybe she tried.”
He reached into his wallet and removed a tiny folded piece of paper so worn it looked like cloth.
It contained six numbers and one word.
MILLER.
“I thought it was a storage code,” Dad said. “I checked every place I could think of. Nothing.”
Eleanor stared at the paper.
“Miller wasn’t a place.”
“What was it?”
“Claire’s favorite author when she was a child. Henry Miller.”
Richard frowned. “That means nothing.”
Eleanor shook her head. “Our family library uses author names for the old locked cabinets.”
We all looked toward the estate.
The library had a Miller cabinet.
It had not been opened in decades.
When we reached it, the six-digit code opened the brass lock.
Inside was a package wrapped in brown paper.
May you like
On top, in Claire’s handwriting, were four words:
FOR REBECCA’S SON ONLY.
