Chapter 18 - Claire Calls
I put the phone on speaker.
“Claire?”
The line went silent.
Then the woman said, “Yes.”
Eleanor began sobbing.
“Claire?” she whispered. “Baby?”
The voice on the phone broke.
“Mom.”
No one in the room moved.
Thirty-seven years collapsed into one word.
Claire was calling from Arizona under another name. She had stayed hidden because Caleb had found her twice over the decades. The last time was after Rebecca’s crash.
“I thought if I disappeared completely, he would stop watching Ethan,” she said.
Ethan leaned toward the phone. “I’m Ethan.”
Claire inhaled sharply.
“I know your voice.”
“How?”
“Your mother sent me recordings when you were little.”
He covered his mouth.
I asked the question Claire had warned me about.
“What did Richard do last winter?”
Silence.
Richard looked confused.
Claire said, “He found me.”
Everyone turned toward him.
Richard stood. “No.”
“Yes,” Claire said. “You came to Tucson in January.”
Richard shook his head. “I have never been to Tucson.”
Claire continued. “You told me Caleb was dead. You said it was finally safe to come home.”
Richard looked at Sheriff Molina. “Check my records. I was in Boston that week.”
Molina’s expression sharpened.
Claire went quiet.
Then she whispered, “If that wasn’t Richard…”
Dad finished the thought.
“Caleb pretended to be him.”
Claire’s breath caught.
She said the man had worn a scarf high on his face and claimed surgery had changed his voice.
“He wanted me to tell him where the original tapes were,” she said.
“Did you?” Molina asked.
“No.”
“Where are you now?”
Claire gave an address.
Molina immediately contacted Arizona authorities.
Then Claire said, “There’s one more thing.”
“What?” Ethan asked.
“The wooden box Ghost found was never buried by me.”
Every person in the room went still.
Claire’s voice dropped.
“Someone put it there recently.”
I looked out toward the wedding platform.
Snow had already filled the hole.
Someone had wanted us to find the ring.
I thought back to the ceremony: the perfect arch, the white roses, the string quartet, Ethan’s hand around mine. For months I had worried about seating charts, flowers, weather reports, and whether my father would feel out of place among the Coles. None of those things mattered now. Our wedding had become a trapdoor into a story that began before either of us was born.
Ethan looked at me. “If whoever buried it wanted the truth out, why threaten us afterward?”
“Maybe the person who buried it and the person threatening us aren’t the same.”
Eleanor’s eyes lifted sharply.
That possibility changed the room. One person might have wanted the secret exposed. Another had spent the entire day trying to erase it.
May you like
Someone had wanted us to find the ring.
Someone inside the estate had started all of this on purpose.
