Chapter 4 - THE GIRL IN THE YELLOW CARDIGAN
The eleven-year-old girl stood just inside the doorway, the sleeves of her faded yellow cardigan ending three inches above her wrists.
She had dark, serious eyes and the unmistakable square chin of Michael Harrison.
Behind her stood a tired-looking woman in her forties wearing a nurse's uniform under a raincoat—Sarah Miller's sister, Hannah.
Nobody in the dining room spoke.
Even the waiters along the wall stood like statues.
The little girl walked straight past my son Lucas, her scuffed sneakers making no sound on the carpet, until she stopped in front of the head table.
She didn't look at Daniel.
She looked at me.
"Are you Aunt Patricia?" she asked, her voice small and clear.
My throat constricted so tightly I could barely breathe.
I crouched down so my eyes were level with hers, ignoring the tightness of my suit skirt. "Yes, sweetheart. I'm Patricia. And you must be Clara."
"My grandpa Walt said if the checks ever stopped coming, I had to bring this watch to the lady who signs the blue Christmas cards," Clara said, holding out the battered silver railroad watch.
I stared at her. "The blue Christmas cards?"
"Every December, a card with a blue bird on the front came to our post office box with five hundred dollars cash inside for my winter coat," Clara said simply. "Aunt Hannah said Uncle Daniel didn't send those, because the handwriting was pretty."
A cold shiver went down my spine.
Every November for the last seven years, my mother-in-law Margaret had asked me to address a stack of forty blue charity Christmas cards for her church guild—and she had always asked for one blank card with an unaddressed stamped envelope to "send to an old friend in Wisconsin."
I turned my head slowly toward Margaret.
Margaret was weeping silently into her lace handkerchief.
"You knew the whole time, Margaret," I whispered, the betrayal stinging in a completely different place than Daniel's affair. "Seven years ago, when Sarah's sister came to the office... she didn't talk to Daniel first. She talked to you."
"I had my first mini-stroke that winter, Patricia," Margaret sobbed, holding out a shaking hand toward her granddaughter. "Daniel and Robert told me that if the police ever reopened the investigation into Michael's truck, the insurance company would void the liability bond on the Rockford bridge and both of them would go to prison for fraud! They made me swear not to tell you, because they knew you would go straight to the police!"
"So you let your own granddaughter grow up in hiding while Daniel stole from my retirement account to keep her quiet?" I stood up, my heart hammering against my ribs.
"Wait," Hannah said, stepping forward from the doorway and resting her hands protectively on Clara's thin shoulders. "We didn't come here tonight for money, Mrs. Harrison. My father Walt passed away at the nursing home on Tuesday."
Daniel let out a long, ragged breath—a sound of ugly, unmistakable relief.
"I'm sorry for your loss, Hannah," Daniel said quickly, straightening his tuxedo jacket as if the crisis had just evaporated. "Truly. I'll have my attorney wire fifty thousand dollars tomorrow morning to cover the funeral and set up a college fund for Clara, provided we sign a final non-disclosure—"
"Shut up, Daniel," I said coldly.
Hannah looked at Daniel with pure disgust.
"Before my dad died," Hannah said, reaching into her raincoat pocket and pulling out a yellowed, grease-stained mechanic's clipboard sheet sealed inside a Ziploc bag, "he had two days where his mind came back completely clear. He told me he didn't put the real brake-fluid log in the Lake Geneva safe."
Across the table, Rebecca's hand twitched toward her purse again.
"My dad was sixty-eight when the truck went into the river," Hannah continued, her voice echoing off the wood-paneled walls. "He wasn't blackmailing you to get rich, Mr. Harrison. Every dime you wired to that clinic went to pay for Clara's heart surgery when she was five—the same congenital valve defect her father Michael had."
My knees went weak.
I looked down at Clara's pale cheeks and the faint white scar peeking above the collar of her cotton shirt.
While Daniel was buying gold bracelets and silk dresses for Rebecca in Chicago, his dead brother's child had been fighting for her life in a small-town clinic.
"What is on that mechanic's log, Hannah?" my son Mark asked, stepping forward and taking the Ziploc bag from her hand.
"My dad saw the person in the yellow raincoat cutting the brake line on the white Ford F-250," Hannah said, her eyes locking onto Rebecca Collins. "And he also saw who drove into the yard ten minutes later in a red sedan to pick that person up. My dad wrote down the license plate number on the back of his shift sheet."
Rebecca lunged for Mark's hand.
"Give me that!" Rebecca shrieked, her fingernails raking across Mark's wrist before Lucas caught her by the shoulders and pulled her back.
Mark turned the yellowed paper over inside the plastic bag.
"Illinois plate," Mark read aloud, his voice dropping in shock. "Registered to... Arthur Collins. Rockford Paving and Asphalt."
Daniel stared at Rebecca as if he had never seen her face before.
"Arthur Collins is your father," Daniel whispered. "Rockford Paving was the rival bidder on the county bridge contract the week Michael died. When Michael's truck crashed with the soil samples inside, we lost the bid deadline and your father's company made four million dollars."
"Your father didn't cut the brakes," I said, looking at Rebecca's trembling hands and remembering the Lake Geneva marina key she had just tried to ditch in the champagne glass. "You were twenty-six years old, working as a file clerk in our Rockford trailer. You cut the brakes on Robert's truck because you thought Daniel would be driving it to the county courthouse the next morning."
"It was supposed to be a slow leak!" Rebecca screamed, tears of rage and terror spilling through her mascara as sixty guests stared in horror. "My dad was going to lose our house if we didn't get that paving contract! How was I supposed to know Michael would borrow Robert's truck in the middle of a blizzard?"
"And five years ago, you came to Chicago and seduced my husband," I said, the final piece of the puzzle clicking into place with chilling clarity, "because your father found out Daniel was paying off the night watchman in Lake Geneva, and you needed to find out where the old man was hiding the shift log."
"You used me?" Daniel choked out, staggering back against the buffet table, looking every single one of his fifty-eight years. "Five years... the condo... the bracelet... you were just looking for the Lake Geneva house?"
Rebecca laughed—a bitter, cornered sound as she wrenched her arm free from Lucas.
"You really thought a thirty-two-year-old woman fell in love with a married man in bifocals who complains about his sciatica?" Rebecca spat at him. "I spent five years listening to you brag about yourself just to get the password to your home safe! And you didn't even keep the Lake Geneva deed in the house—Patricia had it!"
Wait.
Clara tugged sharply on my coat sleeve.
"Aunt Patricia," Clara said, pointing at the gold bracelet with the heart charm still sitting inside my black velvet box on the table. "Why does that lady have my daddy's bracelet?"
Everyone in the room went dead silent.
I looked down at the tiny gold heart engraved with Forever, D.
"What did you say, Clara?" I whispered.
Clara reached into the pocket of her yellow cardigan and pulled out a faded Polaroid photograph of her mother, Sarah Miller, holding a newborn baby in a hospital bed eleven years ago.
On Sarah's wrist was the exact same gold link bracelet—and written on the bottom border of the Polaroid in Michael Harrison's handwriting were the words:
For my darling Sarah — Forever, Ducky.
Ducky.
Michael's childhood nickname.
May you like
The bracelet hadn't been bought by Daniel five years ago at all; the jeweler's receipt I had found on my fiftieth birthday wasn't for a purchase—it was for a clasp repair and re-polishing.
And as I flipped the silver railroad watch over in Clara's hand, I saw a fresh scratch across the inside of the brass casing: a locker number at Union Station, dated yesterday.
