Chapter 7 - THE THIRD HOOK ON THE WALL
The paramedic crew swarmed down the concrete slipway thirty seconds later, easing Leo onto a backboard and strapping an oxygen mask over his face while harbor police handcuffed a weeping Katherine Sterling beside her sedan.
I stood at the edge of the dry-dock pit while a second paramedic wrapped a thermal blanket around my mother’s shoulders and fitted her with a nebulizer mask for her coughing.
In my left hand, I held the scorched three-hook coat rack Kowalski had pulled from the ashes of our Ravenswood townhouse twenty-five years ago.
DANNY. LEO. CHLOE.
I opened the tiny, soot-darkened plastic heart locket hanging from the third hook. Inside was a thumbnail-sized sticker photo from a mall photo booth, dated SUMMER 2001. In it, two five-year-old dark-haired twin boys were grinning with missing front teeth on either side of a three-year-old blonde toddler in a yellow daisy sundress.
My mother pulled the nebulizer mask down from her face, her eyes wide as she looked at the scorched brass hook in my hand.
"Where did Frank Kowalski find that?" Helen breathed. "That hung inside the back mudroom door—right where the fire started!"
"Mom," I said, my voice shaking as I showed her the tiny sticker photo inside the locket. "Why was three-year-old Chloe Sterling in our Ravenswood townhouse on the night of October 14th, 2001? You told me Gregory Sterling was my father’s lawyer. I thought I didn't meet Chloe until my father introduced us at the Lake Forest Country Club four years ago!"
My mother stared at the tiny photo of the blonde toddler, her weathered brow furrowing deeply before her hand flew to her mouth.
"That’s not Gregory Sterling’s daughter," Helen whispered, her voice trembling with sudden, horrified clarity. "In 2001, her name was Chloe Novak. Her mother was Katherine Novak—my neighbor who lived in the basement garden apartment right below us in Ravenswood!"
The cold wind off Lake Michigan seemed to stop dead in my lungs.
"Chloe’s mother lived beneath us?" I repeated slowly.
"Katherine was a paralegal who worked at Gregory Sterling’s divorce firm," Helen said, grabbing my wrist as the pieces of twenty-five years fell together like tumbling dominoes. "That’s how your father found out where we were living! On the night of October 14th, Katherine asked me to watch little three-year-old Chloe upstairs for an hour while she went to the pharmacy. Five minutes after Katherine walked out the back mudroom door, the kerosene rag went off in the mudroom laundry basket!"
I stared back toward the police cruiser at the entrance of the hangar, where Katherine Sterling sat in the backseat in her champagne silk mother-of-the-bride dress.
Wait.
"If three-year-old Chloe was upstairs with me and Leo when the mudroom caught fire," I said, my heart hammering against my ribs, "how did Chloe get out before you carried me down the fire escape?"
From the rolling stretcher beside us, Leo pulled his oxygen mask aside an inch, his feverish eyes locked on mine as the paramedics wheeled him toward the ambulance doors.
"She didn't get out before the fire, Danny," Leo rasped, pointing at the laminated newspaper clipping he had pressed into my hand alongside the hook. "Check Box 19... Katherine didn't go to the pharmacy. She left the gas burner open on the basement water heater with a kerosene rag on top so she could collect the tenant liability payout from Arthur’s insurance company and marry Gregory Sterling—and she forgot little Chloe had wandered back down the inside stairs looking for her doll!"
I unfolded the laminated clipping and the yellowing fire marshal’s evidence log from Box 19 that Leo had tucked inside his shirt.
My eyes raced down the handwritten property receipt signed by Inspector Frank Kowalski on October 15, 2001:
ITEM 4A: One (1) child’s yellow raincoat, size 3T, recovered next to intact rear basement exit door. Accompanying pediatric admission record — Mercy Private Clinic, Oct 14, 2001, 11:40 PM: Female child, approx. age 3, unconscious, severe smoke inhalation. Admitted alongside male child, approx. age 5 (Daniel Vance).
"Oh, my God," I whispered, the paper trembling in my hands. "Chloe was in the basement when the stairs collapsed. She wasn't in the nursery with us—she was right by the back door where Katherine set the fire."
"And when Arthur pulled up in the alley," Helen realized aloud, her eyes wide with horror, "he found you lying on the grass where I left you, and Katherine running out the basement door carrying unconscious little Chloe! If the fire marshal had investigated that basement water heater, Katherine would have gone to prison for arson—and Arthur would have gone to prison for paying her ten thousand dollars to let him inside the building with a spare key to kidnap you boys!"
So Arthur Vance and Gregory Sterling had buried both crimes at Mercy Private Clinic that night.
Gregory had married his paralegal Katherine six months later, legally adopted three-year-old Chloe, and raised her in Lake Forest with the same lie my father had fed me—telling Chloe that her biological father had died in the 2001 Ravenswood fire and that Arthur Vance had heroically pulled both of us from the smoke.
That was why Chloe had frozen when she saw the 2003 photograph on my phone on the church steps.
And that was why seven-year-old Toby—wait.
The ambulance doors slammed shut as the paramedics loaded Leo and my mother inside to rush them to Northwestern Memorial Hospital.
"Danny, come with us!" my mother called from the ambulance step.
My cell phone buzzed violently in my pocket. It wasn't Chloe’s number. It was Monsignor Kelly from St. James Cathedral.
I answered it on the first ring. "Monsignor?"
"Daniel, thank God!" the seventy-year-old priest’s voice was breathless with panic over the phone line. "After the police cars left here for the harbor, your father didn't get arrested—he told the officers he had nothing to do with Gregory’s boatyard and went back inside the sacristy to get his briefcase! Daniel, Chloe is still here, and she found the probate rider inside your father’s briefcase while he was in the washroom!"
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"Put Chloe on the phone right now, Monsignor!" I shouted, sprinting back toward Marcus’s Mercedes.
"I can't!" the priest cried. "When Arthur came out of the washroom and saw Chloe holding the 2001 Mercy Clinic files, he grabbed seven-year-old Toby by the arm and locked the two of them inside the bell tower gallery above the organ loft! He’s standing on the exterior parapet balcony with the boy right now, saying if the police come up the stairs or if you don't bring him the safe-deposit key from the boatyard, nobody gets out of that tower!"
