Chapter 10

“H ow is she?”

He had whispered the question. I unclicked my seatbelt and leaned over to look in the back seat. But Esme wasn’t asleep. Her blue eyes were open and she smiled when she saw me peeking. She got that expression a lot now, and every time she did, I grinned back at her.

“Hi, honey,” I said. I felt her hands to make sure that she wasn’t too warm or too cold, and then I touched her head because I loved her hair. Then I leaned back even farther to kiss her.

“She’s fine,” I answered Daniel as I settled into my own seat and refastened my belt. “She’s been doing great.”

We had taken the day off to drive to Ann Arbor to meet with the historians there about the Father Richard documents that I’d found in the box of junk. They had been more than excited—more like flabbergasted and thrilled. They were entirely overwhelmed when Daniel said, “You should just keep all this. You guys will know what to do with it.”

They’d been so grateful that one of them had dabbed his eyes. “I have a request,” Daniel had continued, and they’d nodded and said sure, anything. “I don’t want my name or my dad’s name to be associated with anything. If you’re going to display the documents or publicize that you have them, could you just say that they’re from an anonymous donor?”

That was fine with them. They didn’t understand that his father didn’t deserve to be honored, and they probably wouldn’t have understood the guilt his son felt about the whole situation. They took us to lunch to say thank you, and Daniel and I traded off holding the baby while we ate. The researchers had been properly appreciative of her good behavior, natural intelligence, and extreme beauty, which made sense because they were obviously also smart people.

“You have a lovely family,” one of them had said to Daniel as we left the restaurant.

He’d paused for a moment, and then he’d answered, “Thank you,” and my heart had done a funny skip. It probably made more sense for him to say that, rather than getting into a long explanation about our identities…I understood, but my heart hadn’t cared.

I thought about it again as we drove on M-14 towards the city. With Esme in the back in the seat that he’d installed (and had checked by the firefighters), it could have felt as if we were the parents and she was our baby. I watched him carefully change lanes, using his mirrors and signaling. Someone would feel very comfortable and easy with him as her partner.

“Comfort” and “ease” were feelings I hadn’t been experiencing much, not lately. It had been two days since the burglary and I hadn’t yet returned to my house. The bad news was that the police didn’t have any more information, and the worse news was that Addie had told the story to our other sisters. Even Brenna seemed concerned and Nicola got upset about my usually peaceful neighborhood falling to crime. But it was specific to me, I’d thought, although I’d stopped trying to convince people of that because it did make it even scarier. I took a sip of water from my bottle, since my mouth had gone dry as I thought about it.

The burglary might also have been specific to something else: the Horner case. When I’d used my dad’s old computer the next day, I had been able to access my data online without any problems. It was intact—except for one file. All of the information about the Horners was missing. Everything. Every email that Mrs. Horner and I had exchanged had been deleted, not just trashed but totally gone. The reports I’d written, the research I’d gathered, the notes I’d taken—it was erased as if it had never been there. I wasn’t an expert but I knew my way around data, and I couldn’t find the least trace of anything related to that case. I’d reported that development to Granger, Addie’s fiancé, and I was waiting to hear…I looked at my phone and saw that he had texted while we’d been at lunch, wondering if I had time to talk.

“Granger wants me to call him,” I said to Daniel.

“Ask if you can put him on speaker. If you don’t mind me hearing it, I’d like to.”

“I don’t mind,” I said, but I didn’t immediately call, either.

“It’s ok,” he told me. “Whatever he has to say, it’s ok.”

“I know that,” I answered. It still took me another moment to dial, but I did it.

Granger was amenable to talking to both of us (and Esme) and he had a lot to say—but first he asked me a question. “Did you research both spouses? Both Horners?”

“No,” I answered. “Mrs. Horner was my client so I only checked on her briefly to make sure she was who she claimed to be. I confirmed her identity and that she was the guy’s actual wife. Why?”

“Because if you’re going to continue to pry into people’s lives, then you need to know who you’re dealing with,” Granger said, and I bristled.

“I’m not ‘prying into people’s lives,’” I told him. “I’m providing a service to individuals who have been wronged. I’m helping them to better their circumstances.”

There was a short pause. “However you want to think about it, it’s a dangerous job. You’ve taken some precautions to protect your identity, but clearly, they weren’t enough. Alonya Horner, your client, comes from a family deeply involved in organized crime. From here on out, do not contact her, do not—”

“What?” I gasped. “Her family—what? Organized crime?”

“If that’s true, then why did she need to pay Sophie to find out about her husband?” Daniel asked.

“I have to assume that she kept them out of her marital problems, but now, they’ve stepped in. Your data was wiped because your connection to her has been severed and erased, and now she can claim that she didn’t know about her husband’s misconduct. They sent you a message when they came to your house, though. They can find you, they can get to you, so keep your mouth shut and stay away from the Horner case from now on.”

There was a deafening silence in the car, only broken when Esme yelled out.

“Is that the baby? Hi, Esme,” Granger said in a totally different tone. “How is she doing?”

“Very well,” I said automatically. “Wait a minute. Are you serious? I had murderers in my house?”

“They’re worse than that.”

“What’s worse than that?” I asked him.

“Things are moving quickly now,” Granger said, which didn’t answer my question. “No one has seen the husband in the last few days. He hasn’t been at work. The kids were pulled out of school and their house is up for sale.”

“What happened to them?” I asked.

“I believe that the wife and kids are fine.”

I noticed that he hadn’t said anything about the husband, though, and I would have bet that guy was definitely not fine. Not at all. “Wait, we’re discussing this on the phone!” I exclaimed.

“This line is secure,” Granger assured me.

“I’m on a cell phone!” I emphasized, in case he hadn’t understood.

“It’s secure. Addie loved seeing the baby,” he remarked conversationally. “You guys should come over for dinner. I know she’d like to talk to you about wedding stuff.”

“I—what? Uh, sure. Huh? Yes. Ok.” The words were stumbling out of my mouth as my thoughts tumbled around in my skull. “Granger, am I safe? Am I putting people in danger?”

“I think you’re ok, and I would tell you if I thought you were compromising anyone else. But if you have other materials relating to the Horners, destroy them. Take a vacation from your job,” he advised.

“Should she quit?” Daniel asked.

“That’s my decision!” I snapped. “I’ll decide.”

“It’s up to you,” Granger spoke from my phone. His voice was very neutral but I looked over at Daniel, and he didn’t look neutral at all. He usually kept himself under control and it had always been hard to rile him to major anger. Now was one of the occasions that he was riled, and very much so.

“Did you call the police?” he asked Granger. “Should we?”

“Their activities are under investigation at a federal level and I’d prefer to keep Sophie’s name out of it. Nothing good is going to come from her getting involved, but she may have to. I’ll do my best.”

“Great,” I said. “So I’ll have agents and criminals after me?”

“I hope that won’t be the case,” Granger answered, and I threw up my hands in anger. Why was this happening? It was ridiculous! It felt unfair, too, because all I had done was my job, and my job only consisted of finding out the truth for my clients.

“This sucks,” I announced, but no one answered. “It really does! Why am I the one who’s being punished?”

“Her husband is missing,” Daniel said. “You think he wasn’t punished?”

I didn’t have anything to say to that and neither did Granger, so I blabbered out something about coming over for dinner before I hung up and looked across the car. “I didn’t mean for this to happen,” I said.

“I know that, but it’s here now.”

I shook my head, because this wasn’t making sense to me. “I’m having a hard time accepting that my job led to…to whatever is going on,” I said.

“You knew that there were real-world consequences for what you were doing.”

“Of course I knew that,” I answered, irritated. I had been aware that people had fought, broken up, hated each other. “I knew that,” I repeated. I just hadn’t thought there would be this kind of consequence for me.

“You really didn’t look into your clients’ backgrounds?” Daniel asked.

“There were several people I turned away because they’d lied about who they really were,” I told him. “I wasn’t helping stalkers or people who were hiding their real motivations for hiring me. I checked out Mrs. Horner and saw that she was a thirty-five-year-old woman with three children, an office job, modest savings, a leased car, and a mortgage. I didn’t look into her any further and yes, I could have learned more.”

“Or maybe not. Maybe you didn’t ever really know who you were dealing with.”

No, that wasn’t true! I—well, I thought about it. “Maybe not,” I admitted. “I can see that it seems a little negligent that I didn’t do more investigation into my clients.”

“Negligent? It seems extremely dangerous. Foolhardy.”

“I did take precautions. You heard Granger say it,” I retorted. “I never used my name. It’s not associated with my website in any way. Even the ownership of my house is hidden under corporate stuff.” Hidden, but not impossible to find if someone knew what he was doing. “You didn’t know that I lived there before you moved in across the street,” I ventured.

“No, it was a total fluke.”

Sure.I nodded.

“I’d thought about some of the danger you were in,” Daniel said. “I wondered how much you really knew about the people who hired you, but I never considered that it could go this far. Organized crime? You just told me that it’s your decision whether you want to keep doing this job or not, but if my opinion means anything to you, you’ll find a new line of work. If you plan to continue, you have to invest in security, like dogs and weapons. You’ll need a real alarm system, not motion-activated lights but a serious set-up. You should probably move, too.”

“No, I’m not moving,” I said quickly, and then couldn’t come up with any other answers. “I don’t know what to do,” I admitted. “This is shocking to me but I don’t know why it would be. I’ve seen some of the terrible ways that people can behave. I’ve written reports about it, but I’ve never been personally involved, and I’ve never been up-close to anything violent.” I paused. “Did they kill her husband? Is the Horner guy dead?”

“It sounds like Granger thinks so. If he’s not dead, he’s out of the picture for good. I agree that they were sending you a message, Sophie.”

“And I won’t involve myself in that case at all anymore. Not at all.”

“What about the next client who has crazy relatives? Or the client who’s crazy herself? If those guys could find you—”

“It’s my job,” I reminded him. “It’s how I make my living. I have to earn money somehow.”

“It’s not the only job in the world,” he answered, and then he started to talk about other options. “What about journalism? That was what you always wanted to do.”

“When I was starting college, I thought about that a lot and I decided against it. As much as I enjoyed ranting in the school newspaper, it wasn’t something that I wanted to do for the rest of my life and other careers were more stable.”

“Like accounting,” he suggested. “Like your dad.”

“I did get my degree in that, and I was planning to be a CPA. I changed my mind.”

He was nodding as if he already understood. “Because you broke up with the guy in the Caribbean.”

“Holy Mary! Did my mom hold anything back when she told you about that episode?”

“No, I don’t think so. She even seemed to know what you were wearing.”

“She does not, and I didn’t decide to give up on becoming a CPA because of what happened,” I said. “I quit because I hated it. I hated every moment of it, all the accounting and econ classes I took, all the studying I did, and every bit of the actual job. I had a big talk with my dad and he said that I shouldn’t keep pushing myself into a career I couldn’t stand.” I hesitated but then kept going. “He admitted that he doesn’t like it either, but he had gone for an advanced degree and he and my mom got married very quickly after they met. Then Nicola was on the way. He felt trapped into sticking with it, so he didn’t quit. He worked all the time when I was a kid and I imagined myself spending years trudging away like he does, constantly miserable.”

“He’s miserable?”

“I think so,” I said. “I think he’s miserable in his job and in his house. I didn’t want to tell my sisters that, though. I let them think that I changed career paths because of what had happened in the Caribbean, that I was changing up my entire life because of that.”

“So you don’t tell each other absolutely everything,” he noted. “Ok, so accounting is out.” But he had other ideas about how I could leave my successful business behind and start over, and we spent the rest of the trip discussing his suggestions.

Eventually, it turned into an argument. “I understand that you’re trying to help,” I said testily, “but I have to decide this. Me.” We turned into his driveway and pulled into the now-empty garage. “I have to be the one to choose what I’ll do with the rest of my life, since it’s mine.”

He turned off the car. “But other things factor into it, now. What about Esme?”

“What about her?”

“What if she had been in the house with you when those guys broke in?” he asked.

“Why would you say that?” I retorted angrily. “She wasn’t. She’s fine!”

“If you’re going to act like her parent—”

“I’m not, obviously. I mean, I’m obviously not her mother and I’m not acting like I am!” My mind flitted back to the compliment that Daniel had accepted about his “beautiful family,” the words that I’d been oddly thrilled to hear at the time. It was just silly, though. “I can’t act so silly! I’m not going to structure my life around a baby that’s not even mine.” As I said it, I unclicked my seat belt so I could see her and touch her. “She’s not mine,” I stated, but then I had to lean down to kiss her, too.

“You already have structured your life around her,” he said. “I’m not criticizing you, I’m stating a fact. As far as I can tell, you’ve changed everything, from how you work, to how you eat, to where you sleep at night. I remember you making fun of the girls at our school with their fancy water bottles and now you’re carrying one because yoga makes you thirsty. Yoga, which you also used to mock and say that you couldn’t do because you allergic to patchouli.”

“I do hate patchouli and I can’t help being thirsty!”

“Good, drink more water!” he told me. “I’m just saying—”

“For years and years, my family has criticized the way I lived. My house was a mess, I never went outside. I didn’t exercise, I wore ugly clothes. My diet was terrible, I didn’t sleep enough. I didn’t have friends.” I stopped, because I’d just painted a truly ghastly picture of myself.

“If you were happy with the way things were, then why did their criticism bother you?” Daniel asked. “You told me any number of times that you liked your life. You were happy.”

“I did. I do! I am!”

“Well, then you should have told them that you weren’t interested in what they had to say. You never had a problem before with telling people that you didn’t care about them.”

There was a short silence. “I need to get Esme,” I stated, and we both stepped from the car. I looked across the street at my house, at the color I’d chosen because I loved it and because I’d decided that Brenna and everyone else who hated the pink could just suck it. “I don’t care what people think,” I told the baby. Her face screwed up as she started to cry. “No, I love you,” I said, but she was hungry and tired of being in that car seat. I should have gone right to my mom’s, but I had wanted to come back here to check on my house. Now, I didn’t even want to go over there after what Daniel had said about me putting Esme in danger.

“I wouldn’t do that to you,” I said to her softly as we rocked together. “I love you, and I won’t do anything that would hurt you or that would separate us.” Of course, I wasn’t her parent—but he had been right that I had changed a lot to take care of her. Would I give up my job? I liked it, but I’d always known that I was making people angry…since I didn’t care what anyone thought, though, what had that mattered?

I knew that Daniel was still in the garage, too, so I didn’t have to raise my voice to speak to him. “I’ll finish up a few things for existing clients and then I’m going to take a vacation, like Granger suggested,” I announced. “I’ll decide what I want to do next. I’m not Esme’s parent but I know that my actions impact her.”

“Ok.”

I turned around. “That’s all you have to say?”

He shrugged. “Do you want me to keep arguing? I don’t have any sway over what you do. I don’t know why I was acting like I did.” He reached for Esme. “I’ll give her a bottle if you want to go to your house,” he suggested.

“I…”

“Do you want us to go with you?”

“No,” I answered immediately. No, I didn’t want either of them in there.

“I’ll sit on my porch with her so we can see you,” he said. “You could leave the front door open while you look around.”

So that was what we did. He carried a chair outside and they sat in the shade of his awning while I went over to my house. We’d locked the door when we’d left there the last time, as if my puny deadbolt would have stopped those thieves. I did leave it open as I stepped inside and I glanced back across the street. Daniel raised his hand and I nodded to him and then made myself walk down the hall.

It looked fine and that had been another red flag: there just wasn’t very much out of place, and it should have been. Once, when I was a kid, my neighbor’s house had been burglarized. I remembered peeking in with my sisters and the place looked as if a tornado had gone through it, with drawers not just opened and searched but pulled out and dumped on the floors, a door torn off a closet, and broken glass everywhere. But my house looked almost as if no one had been there at all.

I stood at the entrance to my office and recalled working at my desk and hearing someone knock, and the excitement I’d felt because I’d expected to see Daniel. For the whole day, I had complacently believed that I was safe and secure. Actually, for my whole career, I’d had no inkling at all that I was a sitting duck.

It was a terrible realization but when I thought about what Granger had said about the dangers of the job, of how angry I’d made strangers who hadn’t been fooled by the precautions I’d taken to protect my identity…I also felt na?ve. I’d been smug as I dug up their secrets; I’d told myself that those people deserved it for hiding the truth from those who trusted or loved them. I’d acted like I wasn’t judging, too, but—

“Sophie,” Daniel said quietly.

I screamed and Esme started to cry, wailing in fright as I rushed to her. “Why did you come in here?” I asked him angrily, taking her and holding her close. “Why did you come over at all?”

“You said you’d be back in a minute and it was a lot longer than that. I called your phone and I knocked and you didn’t hear anything?”

“No.” The baby had calmed a lot but I didn’t want to let her go. “Everything is fine. We should leave.”

Esme and I also left Daniel’s house shortly after that and drove to my parents’ place. Both of us were cranky, which made sense. She’d been in a car for much too long and had been thrown off her routine, and I’d been told that I was a target of an organized crime family. And for some reason, I kept thinking about the woman whom I’d investigated a few years before. Her daughter had hired me to get to the bottom of what she considered to be a terrible deception. I’d discovered that the mom had been keeping a secret: she’d given up a child for adoption years before. I shouldn’t have done it, I decided. I should have said that I couldn’t take that case because what happened was private, and it was no one’s business.

But who was to say? Who could really determine when to hold back the truth and when to spill it? What about the guy whom I’d helped by uncovering that his girlfriend had a huge gambling problem, saving him from financial ruin before he’d intermingled his money with hers? That was a win for him and for me, wasn’t it? Secrets like that didn’t deserve to be kept. Secrets that hurt people had to be driven out into the open. Wasn’t that right? I had always thought so, but—

For the second time that day, I nearly jumped out of my skin. It was because my mother knocked on the passenger window and she waved as I clutched my chest. “Why are you sitting out here?” she asked me, and I shrugged and unlocked the car doors. She got Esme out of the seat and was excited to see her after we’d been gone for so long, which was nice. Neither my dad’s SUV nor my brother’s new-to-him beater was parked in the driveway or at the curb, so my mom had been alone.

“Where’s Patrick?” I asked and I watched her shoulders stiffen and her eyes dart.

“I think he found an apartment,” she said, her voice betraying none of the wariness her body displayed.

“What? He’s moving Esme into an apartment?”

My mom started walking toward the house. “He found a job, too, which I know you’ll be glad about even though it doesn’t utilize any of his skills,” she accused me.

“What would his skills be? I guess he could say that he’s a successful fabulist, since he was able to trick a woman into believing that he’d had a vasectomy. That would look great on his résumé.”

“You never give him credit for anything, Sophie!”

“What job?” I asked. “What apartment?”

It took a while to wring out the truth. I learned that Patrick had started a retail job “to keep him busy” until he could come across something more suitable for his skills. No, she didn’t mean that he was a successful liar! He was actually a very talented, capable person, with so many special qualities…and so on, and so on. No, he wasn’t moving into an apartment with the baby. I breathed out a sigh of relief when I heard that.

“Thank goodness,” I said, and my mom stopped trying to convince me that he was wonderful—just for a moment.

“I was worried about that,” she said. “I really don’t think he’s prepared to take care of her by himself, not all the time.”

It was a lot for her to admit, and I was briefly shocked. “He’s not prepared to take care of her even some of the time,” I volunteered. “He barely does squat and now he won’t be around to do even that.”

“He just bought a jumbo pack of diapers!” she defended him.

“Mom, are you serious? He’s moving out and leaving you with his baby, and you think some diapers make up for it?”

“I’m making lasagna for dinner,” she said, and checked the oven. “Doesn’t it smell good?”

That was about as far as the conversation went. I tried to get ahold of Patrick, but he didn’t pick up or write back, and none of my sisters had heard from him either. Juliet admitted in our group text that she hadn’t known that he was moving out, and she didn’t know where he was moving to, either.

“I’m busy,” she told us all, and then stopped replying.

For what seemed like a million reasons, I couldn’t go to sleep that night in the bed that Patrick had apparently abandoned. I lay and listened to the baby snuffling at times in her crib, and then I got up and went downstairs. I was in the kitchen when I saw headlights pull into the driveway, and I went to the front window to watch my dad walk toward the door, just like I’d done when I was a little girl.

He’d never been surprised or upset to see me there no matter how late I’d waited up, and he wasn’t surprised now, either. “Hi, sweetie,” he said, and smiled tiredly.

“Hi, Dad. How was your day?”

“Busy,” he answered, which was what he usually said, and he grimaced in a way that was also very familiar. “How about you?”

“I guess mine was informative,” I told him. As we went to the kitchen and he reheated some of the lasagna, I talked about going to Ann Arbor and handing over the Father Richard papers, and he was very interested in the tax implications of that. “Daniel isn’t going to worry about how the gift affects his taxes,” I said.

“You could let him know. I’d be happy to work on it with him,” my dad mentioned.

“Ok, I’ll tell him,” I agreed. I watched him eat for a moment. “Mom’s a good cook.”

“Very. I’ve always liked her dinners.”

“Do you like her, too?”

“Sophie, what a thing to ask me,” he said, grimacing again. “We’ve been married for more than thirty-five years.”

“I know.” I’d thrown that factoid into Carrington’s face, too, but I’d been aware at the time that it didn’t mean anything about their relationship. “If you could go back, would you still have married her?”

“There’s no going back,” he said, and I supposed that was answer enough.

“Patrick’s moving out,” I commented, and he took it in stride.

“Good.” He nodded and ate more of his dinner.

“He’s not taking the baby, though. She’ll still be here, so I’ll probably be here, too. Do you care?”

“I don’t mind having you around.” He chewed slowly and then said, “I’m surprised that you’re doing this for your brother.”

“I’m not doing it for him,” I corrected. “I’m doing it for Esme.”

“She doesn’t look much like a Curran.”

“Yes, she does! She has Patrick’s eyes. And we have a DNA test, so she’s definitely your granddaughter. She’s your first one, too, and I wish you were more interested in her.”

“I’m not great with kids,” he said.

Then he probably shouldn’t have had seven of them, but he’d never been able to say no to my mother. “Are you sorry that you had all of us?”

Now he put down his fork. “Where is this coming from, Sophie?”

“I don’t know,” I said honestly. “I started questioning things today and rethinking my decisions. I’ve been doing it for the past few months, actually. I’ve been wishing that I could redo some choices I made, even though I know that I can’t go back, either. It made me wonder if you would redo things, too.”

“I would have become an architect,” he said. “But you already knew I’ve never enjoyed my work. I enjoy the freedom that the paycheck gives me, but not the job itself.”

“I probably need to find a new job,” I said, and I didn’t totally explain why but I did relay that I’d had problems with clients that I wouldn’t be able to resolve. Like Daniel, my dad also had ideas, and I listened to them.

“Don’t you need to get to bed?” he asked after a while. “I hear you waking up early with the baby.”

His home office, where he’d been sleeping on the couch, was right under Patrick’s old room. “I’ll try to be quieter.”

“It doesn’t bother me.” He put his plate into the dishwasher and started it. “Goodnight, sweetie.”

“Goodnight, Dad.”

He paused and turned back. “I’m not at all sorry that we had seven children. I’m angry at your brother right now and I don’t know what to do about Grace, but I love each of you. Whatever happens, you can know that.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

He had turned off the light in the hallway, and I heard his office door close.