Chapter 4: The Attorney Who Called First
I did not speak immediately.
In my experience, the person who speaks first in an unexpected call has already given something away.
Victor Hale waited.
He was comfortable with silence.
That told me something.
"How did you get this number?" I said.
"The same way I get most things," he said.
"Carefully, and well in advance."
He had the voice of a man in his sixties — not old, but settled.
The kind of voice that had spent decades in rooms where decisions were made and then denied.
"Celeste called you," I said.
"Celeste calls me when she's frightened," he said.
"She called me forty minutes ago.
She told me you'd gone to the hospital and hadn't come back.
She told me the nurse was awake." A pause.
"I'm calling you because I have been Celeste's family's attorney for thirty-one years, and in that time I have done things I cannot undo.
I am not calling to threaten you.
I am calling because I am seventy-one years old and I have a granddaughter who starts school in September, and I find that changes the arithmetic considerably."
Delia was watching me from the bed.
I held up one finger.
"What do you want?" I said.
"I want to give you the second document," Hale said.
"The one your mother hid.
I know where it is because I'm the one who helped her hide it."
The heating unit clicked.
Somewhere down the hospital corridor, a cart rolled past.
"You helped my mother," I said.
"Three years ago.
She found a way to reach me — I won't tell you how, it doesn't matter now.
She asked me to draw up a witnessed affidavit and keep it outside my firm's records.
Off the books.
In exchange, she asked me to deliver it at a time of my choosing, to the person of my choosing, when I believed the moment was right." His voice dropped slightly.
"I believe the moment is now."
"Because Celeste is frightened."
"Because Celeste is frightened and frightened people do reckless things, and I am no longer willing to be in the room when that happens."
I looked at Delia.
She had heard enough of it to understand the shape of the conversation.
Her expression didn't change, but she gave me a single slow nod.
"Where?" I said.
He named a coffee shop on the west end of the loop.
Seven in the morning.
He would be alone.
He would bring the document.
He asked only that I come without the kind of company I usually kept.
"I'll come alone," I said.
"I know you will," he said.
"You're the kind of man who doesn't need company to make a point."
He ended the call.
I set the phone down on the arm of the chair.
Delia was still watching me.
"He helped her," she said.
It wasn't a question.
"He says so."
"Do you believe him?"
I thought about it honestly.
"I believe he's afraid.
Whether that makes him trustworthy is a different question."
"What are you going to do?"
"Meet him." I picked up my coat.
"But first I need to make a call of my own."
I stepped into the corridor and called the one man I trusted.
He answered on the second ring, the way he always did.
"I need everything on a Victor Hale," I said.
"Attorney.
Sixty-one, maybe seventy-one.
Connected to the Vandermark family going back thirty years.
I need it by six."
"Give me two hours," he said.
"You have one."
I went back into the room.
Delia had pulled the folded paper from the blanket and was holding it, not reading it — just holding it, the way you hold something that belongs to someone who is gone.
"My mother," I said.
"Did she know you were Ewan's sister when she hired you?"
"I applied through the agency," Delia said.
"Standard process.
But yes.
She knew within the first week.
She recognized my father's eyes." A small pause.
"She never said it out loud.
She just started leaving the door open when I came in at night."
I sat down again.
Outside, the first grey light of morning was beginning to show at the edges of the window.
"She left the door open for me too," I said.
"Every night for two years.
I thought it was habit."
"It wasn't habit," Delia said.
We sat without speaking for a while.
It was not an uncomfortable silence.
It was the silence of two people who have just understood something at the same moment.
Then Delia said: "She's going to find out you didn't come home."
"She already knows."
"She'll do something."
"Yes," I said.
"She will."
My phone lit up on the chair arm.
A message from a number I didn't recognize — different from Hale's.
No words.
Just a photograph.
It was a picture of the front of the hospital.
Taken from the street, less than an hour ago, in the dark.
Someone had been watching the entrance.
Someone who wanted me to know they'd been watching.
I turned the phone face-down on the chair and did not look at it again.
"Get some sleep," I told Delia.
"I'll be back before noon."
She looked at the phone, then at me.
"Be careful."
It was the second time in my life someone in that family had told me to be careful.
May you like
The first had been Ewan, the morning before everything changed.
I buttoned my coat and walked out into the corridor, toward whatever Celeste had decided to do next.
