Chapter 3

Vance took us into the carousel office because it was the only room on the pier with a lock.

It was a cramped little box behind the band organ - a desk, two filing cabinets, a coffee maker with an inch of burned sludge in the pot, a window that looked out at the locked gates and the crowd pressed against them. Preston's calendar hung on the wall with the festival schedule blocked out in red. Somebody had circled today.

Sophie sat in the desk chair with her knees up and her arms wrapped around them. She hadn't let go of the cord. She wouldn't put the token back on. She just held it in her lap, both hands, like a stone she'd picked up out of the surf.

Augustin Rourke stood by the window with his back to us for a while.

"I frightened her," he said finally. "I'm sorry."

"You grabbed her out of the crowd and opened her necklace," I said. "Yeah."

"I meant the other man. I should not have-"

"You're not the one I'm worried about." I sat down on the corner of the desk, which put me close to Sophie, which was where I wanted to be. "Start at the beginning. Thirty-five years ago."

He turned around.

"My wife, Vivienne, died the spring my daughter was two," he said. "She was sick for eleven months. Celia didn't understand any of it. She just knew that one day the bed was empty and the house was quiet and everyone around her was whispering."

He said it plainly. Men of that generation usually do.

"I hired a nanny that fall," he said. "A nursery attendant, they called it then. Elena Velasco. My sister recommended her. Rosalind had her working at the Foundation offices in town and said she was gentle with children, that she needed the room and board."

My hands went cold. I put them flat on the desk.

"The seventh of October," he said. "A Tuesday. I had a board meeting in the city and I didn't get back until nearly nine. The housekeeper was on the kitchen stairs, sobbing. The back gate was standing open. Elena's car was still in the garage with the keys in it. Her handbag was on the hall table with her wallet in it, sixty-three dollars, and a savings book, and a letter she'd written to a priest and never mailed."

"Where was Celia?"

"Gone." He said the word like a man lifting something heavy. "Her coat was gone from the hook. That's all. Her coat, and the yellow blanket off her bed."

I looked down at Sophie, who was watching him with her chin on her knees, and I thought about the strip of yellow wool I still kept in a shoebox. I had told myself for years that it was a hospital blanket from my own birth. I had never once asked my mother where it came from, and now there was no one left to ask.

"Say it," I said. "Say the thing you came here to say."

Augustin Rourke put his hand in his pocket. He took out his phone. He set it on the desk face-down and then turned it over, which I understood a moment later was him deciding something.

"The Foundation has a phone account for this office," he said. "I'm on the board. I can see the activity. I just looked."

He turned the screen toward me.

One outgoing call, eleven minutes ago, placed from the landline on that desk. A local number with an exchange I didn't recognize.

"Preston used this room to make his call," Augustin said. "He wanted the number untraceable to his own phone. He didn't know I could see it."

He pressed a button. The phone rang once, twice, three times, and then a woman answered - crisp, warm, unhurried, the voice of somebody who has never once been rushed in her life.

"Preston," she said. "Tell me it's handled."

Augustin closed his eyes.

"Rosalind," he said.