Chapter 9

We met in a room at the Santa Lucia police department that smelled like carpet cleaner and cold coffee. A detective named Ocampo, Nadia Fenn, me. Augustin came in a wheelchair pushed by a nurse, because Nadia had called the doctor and the doctor had said no, and Augustin had said he was going anyway.

The envelope was in a clear plastic sleeve. It had been slit open forty minutes earlier by the evidence clerk.

Nadia read it out loud because Augustin's hands were shaking and mine were too.

It was four pages, handwritten, in the English my mother learned from a correspondence course and a decade of cleaning houses. Misspellings everywhere. Every one of them felt like her.

Father. I am writing to you because I have no one and I will not be alive to explain this. I am going to take the child tonight and I want someone in the world to know why, in case I am caught and in case I am killed.

I work at the office of the Foundation. I was hired by Miss Rosalind. In June I was told to go to the house and help with the little girl, and I did, and I love her. She is not my daughter but I love her.

On the 30 of September I was in the east hall with the sheets and I heard Miss Rosalind in the library with a man who comes to the office. She said the girl was the only thing in the way. She said to wait until the ground is soft. She said make sure it is the water and not the house.

I heard her say a name for me too, Father. She said the nanny is not a problem, she cannot read well enough to be a problem.

I did not go to the police because who am I against her. I did not tell Mr. Rourke because she is his sister and he is a sick man and I did not know if he was part of it. So I took the baby. I took the yellow blanket because she does not sleep without it. I have done a terrible thing and I have done it for a good reason and I will spend my whole life paying.

If you are reading this, she is alive. Her name is Celia. Tell no one the name she has now.

The room was completely silent for a while.

Augustin Rourke put his face in his hands.

I want to tell you what I felt and I can't, exactly. It was rage and it was not rage. It was thirty-five years of a life built on a lie that had been told by a frightened young woman who couldn't read English well enough to know she'd even been caught listening.

"You need to know the rest," Nadia said quietly. "We have the trust documents."

She laid them out.

The Rourke Family Trust, 1961, amended twice. Augustin's father had structured it so that the family's income - not the principal - flowed to Augustin's lineal descendants. Rosalind received a substantial yearly allowance, and had for decades, tied to her role at the Foundation.

The foundation she chaired.

And then the codicil: if Augustin died without living lineal descendants, the residual estate passed to the Rourke Maritime Foundation, whose board chair would appoint her successor.

"She doesn't kill the girl," Augustin said slowly, from the wheelchair, not looking up. "If Celia is dead, there's a death certificate, there's an investigation, and there's me. I'd have remarried. I'd have chased it forever."

"Alive and gone," I said, "keeps you exactly where she left you."

He nodded. His mouth was trembling.

"Grieving. Frozen. Never remarrying. Never asking the hard questions, because I couldn't afford to lose the hope." He finally looked up. "I gave that woman thirty-five years of giving her everything she asked for, because she was the only one who would sit with me in it."

Rosalind Rourke Ainsley was arrested at her home on a Tuesday morning.

She came out in the silver bob and the pearls, and she walked to the car without a coat and without a word. The charge was kidnapping conspiracy, and conspiracy to commit murder, and twenty-two counts of fraud and forgery and obstruction for the payments and the letter and the rest of what Nadia dug out of the Foundation's books over the next six months.

She never confessed.

But when they brought Preston Hale in two hours later, Preston did.

He had been nineteen years old when his mother called him from a payphone in Barstow and told him what she had done. He hadn't believed her. He was thirty-two when she told him the rest, the part about the library and the east hall, and he believed that. And then he had taken her silence and turned it into a security contract.

He sat in an interview room in the same linen jacket, gray-faced, and said, "She told me if I ever moved her, it would start the clock. So I didn't move her. I gave her a job and I watched her and I told myself I was keeping her safe." He kept rolling a paper cup between his palms. "I pried the eye out myself to get her off the pier before Augustin got there. That's how much I was still doing my job."