Chapter 4 - THE DOCTOR WHO DECLARED A LIVING GIRL DEAD
Dr. Helen Ward was seventy-four.
Retired.
Widowed.
Living in Brooklyn Heights in an apartment filled with books and terrible paintings.
I did not break in.
I did not threaten her.
Growth.
Gabriel called first.
Told her Nora Bell was alive and asking questions.
Helen went silent for almost half a minute.
Then said,
“I wondered how long I had left.”
Not reassuring.
Theo—no, Gabriel. Keep continuity. Gabriel accompanied me.
Helen opened the door herself.
She looked at me once.
Then closed her eyes.
“Victor’s boy.”
“I’m thirty-six.”
“To me you are still seventeen and bleeding on my kitchen floor.”
Another memory moved.
A woman stitching my arm.
Adrian pacing.
Nora crying.
I had forgotten Helen too.
Maybe trauma did not erase memories.
Maybe it scattered them until you stopped trusting the pieces.
We sat.
I placed Nora’s death certificate on her table.
Helen did not touch it.
“You signed this.”
“Yes.”
“She wasn’t dead.”
“No.”
“Why?”
Helen looked toward the window.
“Because Malcolm Rourke believed she was.”
“That is not an answer.”
“It is the reason.”
She told us the apartment fire had been real.
An abandoned apartment building outside Milwaukee.
One unidentified female body was recovered after the fire.
Too damaged for visual identification.
Adrian arranged for dental records to be substituted.
Helen signed the identification.
Nora Bell died on paper.
The actual victim remained unidentified for years.
I felt sick.
“You used another dead woman.”
Helen’s eyes filled.
“Yes.”
“Did her family ever know?”
“No.”
“That bothers you?”
“Every day.”
Good.
It should.
“So Adrian ordered it.”
“Yes.”
“To protect Nora?”
“Yes.”
“From Rourke?”
Helen looked at me.
“From Rourke and from you.”
I leaned forward.
“Careful.”
“You were seventeen, furious, and already surrounded by men telling you vengeance was manhood.”
She did not blink.
“If Adrian had told you Nora survived, what would you have done?”
Found her.
Killed anyone in the way.
Probably gotten her killed.
I hated that Helen knew the answer.
“So he decided for me.”
“Yes.”
“And for her.”
“Yes.”
“Did Nora agree?”
“To the new identity.”
“Did she agree never to speak to me again?”
Helen’s face changed.
“No.”
I sat back.
There it was.
“Adrian told her I would die if she contacted me.”
“Yes.”
“What did he tell me?”
Helen whispered,
“That she had chosen to run.”
My jaw locked.
Nineteen years of anger toward a seventeen-year-old girl built on a lie told by the man who raised me afterward.
Gabriel remained very still.
He knew what Adrian meant to me.
“What happened to Thomas Bell?” I asked.
Helen’s eyes lowered.
“Nora’s father helped create the false death.”
“And afterward?”
“He disappeared.”
“Nora said that.”
“You know more.”
“Yes.”
Of course.
“Where is he?”
“Dead.”
“How?”
Helen looked at me.
“Malcolm found him.”
The room cooled.
“When?”
“Seven months after Nora’s false death.”
“Who told you?”
“Adrian.”
“Did he see the body?”
“Yes.”
“Cause?”
“Gunshot.”
I looked down at the certificate.
Another father.
Another daughter.
Another body pushed behind a lie.
“Why didn’t Adrian kill Rourke?”
Helen almost smiled.
“You assume he didn’t try.”
That sounded like my family.
“What happened?”
“Rourke had insurance.”
“Meaning?”
“Evidence.”
Names.
Payments.
Police.
Judges.
Freight.
If Rourke died, copies went out.
Victor had built something similar.
Mutual blackmail.
A system in which everyone survived because everyone could destroy everyone else.
It sounded less like organized crime than government bureaucracy with guns.
“What changed now?” Gabriel asked.
Helen looked at me.
“If Rourke found Nora, he found the truck.”
“He hasn’t.”
“Then that is why she is alive.”
Good point.
I placed the photograph of the black sedan on Helen’s table.
She stared.
“Do you recognize the plate?”
“No.”
“The face?”
Gabriel had enhanced the image.
A man in his late fifties.
Gray hair.
Scar near the left collar.
Helen’s face drained.
“Malcolm.”
The man I shot at seventeen.
Alive.
Watching the alley.
I stood.
“Where is Adrian?”
Gabriel answered.
“Westchester.”
“I know where he lives.”
Helen stood too.
“Ethan.”
“What?”
“Do not go there believing he killed Victor.”
I turned.
“Did he?”
“No.”
The word came without hesitation.
“How do you know?”
“Because Victor died in my arms.”
Every thought stopped.
“You were at the warehouse.”
“Yes.”
“After?”
“Adrian brought him to me.”
I could barely speak.
“What did Dad say?”
Helen’s eyes filled.
“He said three things.”
I waited.
“Get Ethan out.”
My throat tightened.
“Keep Nora alive.”
She swallowed.
“And?”
Helen looked toward the Saint Christopher medal hanging from my fingers.
“Trust Adrian until the watch stops.”
I frowned.
“What watch?”
Helen looked surprised.
“You don’t have it?”
“No.”
She sat back slowly.
“Then Adrian kept the one thing Victor told him to give you.”
My father’s pocket watch.
The gold one he carried every day.
The watch that disappeared the night he died.
Helen looked at me.
“Before you accuse your uncle of murder…”
Her voice became quiet.
“…ask why Victor broke his own watch at 11:42.”
Official records put my father’s death at 11:17.
Twenty-five minutes before the time Helen said he was still alive.
Somebody had falsified more than Nora’s death.
May you like
They had changed my father’s too.
And the only man who possessed the broken watch was the uncle who had spent nineteen years telling me the wrong story.
