Chapter 5 - THE GIRL IN VICTOR MARINO’S CAR
Celeste did not deny it.
We returned to Beacon Hill before midnight.
She was still in the mansion under Rourke’s supervision.
Adrian placed the photograph on the table.
“You took this.”
Celeste looked at it.
“Yes.”
I sat across from her.
“You were what? Fifteen?”
“Sixteen.”
“Why were you photographing Gabriel holding me?”
“My father told me to.”
There was shame in her voice.
Not fear this time.
Adrian remained standing.
“Explain.”
Celeste rubbed her palms together.
“When I was sixteen, my father drove me everywhere because my mother was recovering from surgery. I thought he was overprotective.”
She laughed once.
“I learned later he just didn’t want me home alone while men came to our house.”
“What men?” Adrian asked.
“Your father’s men. Accountants. People from St. Agnes.”
Eleanor sat near the fireplace.
She looked suddenly very old.
Celeste continued.
“One afternoon, my father took me to Dorchester. He parked across from the Bennett house.”
She looked at me.
“I saw you get off a school bus.”
I pictured sixteen-year-old Celeste.
Not the woman in the ballroom.
A teenage girl sitting beside Victor Marino while adults around her protected things she did not understand.
“My father handed me a camera.”
“Why you?” I asked.
“Because if anyone noticed us, a teenage girl taking pictures looked harmless.”
That was ugly in a different way.
Victor had used his daughter too.
“Gabriel arrived later,” she said. “He argued with Thomas. Then you came home.”
“And Gabriel held me?”
“Not at first.”
Thomas had never seen that moment.
Celeste explained.
I had apparently walked away from the porch after dropping my backpack.
Gabriel followed me to the sidewalk.
I had tripped on a broken curb.
He caught me.
For perhaps three seconds, he held my shoulders.
Celeste photographed it.
A father touching the daughter he had erased.
“What did Victor do with the picture?” Adrian asked.
“He kept it.”
“How did it end up in Thomas’s watch?”
“I don’t know.”
Eleanor spoke quietly.
“Margaret.”
We looked at her.
“She knew Victor had begun photographing Rachel.”
“How?”
“Victor bragged.”
Adrian’s mouth tightened.
Eleanor continued.
“He thought Margaret needed to understand that hiding a child didn’t mean the child was unreachable.”
A threat.
Not against me.
Against my mother.
“What happened on Harbor Road?” Adrian asked.
Celeste closed her eyes.
“I was in the car.”
Nobody spoke.
She looked at me.
“This is the part I’ve spent half my life trying not to remember.”
Adrian pulled out a chair.
“Then remember it once.”
Celeste sat.
“My father drove to Harbor Road just before two in the morning. He told me to stay down.”
“Why take you?”
“My mother had been admitted overnight again. He had nowhere else he trusted me.”
Human.
Terrible.
Plausible.
“I heard another car arrive. Margaret got out.”
Eleanor covered her mouth.
Celeste’s voice thinned.
“She had the red book.”
Adrian leaned forward.
“You saw it?”
“Red leather. She held it against her chest.”
“What did she want?”
“I couldn’t hear everything. The windows were up. But she said Rachel’s name.”
My name.
Not Adriana.
Rachel.
“She told my father she had changed her mind. She was going to expose everything.”
“What everything?” I asked.
“St. Agnes. The false birth record. The trust. Payments my father had made.”
“And Gabriel?”
Celeste looked at Adrian.
“Margaret said she had given him one last chance.”
Adrian did not react.
“What did Victor say?”
“That if she exposed him, Gabriel would fall too.”
Eleanor whispered, “That was true.”
Celeste nodded.
“Your father had signed the transfer. He had allowed Victor to create the false death certificate.”
The room was silent.
This was the reversal I had not wanted.
Gabriel had not been tricked into the lie.
He had begun it.
Victor had simply learned how useful the lie could become.
“What happened next?” Adrian asked.
“My father took the book.”
“How?”
“They fought over it.”
“Physically?”
“No. Margaret gave it to him.”
Adrian frowned.
“Why?”
Celeste stared at the tabletop.
“Because he promised to bring it directly to Gabriel.”
Eleanor made a broken sound.
Celeste nodded.
“She still believed Gabriel would choose his children over the secret.”
“And did Victor bring it to him?”
“Yes.”
“You saw that?”
“No. My father told me years later.”
Adrian walked toward the window.
“So Margaret left Harbor Road without the book.”
“Yes.”
“And died afterward.”
Celeste’s breathing changed.
“That isn’t all.”
Of course it wasn’t.
“What?” I asked.
“My father followed her.”
Eleanor stood.
“Why?”
“He said he needed to make sure she went home.”
“You believed that?” Adrian asked.
“I was sixteen.”
He stopped.
That landed.
Celeste’s voice broke.
“Her car turned onto Memorial Drive. My father accelerated.”
I could hear the road in my head.
Wet pavement.
Headlights.
Boston after midnight.
“She noticed us,” Celeste said. “She sped up.”
Adrian went still.
“She was afraid.”
“Yes.”
“What happened?”
“Margaret missed the curve.”
Eleanor whispered a prayer.
Celeste was crying now.
“Her car hit the barrier.”
“Did Victor hit her car?”
“No.”
“Did he force her off the road?”
“I don’t know.”
“You were there.”
“I was on the floor of the passenger side because my father screamed at me to get down.”
Her hands shook.
“When we stopped, he got out.”
“Did he help her?”
“He ran to the car.”
“And?”
Celeste looked at Adrian.
“He came back carrying her purse.”
The room seemed to contract.
“He stole from a dying woman?”
“He said he was protecting everyone.”
Adrian laughed once without humor.
“Men like Victor always say that.”
Celeste stared at him.
“So did Gabriel.”
Adrian’s face changed.
“What?”
“My father called Gabriel from a gas station twenty minutes later.”
No mysterious current phone call. An old one.
“What did he say?”
“That Margaret had crashed.”
“And my father?”
Celeste hesitated.
“He asked one question.”
Adrian’s voice became almost a whisper.
“What question?”
“Did she still have the red book?”
No one moved.
Not Was she alive?
Not Where is she?
The book.
Adrian looked away.
For the first time since I had known him, he seemed less dangerous than hurt.
I understood why Eleanor had begged us not to open Room Fourteen.
Some truths did not free people immediately.
First they wounded them.
Celeste wiped her eyes.
“My father told him no. Then Gabriel said…”
She stopped.
“Say it.”
Celeste looked directly at Adrian.
“He said, ‘Then leave the girl where she is.’”
I felt my stomach turn.
The girl.
Me.
Adrian gripped the back of a chair.
Eleanor spoke quickly.
“Gabriel changed his mind later.”
“How many years later?” I asked.
She had no answer.
Celeste reached into her purse.
“There’s one more thing.”
She removed a folded sheet of red leather.
Not paper.
A torn book cover.
Stamped inside were faint gold letters.
M.D.
Margaret DeLuca.
Adrian stared at it.
“You said the book was inside the piano.”
“It was.”
“Then why do you have part of the cover?”
“Because someone cut it apart.”
“When?”
“Three weeks ago.”
The engagement gala had been planned for months.
Eleanor looked confused.
Celeste handed Adrian the piece.
On its inside surface, written in fresh black ink, was a message.
Not Margaret’s handwriting.
I recognized it.
So did Adrian.
I had seen that handwriting on household instructions for fourteen months.
Michael Rourke’s.
The head of security.
Four words.
ROOM 14 IS NOT EMPTY.
We all turned toward the hallway.
May you like
Rourke was no longer standing outside.
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