The kitchen was very still. Outside, a truck went past on the two-lane road, and the sound faded, and did not come back.
"Tell me," Eleanor said. "All of it. Start at the beginning of that night."
Claire looked up, and her face was the face of a woman watching a dam she had tended for twenty-three years finally crack in front of her.
"I carried her out," she said. "She was five days old. There was smoke everywhere, and the alarms, and people shouting — and I carried her out of that building in my arms. And then I panicked. I panicked and I — "
She stopped. Her breathing was ragged. Marcus leaned forward slightly, the way he did when a witness reached the edge of what they could say standing up.
"And then what did you do with my daughter, Claire?" Eleanor asked.
And Claire Marsh, night nurse of Saint Anne's, sixty-six years old, living small and quiet at the end of a gravel driveway in Vermont, put her face in her arthritic hands and said, "I need to tell you the whole thing. You have to let me tell you the whole thing."
Chapter 12: The Night of the Fire
The words came out of Claire Marsh in the order they had waited twenty-three years to come out, which was no order at all at first — fragments, corrections, her hands moving as if she could shape the smoke back into the air of the kitchen.
"You have to understand what Saint Anne's was," she said. "Not the building. The arrangement."
She had worked the maternity ward nights for five years. She had liked nights — the ward quieter, the nursery humming with its warm machines — and she had been good at the small hours: the feeding, the charting, the rocking of infants who would not settle. She had never married then. The babies, in some unexamined way, had been enough.
"Dr. Voss ran the ward like it was his," she said. "Harlan Voss. He decided which mothers saw which social workers. He decided which charts got flagged. And after a while I started noticing — babies that were supposed to go to the state system didn't. The paperwork would say transferred, and there'd be a private agency name I'd never heard of, and the money — " She stopped. "I wasn't supposed to see the money. But the ward clerk and I shared a desk, and I saw an envelope once. Cash. Thousands. For a signature."
Eleanor sat very still across the table. Marcus had his notebook out but was not writing yet.
"It was a ring," Claire said. "That's the word for it, isn't it? He found women — young, alone, sometimes girls who'd been told their babies died, sometimes women who signed papers they didn't understand — and the babies went to private adoptions. Rich couples. No waiting lists, no questions. I told myself for a long time that the babies went to good homes, because I needed to keep working there."
She looked down at her mug. The coffee had gone cold.
"The night of the fire — March — I was on. Just after two in the morning the alarm went off, and then the smoke. It came up the service stairwell fast, black and chemical-smelling, not like anything I'd drilled for. The sprinklers in the east wing didn't catch. Later I learned they'd been — " She hesitated. "They'd been disabled. Someone knew the system."
The ward had filled with shouting. Claire had run for the bassinets with the others, and what she saw there she would never arrange into a clean memory: smoke rolling along the ceiling, heat on her face, and Voss — Dr. Voss, in the nursery at two in the morning, which made no sense — moving between the bassinets with an orderly she didn't recognize, lifting infants, wrapping them fast, carrying them toward the service stairs instead of the main evacuation route.
"They weren't evacuating them," Claire said, her voice thinning. "I saw it and I knew. He was using the fire. The records room was already burning — you could see the glow down the corridor — and he was taking the babies out through the chaos, and nobody would ever be able to say which infants had burned and which had walked out in someone's arms. The fire was going to erase everything. The charts, the transfer papers, the babies themselves. Whatever he wanted to be true would be true."
She had stood there with the five-day-old Whitmore infant in her arms — the bracelet still on her wrist — and watched Voss disappear down the service stairs with two more, and something in her had simply refused. Not a plan. A refusal. She turned the other way, toward the main stairs, toward the night air, and she ran.
"I didn't take her to sell her," she said again, fiercely, to Eleanor. "I took her because if I put her down, he would pick her up. I carried her out into the parking lot and the fire trucks were coming and people were screaming, and I just kept walking. I walked six blocks with her inside my coat. She was so small. She slept through all of it."
She couldn't take the baby home — her name was on the shift roster; they would come for her. She couldn't go to the police — who would believe a night nurse, and what would happen to the baby while the believing got sorted out? She thought of the church on the corner of the street where she'd walked, and the orphanage attached to it — Saint Mary's, the sisters, the door with the little sheltered alcove where, the old-timers said, women had left babies for a hundred years.
"I wrapped her in my own blanket," Claire whispered. "The one from my locker. It was all I had. I laid her in the alcove and I knocked — I knocked hard, twice — and I ran. I didn't leave a note. I didn't leave anything. I thought the sisters would find her in minutes. I thought I was saving her. I have told myself that every day for twenty-three years, and some days I almost believe it."
The silence in the kitchen was complete. The cat had gone back to sleep.
"Within the year, your husband found me," Claire said. "I never knew how. He came to my apartment — he didn't send anyone, he came himself — and he told me he knew I'd taken the Whitmore baby out of Saint Anne's. He said the official story was that she died in the fire, and that story was going to stand, because the alternative would destroy the family and the foundation both. He offered me money. Monthly. Through his lawyers. He said it was for my silence, and he didn't dress it up as anything else. I took it. I took it every month for twenty-three years. I told myself it was because I was afraid of him, and some of it was that — but some of it was that as long as he was paying me, somebody else knew. I wasn't the only one carrying it."
Eleanor had not moved for a long time. When she finally spoke, her voice sounded like it was coming from somewhere far away.
"He knew," she said. "Within a year. He knew she was alive, and he paid you to bury it, and he came home to me every night for twenty-three years and let me grieve a child who was living in South Boston."
"Claire," Eleanor said, and her voice was steady now, with something iron underneath it. "I need the name of every person you remember from that ward. And then I need you to tell me everything you know about Harlan Voss."
Chapter 13: Harlan Voss