"One more question," Bell said, walking her to the stairs. "Why now? After twenty-three years."
"Because she's alive," Eleanor said. "And I want to know how a living child became a dead one on paper."
* * *
Nine days later he called her to come back. The legal pad was full now, the pages covered in his blocky handwriting, and there was a manila folder on the desk between them, thin enough to be disappointing.
"Three dead," Bell said, without preamble. "March 14, 2003. Saint Anne's Hospital, maternity and neonatal wing, third floor. Fire reported at 2:47 a.m., contained by 4:10. Your daughter, Grace Whitmore, five days old. A nurse — Margaret Ellison, forty-one. And an infant boy, unnamed in the report, listed as 'Baby Boy Doe,' parents unknown."
Eleanor gripped the arms of the chair. "An unnamed infant."
"That's what it says." Bell opened the folder. "Cause of fire: ruled electrical. Faulty wiring in a utility closet on the third floor. Investigation closed —" He looked up. "Eleven days later. March 25."
The room was very quiet. Downstairs, someone was running a saw.
"Mrs. Whitmore," Bell said carefully, "I've worked arson for the Boston PD for nineteen years. A hospital fire that kills three people — a nurse and two newborns — does not close in eleven days. Not in 2003, not ever. You'd have the fire marshal, the state, the hospital's insurers, the families' lawyers. Eleven days is not an investigation. Eleven days is a signature."
"Whose signature."
"That's what I'm going to find out." He turned a page on the pad. "But I want you to understand something before I go further. Fires that close this fast usually close because someone with standing asked them to. Someone the investigators couldn't say no to. A trustee. A donor. Someone whose foundation writes the checks that keep the investigators' budgets alive."
Eleanor felt the blood leave her face. "My husband is a trustee of the hospital foundation."
"I know." Bell said it without emphasis, which made it worse. "I looked that up before you got here. Richard Whitmore, board of trustees, Saint Anne's Hospital Foundation, 1998 to present. Which means I'm going to be asking questions about your husband, and I need to know now whether you want me to stop at the edge of that or go through it."
She thought of Richard's breathing in the dark, shallow and alert. She thought of his hand on her back at the cremation, guiding her away from an urn she had not been allowed to see filled. She thought of twenty-three years of closed doors in her own house.
"Go through it," she said.
Bell nodded and made a note. "Then here's my honest assessment, and you don't have to like it. Somebody wanted that fire to be electrical and over. Somebody wanted three death certificates and no questions. Whether that somebody is your husband or somebody your husband was protecting, I don't know yet. But the paper is thin because someone made it thin."
"What do I do."
"Nothing." He closed the folder. "You live your life, you see that girl — Emily — and you let me pull the thread. These things have a way of looking like one thing for a long time and then looking like another thing all at once." He walked her to the stairs again. "And Mrs. Whitmore — don't tell your husband you hired me. Not yet."
She drove home through the late-afternoon light, the Charles glittering to her left, and parked in front of the townhouse and sat in the car for a long time with the engine off. Inside, Richard would be in his study, reading the foundation's quarterly reports, the picture of a man with nothing to hide. She thought of the urn, small and dark, on the mantel for a year before she'd asked him to put it away. She thought of the stone in Mount Auburn with a name on it and nothing under it — she was suddenly, coldly certain there was nothing under it — and she put her forehead against the steering wheel and breathed until the shaking stopped.
Then she went inside, kissed her husband's cheek, asked about his day, and began — for the first time in twenty-three years of marriage — to keep a secret from him.
Chapter 8: Agnes
The house in South Boston was blue-gray, the shutters in need of paint, and Eleanor stood on the narrow front step with Emily beside her and felt the particular shame of arriving somewhere with clean hands. Emily knocked — her key unused in her pocket, a small courtesy Eleanor registered — and the door opened on a woman of seventy-four with white hair pinned up and eyes the color of wet slate.
"Mrs. Doyle," Emily said. "This is Eleanor Whitmore."
"Come in," Agnes said. "There's tea."
The front room was small and crowded with things that had been kept: a piano with a doily, mismatched framed photographs, a refrigerator papered with crayon drawings of a church spire visible through the kitchen doorway. Eleanor perched on an armchair's edge and accepted tea she didn't want and tried not to look like a woman conducting an inspection. She was failing; she could feel Agnes watching her the way a nurse watches a patient — kindly, missing nothing.
"Emily tells me the test came back," Agnes said.
"Yes." Eleanor set the cup down. "Ninety-nine point nine nine percent."
Agnes nodded slowly. "Well. That's a number."
"I wanted to meet you," Eleanor said, "because you raised her. Whatever I am to Emily — biologically, legally — you are the one who did the work. I didn't want to proceed as if that weren't true."
Agnes studied her for a moment. "You're a polite woman, Mrs. Whitmore. Drink your tea before it goes cold."