"I know just the kind of person," he said.
Chapter 4: The Paper Trail
Silas called Walter Briggs from the kitchen table, the house too quiet around him.
"Walter. I need a name."
"A name for what?"
"A private investigator. An honest one."
A pause. "Well, that narrows it. Nadia Ferreira. She found my cousin's dog and my nephew's will, and she'll tell you to your face when you're the problem. Trust her like you'd trust me."
"That's not the reassurance you think it is," Silas said.
"It wasn't meant to be. What are you doing, Silas?"
"Something I should have done twelve years ago."
Ferreira Investigations occupied a second-floor office over a tax preparer on Eisenhower Drive, the air smelling of coffee and paper dust. The woman behind the desk was in her forties, dark hair pulled back, sleeves pushed up, eyes that did the arithmetic before you finished the sentence.
"Mr. Crane," she said, shaking his hand like she meant it. "You don't hire a private investigator unless someone's lying or someone's dead."
"Can it be both?" Silas asked.
She almost smiled. "Sit down. Tell me who's lying."
He told her the whole of it. The boy at St. Jude's Community Kitchen, thin as a broom handle, ladling soup for the other homeless folks because Thelma Wright let him earn his meals that way. The gold ring on a shoestring around his neck. The engraving inside the band, the one Silas had commissioned for Maggie's twenty-first birthday. The fight in 2013. The crash in 2014. And Mack Drayton's flat voice on the telephone that December: the baby didn't make it.
Nadia wrote nothing down. She just watched him.
"Mack Drayton," she said when he finished.
"You know him?"
"In Savannah, everybody in my trade knows Mack Drayton the way everybody at a racetrack knows the man selling tip sheets."
"Meaning?"
"Meaning the man retires whenever somebody pays him to retire. What else did he say?"
"Nothing else. A page of typed notes and a bill. I paid it and I put my daughter in the ground and I stopped asking questions because every question hurt."
Nadia set her pen down. "Here's what I tell every new client, Mr. Crane. I find what I find. If that baby is buried in Bonaventure, you get a grave you can visit and twelve years of grief to finish carrying. If he isn't buried anywhere, you get something worse. You get a reason to be angry. Are you sure you want this?"
"I've been sure of nothing for twelve years," Silas said. "That's the problem. Find me the truth, Ms. Ferreira."
"Then I'm hired?"
"You're hired."
"Then we start today," Nadia said. "Probate records close at four-thirty."
"You move fast," Silas said.
"Fast is all I do." She stood, already reaching for her keys.
"You want to start with the estate file," Nadia said twenty minutes later, climbing into her old sedan with Silas in the passenger seat. "Preston Vane was the executor of your daughter's estate, correct?"
"Yes. Maggie owned eighteen percent of Crane Atlantic. Preston said he'd handle everything so I could grieve." Silas looked at her. "You made a face when I said his name."
"I make that face for free," Nadia said. "Chatham County probate records. Let's go read your daughter's file."
The probate office smelled like the inside of a filing cabinet. Nadia, clearly a regular, nodded at the clerk like an old friend. She signed the request slip, paid the copy fee, and laid the file on a scarred wooden table: the will, the inventory of assets, and a single folded certificate on thin official paper.
"Baby Boy Reyes," she read. "Born November second, 2014. Died November twenty-eighth, 2014. Cause: complications following the motor vehicle accident of the same date."
Silas couldn't look at it for a moment. Then he made himself.
Nadia tapped the form with one finger. "See this line? Hospital of birth, code forty-four-oh-nine. St. Joseph's Hospital, where your daughter delivered, is coded forty-four-oh-one. I know that code cold, Mr. Crane. I pulled the county code directory on another case last year. Forty-four-oh-nine does not exist in Chatham County. It never did."
"It could be a clerk's error," Silas said, but his voice sounded far away. "A mistyped number."
"A clerk can mistype one digit," Nadia said. "A clerk does not invent a hospital." She turned the certificate over, then back. "Now look at the bottom. Witness to certification."
Silas read the signature and his mouth went dry.
"Preston Vane."
"Since when does a chief financial officer witness death certificates?" Nadia asked. She did not wait for an answer. "He wasn't a doctor. He wasn't a nurse. He wasn't in that hospital when the baby was born and he wasn't there when the baby died. He was the executor, and his name is on this paper like he was holding the clipboard. My instincts flare at that, Mr. Crane. They flare hard."
They sat in her sedan in the parking lot while the afternoon heat came off the asphalt in waves.
"I start with 2014," Nadia said. "The county vital records office. The funeral home that supposedly handled the burial. The burial permit. If that baby was buried, there is a permit with a name and a plot. Paper trails don't lie, even when people do."
"And if there is no permit?"
"Then we find the boy's uncle. Then we find Mack Drayton." She slid the certificate into her briefcase and locked it. "But first I run every line of this through the records. I want to know exactly how wrong it is."
Silas looked out at the live oaks and the hanging moss and felt it: the first crack in twelve years of certainty, a thin line running down the middle of everything he had told himself since that December phone call. He had believed Mack Drayton because believing him had let him stop asking.
Nadia started the car. Then she looked at him, sharp, no softening.