"You're my girl," Mabel said into her hair, and her voice shook. "Don't you let nobody tell you different. Nobody."
Driving back to Port Calloway with the fields blurring past, Nora kept hearing it. Not as comfort. As a warning. And she kept seeing Mabel's face when she'd set the photograph face-down — the way you'd cover something you couldn't bear to look at, or couldn't afford to let be seen.
Chapter 4
The Empty Nursery
Claire Beaumont had not slept through the night in twenty-four years. She told no one this — not her son, not her lawyer, not the foundation board, not the priest she'd stopped seeing in 2009. She ran a charitable foundation, sat on three boards, and maintained the Beaumont Hotels empire's public face with the discipline of a woman who had decided, at thirty-three, that grief would not be allowed to make her useless. Grief could have the hours between three and five in the morning. The rest of the day belonged to the living. But every night at 3 a.m., she woke — never gradually, always all at once, as if surfacing — and for one unguarded moment she reached for the small warm weight that wasn't there, her arms remembering what her mind had spent decades trying to forget, and then she got up and walked the halls of the cliff house until dawn came up gray over the water.
The nursery was at the end of the east wing, past Julian's old rooms, past the linen closets. She had kept it exactly as it was in March 2002 — the white crib with the yellow blanket folded over the rail, the yellow curtains, the mobile of wooden stars turning almost imperceptibly in the draft from the old windows. The housekeeper dusted it weekly under strict orders to move nothing, not a block, not a book. Julian, her son, had begged her to close it up when he was a teenager, standing in that doorway with his jaw set the way it still set when he was angry. "It's morbid, Mother." She had looked at him then with the flat calm she used for boardrooms. "It's mine. This room is mine."
Lillian. They had named her Lillian, after Claire's grandmother, a woman who'd crossed an ocean with a sewing machine and built the first Beaumont boarding house. Three days old, eight pounds, a star-shaped birthmark on her left wrist that the night nurse had cooed over. "Your little star," she'd said, touching it with one gloved finger. Claire remembered the weight of her — how impossibly light and impossibly heavy at once — the milky smell of her scalp, the way her tiny fingers had curled around Claire's thumb with surprising strength. She remembered the fire alarm at 2:14 a.m. — the shrill tearing sound, the evacuation, the chaos in the corridors smelling of smoke that turned out to be a trash can in a utility closet — the nurse saying "We'll bring the babies down, ma'am, stay with the group, stay with the group" — and she remembered the stairwell, the courtyard in the rain, the headcount under the floodlights, and the nurse's face going white, then gray, then gone.
They never found her. The police investigated for two years — detectives, psychics, America's Most Wanted, all of it. A nurse named Dora Quinn had been on duty that night and had resigned the following week and disappeared from every record they could find — but there was no evidence, no ransom note, no body, no trace. Just a baby, gone, in the space of seventeen minutes, into a rainy night. Claire's husband, Richard, had died of a heart attack four years later, and the doctors said stress, and Claire had never once doubted what kind of stress.
She had hired investigators for a decade. She had looked at a thousand children's wrists — in parks, in malls, once, shamefully, at a stranger's baby in a grocery line, until the mother threatened to call security. She had learned to stop telling people, because hope in other people's eyes curdled so quickly into pity, and pity was the one thing she could not survive.
And then, at Lumière, pouring her wine with the practiced grace of a girl who'd learned service the hard way, a young woman with tired eyes and a star on her wrist.
Julian found her in the nursery that Sunday evening, sitting in the rocking chair, the photograph of the baby in her lap — the same photograph she'd shown the waitress. He was thirty-one, handsome in the ruthless way of men who have never been told no twice, and he ran Beaumont Hotels with an efficiency that frightened the board and impressed the analysts. He stood in the doorway the way he had at sixteen, arms crossed, jaw set.
"Mother." A pause. "Ellis tells me you've hired a private investigator. And that you've been — visiting a restaurant. Repeatedly. The staff are talking."
Claire didn't look up from the photograph. "Her name is Nora Quinn. She's twenty-four. She has the mark, Julian. The exact mark, in the exact place."
"Millions of people have birthmarks."
"Not that one. Not there." She finally raised her eyes, and he took an involuntary step back at what was in them. "I know what you're going to say. Say it and be done."
He came in and sat on the edge of the crib, which creaked under his weight, the mobile of wooden stars turning above him. For a moment he looked seven years old again — the boy who'd asked where his sister went and been told a story about angels that neither of them believed, the boy who'd cried into his pillow for a month and then never cried again.
"If it's her," he said quietly, "everything changes. The trusts. The company. The foundation. You know that. The board knows that."
"I know," Claire said, "that I have not slept through the night in twenty-four years. Whatever it costs, Julian — whatever it costs, whoever it inconveniences — I am going to know. And if you try to stop me, you will learn what your mother is actually capable of."