They gathered the papers in silence, but the quiet had changed. It was no longer the quiet of two strangers sharing a table. It was the quiet of two women who had just been handed the same thread, and both knew exactly where it led.
Chapter 8: Dr. Lang
The investigator Susan Park had hired got them an address by eight that morning, and by eleven Catherine and Nora were driving north along the coast, the road winding between pale dunes and gray water. The town was called Greyport. Dr. Peter Lang lived in a white clapboard house on a bluff at the end of a narrow lane, a blue door that faced the sea.
Nora parked and sat with her hands on the wheel. "He's seventy-two," she said. "Retired. Maybe he just wants to be left alone."
"He can tell us that himself," Catherine said. The locket sat heavy in her coat pocket. "Come on."
The man who answered her knock was thin and stooped, his white hair careful, his eyes widening as they moved from Nora's face to Catherine's. He knew her. Catherine filed that away.
"Dr. Lang? My name is Catherine Marlowe. This is Nora Fields. You were my obstetrician at Saint Anne's Hospital twenty-three years ago."
"I don't see patients anymore," he said quickly. Too quickly. His hand tightened on the door.
"We're not here for a checkup," Nora said. "We're here about a nursery fire."
Lang's gaze flicked down the lane, as if checking for company, and Catherine watched the movement with the same still attention she used in boardrooms. He was afraid, and already deciding what to say.
"I think you've come to the wrong house," he said.
"No," Catherine said. "It's cold out here, and what I want to ask won't take long. May we come in?"
Then he stepped back, reluctantly, and let them into a dim front room that smelled of tea and old paper. Photographs crowded the mantel: a younger Lang in a white coat, a family.
"Sit, if you like," he said, and did not sit himself. He stood near the fireplace with his hands behind his back, the posture of a man holding himself together.
Catherine stayed standing. "Twenty-three years ago, I gave birth at Saint Anne's. That night there was a fire in the nursery wing, and I was told my daughter died." Her voice was level, every word placed. "The birth register is missing exactly four pages. You filed the fire report, not the administrator. The death certificate was signed eleven days before the burial permit." She paused. "That isn't records getting lost, Dr. Lang. That's something."
Lang's mouth worked without sound. "Hospitals merge. Things get filed wrong. It was a long time ago."
"Your name is on everything that remains," Catherine said. "The woman in your archives told us you handled everything that night. So I am asking you directly: what did you handle?"
Nora had drifted to the photographs. "Nice family," she said, without warmth. "Mine got left at an orphanage with a blanket and no name. Saint Mary's. You ever hear of that place, Doctor?"
Lang turned toward her, and his face showed the moment before a man decides to run. "I delivered hundreds of babies," he said. "I can't be expected to remember every one."
"You can't," Nora said, "or you won't?"
"I don't know what you want me to say." His eyes went to the window, to the road: he was not looking for an escape, he was looking for watchers.
"Doctor," she said quietly, "who are you afraid of?"
"You should go. Both of you. Some things are safer buried."
Nora laughed once, short and disbelieving. "Safer," she said. "Safer for who? Not for me. Not for her." She tipped her head at Catherine. "I spent eighteen years in a system that chewed me up. Where was my safe?"
"I am sorry for that," Lang said, and meant it, which was worse. "But I cannot help you."
Catherine reached into her coat pocket and took out the silver locket. She held it up, and Lang stared at it as if she had drawn a weapon.
"My husband," she said, watching his face, "is Theodore Marlowe."
The change was instantaneous. The color left his cheeks. His hands, behind his back, began to tremble, and he pressed them harder against the mantelpiece as if the wood could hold him upright.
"Whatever hold he has over you," Catherine said, "it ends when the truth comes out. It will come out. It is already coming out. The only choice left is whether you stand on the side of it or under it."
Lang's throat moved. For one terrible second she thought he might speak. Then his eyes slid away, back to the window, back to the road, and the moment closed like a door.
"I want you to leave now," he said. His voice had gone flat and old. "If you come back, I will not open the door."
Nora opened her mouth, and Catherine touched her arm. "It's all right," she said softly. "We're done here."
At the car Nora stopped and looked back at the thin figure still standing in the doorway watching them go.
"He's terrified," she said. "Not guilty-terrified. Caught-terrified."
"Yes," Catherine said. She gripped the wheel until her hands steadied. "And did you notice what frightened him? Not the records. Not us."
"Your husband's name," Nora said. "The second you said Theodore, he looked like he'd seen a ghost."
Catherine pulled onto the lane and drove toward the harbor without seeing it. Twenty-three years of marriage, and she had always known what Theodore was capable of. She had never seen his name used as a threat, and watched it work.
"He knows everything," she said. "He knows what happened that night, and he has been afraid of Theodore for twenty-three years. That is why he won't talk."
Nora was quiet a long moment. "We'll find a way to make him talk." She sounded sure.
Catherine looked at the road ahead, gray and empty. "Yes," she said. "We will."
They drove south with nothing but the certainty that Dr. Peter Lang was hiding something, and that the something was large enough to frighten a seventy-two-year-old man into silence.
Chapter 9: Nurse Ada
The investigator Susan Park hired was a man named Lowell who worked mostly by telephone. He found Ada Kowalski in four days: a brick duplex on a side street in Ridgefield, retired from Saint Anne's for nine years, a widow with a pension and a garden she no longer kept up. Lowell reported all of this in a voicemail Catherine played three times in the car.
Nora drove. She had insisted on coming, and Catherine had not argued.
They knocked, and the woman who opened the door was small and pale, her white hair pinned back neatly, her eyes moving from Catherine's face to Nora's and back again. Something passed across her expression at the sight of them, too fast to read.
"Mrs. Kowalski," Catherine said. "I am Catherine Marlowe. This is Nora Fields. May we come in for a few minutes."
Ada stepped back without a word and let them enter. The living room smelled of lemon cleaner and old paper. Photographs lined the mantel: children, grandchildren, a young woman in a nurse's cap standing before the doors of Saint Anne's Hospital.
"Please sit," Ada said. She did not offer tea. "I do not give interviews. Whatever happened at that hospital, I have nothing to add."