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Henry was starting grad school in the fall, having graduated top of his class at MIT. He’d pursue a master’s in computer engineering at Columbia University nights, while working at a startup cybersecurity company during the day.
“I want him to know who he is,” Henry said, in their tiny Riverside walk-up. The windows had been open, sun streaming. The place wasn’t huge; the neighborhood wasn’t great. But it was theirs and they loved it.
“Or her.”
“Or her,” he agreed.
Piper moved over to him, took his hands and placed them on her middle. “He’ll know, or she’ll know, because of us. Because of who we are.”
She was right. Of course, she was. But when he looked back into his past, it was as vast and as mysterious as it was when he looked up into the stars. The mind boggled at infinity. The infinite possibilities of where he’d come from, from whom. Who Alice had been. Those strange, buried memories that surfaced in dreams. Piper had grandparents, aunts and uncles, stories of where people came from, how they’d made their way through the world. She could give all of that to their baby, a history, origins. Henry had nothing but questions, a dark mystery to be solved.
He started to move out of the car, prepared to walk up the driveway lined with pretty perennials, knock on the red door. He was expected. But he sank back, heart thudding.
He gave himself another moment, thinking of his last talk with Detective West.
So many years later the detective still hadn’t closed Alice’s case.
The old cop was a year from retirement now, but still at it. He was nursing a theory about some guy who might have followed Henry and Alice from Tucson. Tom Watson, the son of Faith Watson, the woman for whom Alice had worked as a caregiver.
“Based on the information you gave me, and the new information I got from your aunt, when I was in Tucson on vacation, I was able to track down the family of Alice’s old employer,” said West.
Alice it seemed had stolen money from Ms. Watson; Tom, according to his sister, had suspected that Alice might have been responsible for the old woman’s death—an error with her medication. Maybe an accident. Maybe not.
Henry had felt a twinge of guilt. West, a stranger to Alice was using his vacation time to hunt Alice’s killer, while Henry had been doing everything he could to tamp down thoughts of her—burying himself in his studies, taking the train to see Piper on Friday nights, partying with her in the West Village all weekend, working nights in the school’s bursar’s office, digitizing records. Those years were good ones; he was so busy that he rarely thought about anything but what was right in front of him.
But Detective West hadn’t forgotten.
“Faith Watson’s daughter, Corinne, said that her brother, Tom, thought Alice tweaked the dosage on the old lady’s meds, then cleared out her accounts. But Tom was a bit of shady character—some drugs, perpetually unemployed. Corinne didn’t believe him, in fact, she’d suspected that Tom and Alice were involved.”
“That sounds like a pretty big lead.”
“Did you ever see her with a man in Tucson?”
Henry searched his memory. Maybe there was someone? A bearded man, smiling and holding a bouquet of wildflowers. There had been men, here and there. No one who’d made a lasting impression.
“Tom admitted to tracking Alice down, but said he never hurt her. Just asked for the money back. Said in exchange he wouldn’t tell the police what she’d done.”
“If he thought Alice killed his mother and took her money, why wouldn’t he call the police?”
The old man cleared his throat. In the background, Henry had heard the noises of the busy police station. He glanced at his watch, a gift from Piper’s parents on graduation. He had the urge to cut the conversation short. He’d been running late for work, and honestly he hadn’t wanted to talk about Alice.
“Good question. I wondered the same. But—there wasn’t any real evidence. Just his suspicions. Honestly, it didn’t seem like Tom cared that much about his mother or how she’d died. I think all he really cared about was the money.”
“How much?”
“About five thousand.”
“Did Alice have that? Did she give it to him?”
“He says no. As far as I found, your mother didn’t have a bank account. Unless she had one under another name. She didn’t even have a credit card. Maybe she had a stash of cash somewhere.”
“There was always money for whatever,” said Henry, remembering. “But I never found anything when we cleaned out the apartment.”
“So maybe the person who killed Alice took that money.”
Henry had turned the information around in his head, trying to fit this knowledge into the fractured pieces of his memory. It did make a kind of sense. They left places in the middle of the night. Alice always seemed to be in flight, looking over her shoulder. If she’d been taking money from people then fleeing, it made sense that she’d be worried someone would come after her.
So probably it was this guy Tom Watson. He’d killed her, taken whatever money she’d had. Or what if she ripped off other people in other places? Had someone finally caught up with her, just as she’d feared?
