Part 2: The Missing Page
I stared at him, unwilling to accept such a vague answer. Richard eventually conceded that he, my mother, and Nora Bell all believed the baby had survived, which meant the three of them had known about the missing child for years.
“What happened at Vale Harbor?”
Richard explained that Vale Harbor had been far more than his family’s home. The sprawling estate held offices, docks, and archives where his father stored contracts, financial records, and information that powerful people never wanted anyone else to find.
My mother had worked there in finance and eventually noticed suspicious transactions concealed behind false identities and secret trusts. Among those records were medical documents and transfers linked to adoptions, and that discovery had pulled her toward something far more dangerous.
“She found something, didn’t she?”
“Yes. Something connected to sealed records and a missing child.”
Elise Morgan had access to restricted archives, while my mother and Nora helped her secretly copy documents. Together they had been trying to uncover what Richard’s father was hiding, though Richard claimed he learned of their investigation only after the situation had already turned dangerous.
I looked again at my mother’s unfinished letter. The missing page suddenly mattered more than anything else, because Richard admitted it held names, a location, and my mother’s theory about what had become of Elise’s baby.
“So you tore it out.”
“I removed it because I thought it would protect you.”
“Michael said the same thing.”
Richard visibly flinched and made no attempt to defend himself. When I demanded the missing page, he reached inside his coat, but instead of pulling out a document, he pressed a small brass key tied to an old blue ribbon into my palm.
“The page is inside a vault in Boulder. Everything else is there too.”
“Why didn’t you bring it here?”
“Because I don’t trust whoever is watching us.”
Richard explained that Ashley should never have been able to reach me, since access to my hospital room had been tightly restricted. Only a handful of people could override those protections, and Michael didn’t have enough influence to do it alone.
“Then someone helped him.”
“Yes.”
“Someone from your family?”
Richard didn’t answer. He didn’t need to, because his silence confirmed the possibility that Michael and Ashley were only pieces of something much bigger, and that the secrets buried at Vale Harbor had already crept into my hospital room.
* * *
Before Richard or I could say another word about the people who might be helping Michael, someone knocked on the hospital room door. The sudden sound sent pain flaring through my injured ribs, and Richard instantly stepped between my bed and the entrance, as though he expected whoever was hunting us to walk right in.
Detective Marisol Grant came in with a thick folder tucked under one arm. Her eyes moved from Richard to the torn letter in my hands, and the tension in her face told me she had arrived with news that could make everything worse.
“I have updates.”
“No. You have timing.”
Grant closed the door behind her before turning back to us. She hesitated only briefly, but it was long enough for me to realize that whatever she was about to say had already changed the investigation.
“Michael Carter is missing.”
Richard straightened at once.
“Since when?”
“He was supposed to come in for questioning today. He never appeared. His attorney claims he’s emotionally unstable, his phone has been turned off, and his car was found abandoned near Denver International Airport.”
My breathing turned shallow as I tried to absorb it. Michael had already tried to dress up my death as an accident, and now that I had survived, vanishing was exactly what I should have expected from him.
“He left?”
“We don’t know that yet.”
“And Ashley?”
“She disappeared too.”
For several seconds, nobody spoke. I thought back to the call Ashley had made to me earlier, especially her warning about Michael and the questions she had raised about my mother’s file.
“She called me.”
Grant’s attention snapped to me.
“When?”
“Tonight.”
“What did she say?”
“She said Michael was running. She also mentioned my mother’s file.”
Grant frowned and immediately asked whether Ashley had named whoever had helped Michael get hold of information he should never have been able to reach. Before I could reply, Richard stepped forward, voicing the same suspicion that had been growing in me.
“No. But someone obviously did.”
Grant opened the folder and laid a photograph across my blanket. Michael stood beside Arthur Voss at a private airfield, but it was the person behind them who made my stomach clench. Nora Bell was there too, clutching a blue notebook against her chest.
