Chapter 5 - TWO WOMEN AT THE LAKE
Richard survived the medical emergency, but the doctors warned Victoria that another episode could be fatal. She spent the night in a chair outside his room, staring at the unfinished sentence in the notebook she'd photographed before the nurses took him away.
She was not alone. There was a—
A what? A witness? A second boat? Another woman?
At four in the morning she called her sister's phone again. It went straight to voicemail. Emily's recorded greeting sounded cheerfully ordinary: Sorry I missed you. Leave a message, and if it's urgent, text me twice. Victoria had texted fifty-seven times. The messages remained undelivered.
“I'm going to find you,” she whispered to the recording. “I don't know how yet, but I will.”
At dawn, Detective Torres arrived with coffee and an exhausted expression. Her team had located the street sign from Emily's photograph: Harbor Lane, in an industrial district near Red Hook. Officers had searched three warehouses. All were empty, except for discarded food containers and a fresh length of chain that might have been used to secure a door.
“The photograph was taken there,” Torres said. “We found the same four-pane window. She was moved before we arrived.”
“Someone knows what you're doing.”
“Possibly. That's why we're limiting access to the investigation.”
Victoria showed her Richard's notebook. Torres read it and called for the original boating investigation report. The files revealed a detail that had barely been noted thirteen years earlier: three witnesses reported hearing a second engine near the Belle shortly before it disappeared. The investigating officer concluded that sound had traveled across the lake from another vessel farther away.
“Who was the investigating officer?” Victoria asked.
“Retired Sergeant Frank Delaney.”
“Can we speak with him?”
“We already requested an interview. He hasn't returned the call.”
The detective paused. “There's something else. Alexander's father, Howard Whitmore, died six years ago. His estate records mention a payment to a private maritime salvage company on the day after your mother's accident.”
“Could they have been searching for her?”
“Maybe. But the payment was hidden under a consulting invoice. We're tracing it.”
Victoria remembered Catherine teaching the girls to swim at Bellmont. She had always insisted that life jackets were nonnegotiable, even for a ten-minute ride. The thought that her mother had been injured and left to die while someone arranged invoices made anger rise in her throat.
Later that morning, Ben called. He had found something under the greenhouse floor: an old metal box that Emily had apparently hidden behind a loose tile. Inside were photographs of a woman in a blue dress entering the estate service elevator, and a handwritten list of appointments with a private investigator named Mara Chen.
Victoria met Ben at the greenhouse. The photographs were recent, their timestamps from the week before the wedding. The woman had Emily's hair and build, but one image caught her face in profile. She was older than Emily, perhaps in her late forties, with the same distinctive cleft in her chin as Catherine.
Victoria held the print near the light. “That can't be.”
Ben stood silently beside her.
“Mom would be fifty-four now,” Victoria said. “This woman doesn't look fifty-four.”
“People age differently,” Ben replied. “And thirteen years is a long time to be missing.”
“Do you think she's my mother?”
“I think Emily was trying to answer that question.”
They located Mara Chen through a public business listing. Her office was above a bakery in Brooklyn, between a dental practice and an immigration attorney. Mara was a former investigative reporter who now handled missing-person cases. She studied Victoria's photograph without surprise.
“Emily hired me in January,” she said.
“Why?”
“She believed your mother had survived the accident. She thought someone connected to your family was paying to keep her hidden.”
Victoria felt her knees weaken. “Did she find her?”
Mara reached into a drawer and produced a folder. “We found a woman using the name Anna Mercer. She was living in a coastal care facility in Maine. Her identity documents were inconsistent. She had facial injuries that could have come from a boating accident and periods of memory loss. Emily visited her twice.”
“What did the woman say?”
“She knew details about the Ashford family that weren't public. Your mother used to call the lake-house stairs the singing stairs. Anna knew that. She also knew what kind of candy Eleanor hid in the kitchen.”
“Was it Catherine?”
“We hadn't confirmed it. Emily was arranging a DNA comparison when she disappeared.”
Victoria remembered Sophie describing a woman who resembled Emily and wore Catherine's silver bird pendant. “Was Anna at the estate?”
“Yes. Emily brought her down to meet Eleanor. They believed your grandmother could recognize her without being influenced by photographs.”
“And then?”
“Eleanor disappeared from her residence. Emily began receiving threats. I told her to contact police immediately.”
“Why didn't she?”
Mara looked away. “She said an officer had warned Alexander about her first complaint. She was afraid the wrong people would hear.”
The answer filled Victoria with dread. She had been wondering how kidnappers anticipated every move. Perhaps Emily had already tested the safest channels and found them compromised.
“Do you have a photograph of Anna?”
Mara opened her phone. A woman stood beside a rainy window, wearing a plain blue sweater. Her hair was darker and shorter than Catherine's, her face thinner, her nose scarred across the bridge. Yet the eyes made Victoria's breath catch. She had inherited those exact eyes, gray with a ring of hazel near the pupils.
“I want to meet her.”
“She's gone.”
Victoria stared. “Gone where?”
“The day after Emily disappeared, someone checked her out of the facility using medical transfer paperwork. The receiving clinic doesn't exist.”
For a moment the room felt airless. Two women vanished. One elderly witness held behind a wall. A wedding arranged to transfer control of a trust. It was not a collection of coincidences; it was an operation.
Mara showed her an email Emily had sent six hours before she disappeared. It contained only one sentence: If anything happens, tell Victoria to check the bells.
“The bells?” Victoria asked.
“That's all she wrote.”
Victoria thought about the singing stairs. A childhood game? A metaphor? Her mother had taught the girls to find hidden things by listening for unusual sounds. Could the clue refer to church bells or a bell-shaped charm?
She went to the lake house with Torres the following afternoon. The detective had obtained authorization for a wider search of the property. They examined the stairwell carefully, testing each creaking board. Beneath the third step lay a brass handbell wrapped in oilcloth. Inside its hollow handle was a rolled photograph showing two women standing together on a Maine beach.
One was Anna Mercer.
The other looked exactly like Catherine Ashford.
Victoria stared at the image. The second woman had a healed scar above one eyebrow, the same scar Catherine had carried from a childhood bicycle accident. Anna had no such mark.
“Who is the other woman?” Torres asked.
Victoria could barely speak. “I don't know.”
On the reverse, someone had written a name: ELIZABETH MORROW.
Mara Chen recognized it when Victoria called. Elizabeth Morrow was a hospice volunteer who had visited Anna in Maine. She had disappeared from the facility's volunteer roster the same week Emily vanished.
Then Torres noticed the date stamped on the photograph. It had been taken just three months earlier.
Victoria closed her eyes. For thirteen years, she had believed her mother had drowned. Now there were two women who resembled her, one using a false identity and another wearing the scar she remembered.
Her phone vibrated. A message from Emily's number appeared for the first time in days.
Don't trust Anna. She is not our mother. Elizabeth is.
Victoria's fingers shook so violently that she nearly dropped the phone. She had spent the day sorting people into categories: the living and the dead, the truthful and the deceitful, the frightened and the dangerous. Now she understood that the wrong name could erase a person more efficiently than a locked door. If Anna's medical records carried Catherine's history while Catherine lived under Elizabeth's identity, even a competent investigator could chase the wrong woman for years.
She asked Torres to preserve both phones and all messages before replying. Torres called the number from a protected line; there was no answer. Victoria wanted to send her sister a dozen frantic questions, but she remembered Emily's first warning. Don't sign anything. Don't let Sophie out of your sight. She opened the photograph again and studied the two women, trying not to choose which one was her mother simply because the resemblance hurt. The real answer had to come from evidence, not desperation.
Outside the boathouse the lake remained calm. Victoria had once imagined water could wash away every terrible thing that happened beside it. Now she knew the lake had been holding a family's silence for thirteen years.
A second message followed before Victoria could call back.
May you like
And if you ever see them together, run. Someone has been switching their names for years.
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