Chapter 7 - The Buyers’ Page
The Mercer cottage had not been home to anyone in fourteen years.
By eleven-thirty that night, it had become the most heavily watched empty house in Essex County.
Detective Vance did not like the plan.
That made two of us.
Ruth remained under police protection at a hotel. Jenna took Owen to her parents’ house outside Worcester under an escort Vance arranged through state police. I hated every mile between my son and me, but for the first time since this began, I believed distance might actually protect him.
Ethan came with me to the cottage.
Vance tried to stop him.
He refused.
“If they think I’m still angry at Daniel, I’m useful,” he said.
“You are also a civilian who has already been shot at once.”
“Technically, shot near.”
“That correction makes me want to arrest you.”
He smiled for the first time since the diner.
It vanished quickly.
The cottage stood behind a line of wind-bent pines, gray shingles silvered by salt and age. My grandmother had called it Mercy House because the ocean was visible from the second-floor bedroom on clear days. As a child, I thought the name sounded religious. Later I learned my great-grandfather had named the property after a boat.
Tonight there was no ocean view.
Fog covered everything beyond the yard.
Vance’s team stayed back from the property. Two officers were already inside, hidden upstairs. Another watched the rear through night-vision binoculars from the tree line. I wore a microphone beneath my sweater and hated every second of it.
The instruction had been clear.
Bring Ruth’s pages.
Come without police.
We brought photocopies inside an old document envelope.
If whoever took Lenora was watching, we needed them to believe the original evidence had arrived.
The real problem was that we still did not know where Thomas had hidden the buyers’ page.
“The nursery floor,” Ethan said as we entered.
I switched on an old lamp.
The electricity still worked because I had never bothered to cancel service.
Dust lay over everything.
A crocheted blanket folded across the sofa. Ceramic gulls on the fireplace mantel. A faded height chart penciled beside the kitchen doorway, my name marked at ages four, five, and six.
Thomas’s handwriting.
I touched the six-year-old mark with one finger.
The year he died.
“Daniel?”
I turned.
Ethan stood near the stairs.
“Nursery?”
“Upstairs.”
The room had not been a nursery in decades. It became a storage room after I outgrew the crib. My grandmother filled it with boxes of curtains, Christmas decorations, and beach towels nobody wanted.
The floor was wide pine boards, darkened with age.
We moved everything out.
Then we searched.
For twenty minutes, nothing.
I began to think Ruth’s memory had failed.
Then Ethan knocked on a board near the wall.
Hollow.
We stared at each other.
He crouched and ran his fingers along the seam.
One nail was different from the others.
Not a nail.
A flat screw painted brown.
We lifted the board.
Below it sat a narrow tin box wrapped in yellowed plastic.
My chest tightened.
I looked toward the ceiling where one of Vance’s officers was hidden in the room beyond.
No movement.
We were supposed to behave as though we were alone.
I opened the box.
Inside were nine original ledger pages.
A photograph of Thomas and Lenora standing beside Ruth Bell outside St. Agnes.
A bank deposit receipt from 1992.
A small cassette tape.
And one folded sheet sealed inside a plastic sleeve.
Across the top:
PRIVATE PLACEMENTS — CLIENT INDEX.
Ethan whispered, “Jesus.”
The page listed codes rather than baby names.
B-2.
B-4.
B-7.
Beside each were surnames, dollar amounts, and initials.
Some names meant nothing to me.
Others did.
A former judge.
A real-estate developer whose family still owned half a waterfront district.
A surgeon whose obituary I remembered seeing years earlier.
A state senator who had died in 2009.
I stopped reading.
These were not all monsters.
Some may have believed they were adopting legally.
Some may have known exactly what they were doing.
The page did not tell me which was which.
But whoever wanted this list would have known the distinction did not matter once the names became public.
Scandal could destroy the innocent beside the guilty.
That was leverage too.
Ethan pointed.
“B-16.”
His code.
There was no buyer surname beside it.
Only handwritten words:
DIVERTED — T.M.
Thomas Mercer.
My father.
Ethan stared at the note.
“He put me on the list.”
“He documented what he did.”
“Like I was property.”
“Or like he was trying to prove where you went.”
Ethan did not answer.
I kept reading.
B-17.
My code.
A surname appeared beside it.
WETHERBY.
$48,000.
My knees went weak.
Forty-eight thousand dollars.
That was what someone had paid for me before I was born.
Before my mother ever held me.
Before my father stole me back from a service nursery.
I thought I would feel violated.
Instead, I felt strangely detached, like I was reading the price of an object that had never actually been me.
“You okay?” Ethan asked.
“No.”
“Me neither.”
A car door slammed outside.
We both froze.
My microphone felt suddenly enormous against my chest.
Another sound.
Footsteps on the porch.
One person.
Maybe two.
I picked up the envelope of photocopies and left the original page inside the tin box beneath the open floorboard.
Ethan whispered, “That’s not the plan.”
“It is now.”
“If they search—”
“Then they search.”
A knock came at the front door.
Three slow taps.
I went downstairs.
Ethan followed five feet behind me.
I opened the door.
A woman stood on the porch.
She was maybe forty-five, wearing a dark raincoat, blond hair pulled into a tight knot. I had never seen her before.
“Daniel Mercer?”
“Yes.”
“I’m here for the pages.”
“Where is my mother?”
“Safe for the moment.”
“Who are you?”
“Someone who would like this evening to end quietly.”
Ethan stepped into view.
The woman’s eyes narrowed.
“You brought him.”
“He invited himself.”
“That seems to be a family trait.”
Ethan stiffened.
“You know me?”
“I know your file.”
He moved forward.
I blocked him with one arm.
“Where is Lenora?” I asked again.
The woman looked at the envelope.
“Hand it over.”
“Show me she’s alive.”
She took out a phone.
On screen was a live video.
My mother sat in a chair beneath a hanging light. Her hands were tied in front of her. A cut marked her temple.
But she was awake.
“Mom.”
She looked toward whoever held the camera.
“Daniel, don’t give them—”
The video cut.
My anger almost overpowered the plan.
“Where?”
“Pages first.”
I held out the envelope.
She reached.
Then stopped.
Her eyes moved past me into the cottage.
Something changed in her face.
“Who else is here?”
“No one.”
She stepped backward.
A second figure appeared out of the fog behind her.
Male.
Large.
He held a pistol low beside his leg.
My blood went cold.
The officers inside had not moved because Vance wanted the exchange to establish evidence.
But a gun changed everything.
I saw the woman touch her left ear.
An earpiece.
Then she said, “We have a problem.”
The man raised the gun.
Police erupted from every direction.
“Drop it!”
The porch exploded into motion.
The gunman turned.
Ethan tackled me sideways as a shot cracked through the night.
The bullet tore into the doorframe.
Officers shouted.
The woman ran toward the yard.
The gunman fired once more before disappearing into the fog.
I hit the floor hard.
Ethan landed on top of me.
“Get off!”
“I just saved your life.”
“Then save it from farther away.”
We scrambled up.
Outside, flashlights cut through fog. One officer had the blond woman facedown beside the porch steps. The gunman had vanished into the trees.
Detective Vance stormed toward us.
“You two are a magnet for terrible decisions.”
“She showed me Lenora.”
“I saw.”
“Can you trace the video?”
“We’re trying.”
The woman on the ground began laughing.
Not hysterically.
Almost pityingly.
Vance crouched beside her.
“Name.”
The woman said nothing.
Vance glanced at the phone recovered from her hand.
The live video connection had ended.
Then the woman looked directly at me.
“You still don’t understand what Claire found.”
I stepped closer.
“What did my wife find?”
Vance raised a hand to stop me.
The woman smiled.
“She found the reason they chose you.”
“Who chose me?”
“Not Kane.”
My heart pounded.
“Who?”
Her smile disappeared.
“The buyers.”
Then she bit down hard.
Vance grabbed her jaw, shouting for an ambulance.
The woman convulsed once and collapsed.
For a second I thought she had poisoned herself.
It turned out to be a seizure brought on by something medical in her mouth that I never fully understood. Paramedics stabilized her before taking her away under guard.
But one thing she said stayed behind.
Not Kane.
The buyers.
Detective Vance’s phone rang.
She listened, then looked at me.
“We traced the live feed.”
“Where?”
“Industrial property outside Salem. Owned by a shell company.”
“Whose shell company?”
Her expression hardened.
“The Kane Foundation.”
I started toward my car.
Vance caught my arm.
“You are not going.”
“My mother is there.”
“We have tactical officers moving now.”
“I’m going.”
“No.”
I looked at her.
“She has spent thirty-four years hiding what happened to me. I have spent one night being furious at her for it. I am not letting the last thing she hears from me be anger.”
Vance held my gaze.
Then she released my arm.
“Stay behind my vehicle. You move without permission, I put you in handcuffs myself.”
Ethan stepped beside me.
“Make it two pairs.”
Vance stared at him.
“I dislike both of you.”
“Good,” Ethan said. “Means we’re bonding.”
Before we left, I went back upstairs and took the cassette from the tin box.
On its label, written in handwriting I did not recognize, were two words:
FOR DANIEL.
May you like
Below that, in smaller letters:
— CLAIRE
