Chương 2
“How long?”
“About forty minutes.”
Daniel nodded.
Claire glanced at Lily.
“Can we not do this beside her?”
“You don’t get to ask me that.”
“No.”
The word was quiet.
“You don’t.”
Rachel studied the two of them.
“There’s a small first-class lounge at the end of this carriage. I can keep the door open. I’ll be close enough to see you both.”
Daniel looked at Lily.
He would not leave her.
Rachel seemed to understand.
“I can stay here with her.”
“No.”
It came out too fast.
Rachel did not take offense.
“Then we stay here.”
Daniel sat on the edge of the bench beside Lily. He pulled his phone from his trouser pocket and looked at the screen.
Three bars.
Plenty.
He did not know whom to call.
The police made sense. His sister made sense. His attorney made sense, though the only attorney he knew personally had handled a dispute over a leaking roof three years ago.
Instead he opened Claire’s obituary.
He did it without thinking.
He had not searched it in months, maybe more than a year, but the browser remembered.
Claire Carter, thirty-two.
Beloved wife.
Devoted mother.
Daughter.
Friend.
He had approved those words while sitting at his kitchen table at two in the morning because the funeral home needed the copy by nine.
He looked up.
Claire was watching him read about her death.
He turned the screen around.
“This woman.”
Claire’s face tightened.
“This woman died on December eighteenth, four years ago.”
“Yes.”
“She was identified by the county.”
“Yes.”
“I buried her.”
“Yes.”
His voice rose.
Lily moved.
Daniel immediately lowered it.
“I buried her.”
Claire pressed her lips together.
“I know.”
“I put dirt on the coffin.”
“I know.”
“I brought my three-year-old daughter to a cemetery and told her her mother was under the ground.”
Claire closed her eyes.
Daniel saw her fingers tighten against the sleeve of her coat.
He wanted her to deny being Claire.
That surprised him.
He wanted a scam. A twin nobody had mentioned. A stranger with surgery and stolen photographs. Something monstrous but simple.
He did not want his wife to have been alive while Lily learned to sleep without her.
Rachel’s terminal gave a soft electronic chime.
She silenced it immediately.
Claire opened her eyes.
“The woman in your grave was named Jenna Morales.”
Daniel stared at her.
Rachel’s attention sharpened.
“Who?”
“A woman I worked with.”
Daniel stood.
Claire flinched.
He stopped himself halfway across the narrow cabin.
“You knew her name?”
“Yes.”
“You knew whose body I buried?”
“Not that night.”
“When?”
Claire looked toward the window.
Snow whipped sideways through the darkness, illuminated briefly each time the train passed a signal light.
“Three days later.”
Daniel laughed again, but this time there was no humor at all.
Rachel said softly, “Mr. Carter.”
Daniel put one hand over his mouth.
He could feel the heat of the slap in his cheek and the old familiar notch in one of his back teeth where he had chipped it opening a beer bottle in college. Strange things became vivid when everything else stopped making sense.
He lowered his hand.
“Start at the beginning.”
Claire shook her head.
“No.”
Daniel stared at her.
“There are four years in the beginning, Claire.”
Hearing her name in his own voice changed something in the room.
She heard it too.
Her shoulders lowered by a fraction.
“Start with the night of the crash,” she said.
Daniel sat again.
Rachel leaned against the open doorway, arms folded loosely, giving them the illusion of privacy without actually leaving.
Claire remained standing.
“Jenna and I worked late that night.”
“At Merrick Health.”
“Yes.”
Daniel knew the name better than he wanted to. Claire had been a senior accounting manager there. The company handled billing and back-office services for assisted-living and home-health companies in six states. Daniel had never fully understood her job except that she spent too many evenings correcting spreadsheets other people had supposedly already corrected.
“Merrick’s office party was that night,” Claire said. “Jenna worked in accounts payable. She was twenty-nine. Her car wouldn’t start. It was sleeting. I offered to drive her home.”
Daniel remembered sleet.
Not the weather itself.
The sound of it against the windows after the state trooper came to his door.
He had been barefoot.
That was the detail that returned most often.
Not the trooper’s face.
His own bare feet on the cold hardwood floor.
Claire continued.
“Jenna had spilled red wine down the front of her coat at the party. She was embarrassed. I gave her mine because I had another jacket in the car.”
Daniel stared at Claire’s dark-green coat now.
“Your gray coat?”
“Yes.”
The gray coat had been listed among the recovered personal effects.
He had never asked to see it.
His stomach tightened.
“Keep going.”
“We were on Highway 18. About twenty miles east of Marlow. A pickup spun ahead of us. I braked. We hit the barrier.”
Claire paused.
Her hand went unconsciously to her right wrist.
Daniel noticed a faint white line beneath the cuff.
“I got out because I could smell something burning. Jenna was dazed. I told her to stay in the car. I went around the front and tried to wave someone down.”
Her voice changed.
Not becoming dramatic.
Becoming slower.
“There was a second impact. I don’t know what hit us. I remember the barrier. I remember being on the ground. I remember not being able to feel two fingers.”
Daniel had read the crash report.
Three vehicles.
One fatality in Claire’s SUV.
Two serious injuries in another vehicle.
He had never imagined Claire outside the car.
“A snowplow driver found me beyond the guardrail. My purse was in the car. My phone was in the car. My wallet was in the car. I didn’t have identification.”
“You knew your name.”
“Not immediately.”
Daniel looked at her.
May you like
“You had amnesia?”
“No.” Her answer was almost impatient. “Not like a movie. I had a concussion. I was confused. I knew pieces. I knew I had a daughter. I knew your first name. Then it came back.”
