Dominic's POV
The last time I saw Abel Thorne, he was standing on a dock in Rockland at four in the morning, holding a dead woman's wedding ring in his fist, and I wanted to kill him.
Now I stand on Track 112 at Grand Central, under the great turquoise ceiling with its painted stars, and I'm so glad to see him that I can't speak.
He comes down the platform in his yellow oilskin, with a canvas bag over his shoulder and his woollen cap in his hand. He's smaller than I remember. The wind has worked on his face for seventy years, and it shows. Beside him walks a tall, straight-backed woman in a grey wool coat, with cropped white hair and a pair of half-moon glasses on a chain.
"Mr Hale," says Abel.
"Abel."
"You look like hell."
"You should see the other fellow."
"I did." He looks up at the stars. "Well, I'll be. They got the constellations backwards, y'know. It's a mirror image. Tourists don't never notice."
"Abel..."
"I know." He puts out a gnarled hand. "I'm sorry. For what I said on the dock."
I take it.
It's a rope of a hand, all knuckle and callus. I hold it much too long.
"You saved her," I say.
"Ayuh."
"I thought you'd..."
"I know what you thought. I thought it too, for a bit." The old blue eyes meet mine. "Then she opened her own."
I swallow.
"This is Dr Pelletier," says Abel.
"Ruth."
"Mr Hale." The woman gives me a brief, sharp nod. Her voice is low and precise, with the trace of a French-Canadian lilt. "I've heard a great deal about you."
"All bad, I expect."
"Some of it." A flicker of dry humour. "Most of it from the patient, in the night, in her sleep."
I stand perfectly still.
"What did she say?"
"Your name." Ruth Pelletier takes off her glasses and polishes them on her coat. "Mostly your name. For eleven weeks."
***
We take them to the penthouse in Marcus's SUV.
It's a quiet ride. Abel looks out of the window at the avenues going by, at the canyon of glass and steel, with the expression of a man observing an alien planet. Ruth holds a battered black medical bag on her knee like a baby.
"Your clinic," I say. "Marcus told me."
"Burned." She says it without inflection. "On Sunday night. The same night as the fire in Newark."
"I'm so sorry."
"I wasn't there." She looks out of the window. "I'd gone to the mainland to visit my sister. I came back to a ring of fire engines and a cottage the size of a matchbox."
"Your records..."
"Gone."
"All of them?"
"The ones in the clinic."
Something in her voice makes me look round.
"There are others?"
Ruth Pelletier smiles.
It's a thin, remarkable smile, like frost on glass.
"Mr Hale," she says. "I trained at Massachusetts General in 1983. I spent thirty years as a trauma surgeon. In all that time I have never kept a single set of records in only one place."
She unzips the black bag.
She takes out a long brown envelope, creased and soft with handling, and a flat tin of 35mm film.
"Intake notes," she says. "Operative reports. Dated photographs. Every procedure, in my own hand, with a witness signature from a retired nurse who is, thank God, still alive, still in Rockland, and still quite incapable of being bribed."
"You've kept it all."
"I kept it all." She sets the envelope in my lap. "Because I thought, one day, someone would ask."
I open it.
The first page is a form. Clinical, neat. Patient: Jane Doe. F, approx. 32. Admitted 15 Oct. Third-degree burns, left neck, shoulder, upper arm. Smoke inhalation. Fractured left zygoma and mandible. Dental: gold crown upper left molar (Cambridge, Mass., c. 2012). Scar left wrist, old, approx. 25 years.
I read it twice.
Scar left wrist.
I hear my own voice in the boardroom. A scar from a boating accident when she was ten.
The second page is a photograph. Polaroid, sallow with age. A hospital bed. A woman's face half-covered in bandages, with a dark swollen eye and cracked lips. One hand lies outside the sheet.
On the left wrist, a thin white line.
I look at it for a long time.
"She asked about you," says Ruth quietly. "When she woke. Not who she was. Not where. Her first words, once the tube was out, were, Is Dom safe?"
The car swerves slightly.
"Sorry," says Marcus, gruffly. "Pothole."
I can't speak.
"I told her I didn't know a Dom." Ruth's voice is very even. "She said, He left on the tender. He was meeting someone. Is he alive?"
"What did you say?"
"That I'd find out."
"And?"
"I did. Abel brought me the papers. Hale Widower Questioned Over Yacht Blast." She taps the envelope. "And I had to tell a half-dead girl in a bed that her husband was the main suspect in her murder."
"God."
"She said, No."
I turn my head.
"She said, No. It wasn't him. It couldn't be. And then she said it again, and again, for three days." The pale eyes rest on me. "Then she stopped. And she never said your name again until the night before she left."
"What happened?"
"She said, If I go back, they'll kill him. Whoever did this. Because he'll know I'm alive."
I close my eyes.
"She stayed away to protect you," says Ruth Pelletier. "Not because she believed you'd done it. I want you to know that. I think you should hear it from someone who was there."
The SUV slows.
It stops.
I sit very still, with a dead woman's medical file in my lap, and eleven weeks of her dreaming of my name, and the whole of the long, grey, ruined city outside the glass.
Abel clears his throat.
"I've got somethin' for her, too," he says. "If she wants it."
"What?"
He reaches into the canvas bag.
He takes out a long, flat piece of wood, scorched along one edge, with a brass hinge still attached. Carved into the pale grain with a penknife, in an unsteady hand, are three small letters.
S. Q. H.
"Found it floatin'," says Abel. "Day after. It was a hatch cover off the Halcyon, lower aft cabin. She'd carved her initials on it when she was..."
"Twenty-nine. On our honeymoon." I take it. "It's the one thing I thought had gone down."
"It was in the weeds off Owls Head."
"Thank you."
"Weren't nothin'."
"It's everything."
He shrugs.
"She'll want it," he says. "Girl's gotta have somethin' of her own."
***
My phone rings as we pull into the garage.
I almost don't answer.
It's Torres.
"Hale."
"Torres."
"I'll be brief." Her voice is clipped, with traffic behind it. "I've got good news and bad news."
"Good first."
"The grand jury's convened. Thursday, nine a.m. We have the subpoenas. Vance's trust. Marlin's accounts. Brandt's phone records for the last five years. The judge signed everything this morning."
"That's..."
"I want Serena Hale in that room. Alive, under oath, with every scrap you've got."
"And the bad?"
A pause.
"Edmund Vance filed an emergency motion at eight o'clock this morning."
I go still.
"To what?"
"To have Vera Lowell declared an impostor as a matter of law. To bar any testimony she gives, in any proceeding, on the grounds that she's a fraud." A long breath. "Hearing's tomorrow at ten. In the Southern District. Before Judge Harold Whitlock."
My stomach drops.
Vance, Whitlock and Strand.
"Whitlock," I say.
"Edmund's brother-in-law's cousin. It's a very small world, Mr Hale."
"Can't you recuse..."
"I've tried. I filed at nine. He denied it at nine-fifteen."
I look at Abel in the back seat, and at the hatch cover on my knee, and at the thin white line on a Polaroid wrist.
"If the judge rules she's an impostor..."
"Then she can't testify on Thursday."
"And the case..."
"Dies." Torres's voice is very flat. "No witness to the bomb. No witness to the pier. Just a notebook and a dead man's voicemail, and a ledger written by your own father."
"What do we do?"
"You get me proof by ten tomorrow morning," says Dana Torres. "Proof, Mr Hale. That she is who you say she is. Because if you can't..."
The line crackles.
"If you can't, I'm afraid she goes back to jail. And this time," she says, "there won't be anyone to pay the bail."