“I read her account of the pregnancy and birth,” Dr. Statler says. “Quite traumatic.” My father was some boy she met on a family vacation to the Dominican Republic, whose last name she never asked for. She was seventeen and the top of her class, and her father would not allow it. Arrangements and announcements were made. “Boarding school,” they called it. There were five other girls when she arrived. The oldest girl was twenty-two, the youngest fourteen, all equally well connected. She labored alone for nearly ten hours and was allowed to see me a few times a day for the next six days, before the nice couple from Indiana could make preparations to come for me.
“It devastated her,” Dr. Statler says. “Having to give you away. But she had no say in the matter.” He places the notebook on his lap and folds his hands. “What was it like for you, learning all of this?”
“It finally made sense,” I say. “When my father said I wasn’t his. I wasn’t either of theirs. But I was mostly excited to meet her. Fifty-one years old and a chance to be part of a family.”
“And?”
“They told me she’d died.” I remember the shock when the woman said this, the way I pinched my palm to stop the tears. “She’d been looking for me her whole life, but she had to die to find me. That’s how the attorney explained it to me, at least. It was only after she died that the court would agree to unseal the adoption papers. They had to, in order to let me know that she’d named me the sole heir of the Lawrence family estate.”
“Ninety-two million dollars, it says here.”
“And the family home in Chestnut Hill, New York,” I say. “I’d been out of work for a few months. I didn’t know what else to do, and so I moved here, into her house.” I squeeze my eyes shut, remembering opening the front door and walking into the house for the first time, everything as she had left it, dust on the furniture and accumulating in the corners.
“She wrote you letters.” Dr. Statler pulls something from between the pages of his notebook: one of her pale-yellow envelopes, a letter inside, written in handwriting I’ve come to adore.
“Two hundred and three of them,” I say. “She was determined that I’d know her someday, as well as the family I came from. They were complicated people.” I keep my eyes on the ground. “So was she.”
An alarm beeps twice. Dr. Statler shifts in his chair. “Looks like we’re out of time.”
“We are?” I ask.
“Yes, it’s time for me to get some sleep.”
As he reaches to silence the alarm, I see the time. It’s nearly one in the morning. “I’m sorry,” I say, mortified that I’ve kept him up this late. “I lost track of time.” I stand and hurry to the door.
“Come back tomorrow morning, Albert,” Dr. Statler says as I open the door. “Ten a.m. We’ll pick up where we left off. Would you like me to write that down?”
“No,” I say. “Ten a.m. I’ll remember.” I step into the hall. “Good night, Dr. Statler.”
He smiles at me, the warmest smile I think I’ve ever seen. “Good night, beautiful.”
Chapter 50
Franklin Sheehy sighs dramatically on the other end of the phone. “I don’t know,” he says. “But I’m not convinced that volunteering at an old folks’ home qualifies as suspicious, Annie. And if it is, well, you’ll have to excuse me, as I need to get down to Catholic Charities to arrest my seventy-nine-year-old mother.”
Annie closes her eyes, envisioning pinning him to the wall by his neck. “I’m not suggesting that volunteering, as a concept, is suspicious, Franklin,” she says, measured. “But it’s not just that.”
“What else is it?” he asks.
“The office space,” she says. “It was awfully generous, what he did for Sam. Like, to a fault.”
“Generous to a fault?” Sheehy says. “You’ve been in the city too long, Ms. Potter. You’ve forgotten that people are nice.”
That’s the same thing Sam said, when she first expressed her skepticism about Albert Bitterman and his “generous” offer. Annie was up most of the night, digging out the lease again and combing through her texts with Sam, trying to piece together what she knew about him. Albert Bitterman Jr., new owner of the historic Lawrence House.
Quirky. That’s the word Sam used to describe him, guilting Sam into staying for a drink every once in a while, asking him to help with tasks around the property—taking out the garbage and sweeping the path. Sam felt indebted, couldn’t get over his good luck.
“He let Sam design the space himself,” Annie says to Franklin. “Sam being Sam, this meant everything cost a fortune. That’s quite a few steps up from small-town ‘nice.’ And now I find out that he’s also been visiting Sam’s mother?”
Annie got the girl at the desk to show her his file. Albert Bitterman, fifty-one years old, started volunteering at Rushing Waters last month. Assignment: bingo night, every Wednesday and Friday. She asked around. Nobody knew him other than as the volunteer who left a lot of comments in the suggestion box. She googled his name when she got home, finding the author of a children’s book and a professor of urban planning, neither of which she guessed was a match.
“What are you suggesting, Annie?” Franklin says. “That your husband’s landlord . . . what? Killed him and disposed of his car? Let me guess. You listen to those true-crime podcasts.”