Yet she seemed genuinely confused by the one fact that had sent him running.
“I don’t know her,” I answered.
“And right now, I don’t know you.”
CHAPTER 2: The Woman in the Library
I had met Caroline Lawson six days earlier in the public library downtown.
She had contacted me through the website for the neighborhood restoration nonprofit where I volunteered on weekends.
The message said she wanted help finding records from a closed residential school called Alder House.
I had spent years helping families locate old city directories and property maps, so the request seemed ordinary.
I recognized her last name only when she introduced herself across a table near the history shelves.
Caroline was smaller than I expected, with a navy coat folded over one arm and a yellow legal pad filled with dates.
She looked tired, but she spoke with the concentration of someone who had already rehearsed every question.
“Richard Lawson is my husband,” she said.
“I know he supervises Jessica,” I answered.
Caroline watched me for a long moment before asking whether we could speak somewhere private.
We moved to a small study room with glass walls and a broken clock.
She placed an old photograph on the table.
A teenage girl stood beside a weathered oak tree, holding a red bicycle by its handlebars.
The photograph had curled at the corners, and a handwritten date marked the back.
“Her name was Mara,” Caroline said.
I asked whether Mara was a relative.
“She’s Richard’s daughter,” Caroline answered.
“He has told everyone she died when she was seventeen.”
I felt an unexpected chill despite the warm air in the library.
Caroline folded her hands over the picture.
“Last month, a woman came to my door carrying the same photograph,” she said.
“She told me she was Mara Lawson, and she was very much alive.”
I asked why Caroline had come to me instead of a private investigator.
“Because the woman vanished again after we spoke,” she said.
“And because the last address she gave me belongs to a building your nonprofit helped restore.”
I looked at the address on her legal pad.
It was on Mercer Street, three blocks from the abandoned boardinghouse where my mother used to volunteer.
Caroline opened a second folder containing a copy of an old admission record and a letter written in blue ink.
The letter ended with a sentence that made me sit upright.
“If you want to know what happened to the children, ask David about the back staircase.”
