Chapter 5 - THE WOMAN THE FAMILY CALLED A LIAR
Chloe met me the next morning at a coffee shop on Wilson Boulevard.
She wore sunglasses despite the gray weather.
There was a bruise near her elbow from the hospital IV.
She didn’t hug me.
I didn’t expect her to.
“Mara Keller was my counselor junior year,” she said.
“At your dad’s school?”
Chloe nodded.
“I liked her.”
She wrapped both hands around her coffee but never drank it.
“Then she disappeared.”
“What did your family tell you?”
“That she was unstable.”
The answer came too quickly.
Chloe looked embarrassed by it.
“Mom said Mara became obsessed with Dad. She said Mara threatened to ruin him if he didn’t pay her.”
“Did you believe that?”
“I was nineteen. My father was Principal Vance. People thanked him for getting their kids into college.”
She looked out the window.
“A few months later, he retired.”
I slid copies of the transfers across the table.
Chloe read the memo.
MK SETTLEMENT.
Her face changed.
“I’ve seen that before.”
“Where?”
“Mom’s desk.”
According to Chloe, Evelyn handled most household bookkeeping because Arthur hated online banking. Years earlier, Chloe had borrowed a stapler from her mother’s home office and seen an envelope addressed to a law firm.
Keller had been written on the corner.
Chloe had asked about it.
Evelyn snapped the envelope away.
Family business.
Nothing more.
“David would know,” Chloe said.
“Why?”
“Because after Dad retired, David helped Mom reorganize everything. The foundation. Their retirement accounts. Insurance. All of it.”
David had been twenty-four.
Old enough to know exactly what he was handling.
I asked Chloe another question.
“Did Mara ever say anything to you?”
Chloe stared at me.
“Once.”
She swallowed.
“It was right before she left.”
Mara had called Chloe into her office after school.
She didn’t accuse Arthur of anything directly.
She only asked whether Arthur ever brought drinks upstairs when Chloe’s friends stayed over.
Chloe had laughed.
She told Mara her father wasn’t some creep from a crime show.
“Then she said something weird.”
“What?”
“She said, ‘If you ever wake up and don’t remember how you got somewhere, don’t let anyone tell you that means nothing happened.’”
Neither of us spoke for several seconds.
Chloe finally pulled off her sunglasses.
Her eyes were red.
“My mother told me that woman was crazy.”
I leaned forward.
“Chloe, I need to ask you something difficult.”
She almost laughed.
“We passed difficult two days ago.”
“Did your dad ever give you anything to help you sleep?”
“No.”
Then she frowned.
“Not exactly.”
When Chloe was sixteen, she had come home from a school dance drunk and terrified her parents would punish her.
Arthur brought her Gatorade.
She slept almost fourteen hours.
At the time, everybody blamed alcohol.
“I never thought about it again.”
Neither of us knew whether it meant anything.
We didn’t turn it into proof.
But before we left, Chloe unlocked her phone and searched old email.
She had kept one message from Mara Keller.
Eight years old.
Subject line:
YOU DIDN’T DESERVE TO BE LIED TO.
The body contained only two sentences.
May you like
I’m sorry I couldn’t explain everything before I left.
Your brother knows why I had to go.
