Not through investigators.
Through visits.
Maeve worked thirty-two hours a week at Store 184 and another ten doing bookkeeping for a small repair company from home.
Her husband, Jalen, had died four years earlier from complications of leukemia.
Ellie was seven then.
They lived in a modest apartment.
No hidden inheritance.
No secret fortune.
No extraordinary hardship beyond the ordinary brutal kind life gives people.
Maeve had worked for Mercer & Field for six years.
That startled me.
“You were inside my company this whole time.”
“Yes.”
“You never thought to contact me?”
“Why would I?”
“Your mother knew who I was.”
“She believed you rejected her.”
Right.
Every answer returned to that letter.
I had it examined.
Ink.
Paper.
Typewriter characteristics.
Nothing produced certainty after thirty-three years.
But the document used an executive stationery layout discontinued the year before the letter was supposedly sent.
That meant someone had retained old stock.
Evelyn had boxes of correspondence supplies at her home after Lorna helped reorganize the office.
Nessa found an archived inventory note documenting it.
Not proof that Evelyn typed the letter.
But support.
Then Maeve brought me one of Maelis’s unsent letters.
The date was eight years after the forged rejection.
Lorna,
I saw your store opening on television today.
You looked older.
So did Arden.
I nearly called.
Then I remembered the letter and decided humiliation should probably not become a family tradition.
Maeve is thirteen now.
She looks like you around the eyes when she is annoyed, which is often.
I wish you knew her.
I read that line five times.
