Chapter 7 - The Visit I Wasn't Ready For
I drove back out to Ridgeline that evening. I didn't tell anybody I was going — not Karen, not Paul. Just me, the twenty-minute drive, the photo face-down on the passenger seat, and Diane's letter still sealed in my coat pocket.
I hadn't been able to open it yet. I wasn't ready to hear her voice.
Dad was in the common room, at a table near the TV, a cup of tea in front of him gone cold and skinned over. He was pointed at the screen without watching it.
He saw me come in. This time he didn't look away.
I sat down across from him and laid the photograph on the table between us.
He looked at it for a long time and didn't say anything.
"Raymond Vale," I said.
His hand curled slowly on the tabletop. He didn't reach for the picture.
"I know what you did, Dad."
"You don't know all of it," he said. His voice was smaller than it had been two days before. Something in it had come loose.
"I know you found her notebook. I know you called her out to the backyard that night. I know you told her to leave or you'd pin the whole thing on her." I kept my voice flat. "I know Vale paid you to get her out of the country. And I know she spent forty years in Spain because of it."
He was quiet a long while. The TV played on. A game show. Somebody winning a car.
"Is that everything you know?" he said finally.
"I know she died eleven years ago. I know Mom went to her grave never finding out what happened. I know you let that happen every single day and never said a word."
His jaw shifted. He picked up the cold tea and set it back down without drinking any.
"She found things she had no business finding," he said. "She was fifteen when she started digging. She thought she was protecting people."
"She was going to the police." His voice picked up an edge — the first real one I'd heard from him. "Do you have any idea what that would have done? To this family? To your mother?"
"Don't." It came out of me like a slap. "Don't you dare make this about protecting Mom. You were protecting yourself."
He looked at me then. Really looked.
"Yes," he said. "I was."
I hadn't expected him to just say it. It stopped me cold.
"Vale had things on me too," he went on. "It wasn't only money I took. There were calls I made early on, before I understood what he was building. By the time I saw the whole shape of it, I was already in it up to my neck. Diane finding that notebook meant all of it came out. Not just him. Me."
"So you shipped your daughter overseas to save your own skin."
He didn't answer.
"She was your child."
"I know what she was."
"She was sixteen and you threatened her and you put her on a plane to another country and then you came home and boxed up her pictures and never said her name again."
His eyes were wet. He didn't blink.
"And you let Mom search until it killed her," I said. "You watched her do it. You knew where Diane was and you said nothing."
"I didn't know where she was," he said. "After she left — I didn't know. Vale handled all of it. I told myself that meant I didn't have to."
"That's not a defense."
"No," he said. "It isn't."
The game show cut to a commercial. Bright colors. A jingle.
"Her daughter is here," I said. "Diane had a daughter. Her name is Marta. She's been mopping floors at Maddie's school for three weeks because she promised her mother she'd find me."
Something in my father's face gave way. Not all at once — more like a wall coming down slow, in pieces.
"A daughter," he said.
"She looks like Diane. She looks like me." I paused. "She looks like you."
He put his hand over his mouth.
I stood up and picked up the photo.
"Raymond Vale is still running a firm forty minutes from here," I said. "An attorney is looking at Diane's papers on Thursday. I don't know yet what the law can do. But I'm going to find out."
He said nothing.
"I'm not doing this to hurt you," I said. "I'm doing it because there are twelve people on a list in Diane's notebook who lost everything and never found out why. Because Vale is still out there doing it. And because my sister carried this for forty years and she deserved a whole lot better."
I turned to go.
"Nora."
I stopped. He hadn't said my name in years. It was always honey, or sweetheart, the way old fathers talk.
May you like
"Whatever she wrote in that letter," he said. "Whatever she said about me. She was right."
I walked out through the common room and into the cold parking lot and sat in my car a long time before I turned the key. Then I reached into my coat and took out my sister's letter.
