Chapter 3 - The Date Nobody Recorded
The courthouse address belonged to a records annex rather than an actual courtroom. At nine the next morning, Dana waited under the awning with Detective Bell, a legal aid attorney named Ruth Salazar, and Lila, who insisted she wanted to come. Rain soaked the steps. People carrying folders pushed through the doors as if this were an ordinary Tuesday.
"We can ask for a certified copy," Salazar told them. "We can't demand that a clerk open a sealed file. If the order is sealed, we'll petition the court through the proper process."
Dana took out the yellow receipt. "Then what does tomorrow mean?"
"It may be the deadline for a routine retention transfer," Salazar said. "Or someone wants us here for a reason we don't understand yet."
Inside, a clerk found the guardianship case number but not the hearing transcript. It had supposedly been transferred to long-term storage the previous month. There was, however, a digital docket entry for a review hearing five years earlier. Lila's name appeared next to a line stating that she had been present by video.
"I was never in court," Lila said.
The clerk turned her monitor slightly so Salazar could read the limited public fields. The video connection had come from a private residential treatment center outside the city. Lila recognized its name. "They told me it was my home. There weren't other patients."
Bell wrote the address down. "Did you see a physician there?"
"A woman. She wore a white coat. Sometimes she brought me books and didn't ask me any questions. Her name was Dr. Avery."
Salazar asked permission to photograph the public docket information. The clerk agreed. Then she lowered her voice. "If you're pursuing this, request the archived recording promptly. A routine purge is scheduled at the end of the week."
The warning explained the note on the receipt, though not who had written it. Salazar filed an urgent preservation request and gave Dana a copy. They couldn't simply seize the recording; it had to be preserved and obtained through lawful process. The gap between those two words was a place where evidence could disappear.
Back outside, Dana received four messages from wedding vendors. The bride's family had formally terminated the event contract. A photograph of Marco slapping Dana was circulating online. Someone had identified Dana as a "disgruntled planner" who had ruined a wedding with a fabricated family story. Dana found a version of the photograph cropped to exclude Lila arriving through the doors.
"Don't answer them yet," Bell said. "Statements you make now will follow your sister into every proceeding."
"I know what happened."
"Knowing and proving are different jobs."
Lila stood beside a rain-darkened pillar, reading the screen. "That woman in the picture is me," she said. "Why do I look like somebody else?"
"Because you lost weight," Dana said, then stopped. She had meant to reassure her. Instead she had supplied a fact without attending to the grief inside the question.
Lila handed back the phone. "He used to show me photographs of you smiling at parties. He said you were doing well without me. He wasn't lying about the smiles. That's the awful part."
Dana tried to explain that people could smile while their lives were falling apart. Lila already knew. She wanted an answer to a different question: why did her family have to continue living after she disappeared? Dana held her sister's hand and said, "We did. I hated it. I'm sorry."
That night, Salazar called with an unexpected discovery. The residential center's corporate registration listed Marco as a minority investor. Its legal representative had signed the guardianship application, declaring that Lila had been found wandering and lacked capacity to manage property. An attachment alleged that her own mother had abandoned her.
"The court file may contain a consent form signed by Marianne," Salazar said. "I'm warning you before your mother sees it."
Dana closed her eyes. There had been no such consent, she was certain. But she remembered something she hadn't told anyone: eighteen months after Lila vanished, Marianne had received a letter offering money if she agreed not to pursue the search. Dana had burned that letter because it had frightened her mother.
She had destroyed the only piece of correspondence that might have connected their family to whoever had taken Lila.
When Dana told Bell, his face changed. "You should have mentioned that yesterday."
"I thought it was a cruel hoax."
"Maybe it was. Do you remember the return address?"
"No. I remember the handwriting."
May you like
She reached for the photocopied guardianship petition Salazar had provided. The letters in the applicant's name leaned sharply backward, just as they had on the envelope Dana had fed into the fireplace. She could not prove the same person had written them, but she knew where she had seen that hand before.
The name on the petition was Eleanor Bellini.
