Chapter 15 - Robert Vale Never Died
At that point, death certificates had become suggestions.
My mother was murdered instead of dying from cancer.
My father had faked his death.
My birth identity belonged to my dead twin.
And now Robert Vale was supposedly alive.
Daniel just stared at the phone.
“My father died in front of me.”
My father answered, “You watched him stop breathing.”
“I watched them pronounce him.”
“Dr. Malloy pronounced him.”
The room went quiet.
Malloy.
The doctor who falsified my mother’s death.
The doctor who signed Robert’s stroke certificate.
Daniel whispered, “Where is he?”
“Blackthorn House.”
“Why burn it?”
“Because he believes Evelyn found the archive.”
Eleanor grabbed the phone.
“Samuel, you son of a bitch. You told me Robert was dead.”
“I believed he was until three days ago.”
Eleanor’s face went gray.
Evelyn laughed softly.
“Look at us. Still finding new ways to be surprised by him.”
We drove back toward Blackthorn.
Nobody agreed that was smart.
We did it anyway.
Fire crews surrounded the east wing.
The nursery windows glowed orange.
I tried to run inside.
Daniel caught me.
“No.”
“The archive is in there.”
“So is fire.”
“I am aware.”
Eleanor grabbed a firefighter’s coat from the back of an equipment truck.
Daniel stared at her.
“What are you doing?”
She put it on.
“Something useful for once.”
Evelyn said, “If you die in there, I will be furious.”
Eleanor looked at her twin.
“You usually are.”
The sisters entered through a side service door before anyone could stop them.
Daniel cursed and followed.
I stayed outside for exactly thirty seconds.
Then I went in too.
Smoke filled the upper hall.
The nursery fireplace had been ripped apart.
Behind it was a steel door.
Open.
The archive was gone.
A man stood beside the empty compartment.
Robert Vale.
Older.
Thinner.
Alive.
Daniel stopped.
“Dad?”
Robert looked at him with no warmth.
“You should not have brought Claire back.”
Daniel’s face shattered.
“You’re alive.”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
Robert coughed in the smoke.
“To finish what all of you were too sentimental to finish.”
I stepped forward.
“You killed my mother?”
His eyes moved to me.
“No.”
“Who did?”
He looked at Eleanor.
She went completely still.
Robert said, “Ask her.”
I turned.
Eleanor’s face collapsed.
“No,” she whispered.
Evelyn stared at her sister.
“What did you do?”
Eleanor looked at me.
“I didn’t poison Laura.”
“Then what did you do?”
She started crying.
“I switched her medication bottles.”
The fire cracked behind us.
My stomach dropped.
“You what?”
“I thought I was switching a sedative with vitamins. Robert told me Laura needed to sleep through a board meeting.”
Robert smiled faintly.
“And you believed me.”
When Eleanor confessed to switching Laura’s bottles, Evelyn looked at her sister with more grief than anger. She said Eleanor had let her believe for seventeen years that she was responsible. Eleanor admitted Robert had told her the digitalis bottle came from Evelyn’s office. Both sisters slowly realized he had made each one suspect the other. Robert smiled through the smoke and said it had kept them separated for seventeen useful years. Daniel asked whether he was proud of that. Robert said he was proud the company survived. That was Robert in one sentence. Not greed exactly. Faith. He believed the institution was more real than the people inside it and more deserving of survival than marriages, children, sisters, patients, or truth. That frightened me more than a man who simply wanted money.
Eleanor stared at him.
“You put the digitalis there.”
He nodded.
And suddenly the woman I had blamed for everything looked less like the architect of my family’s destruction than one more person Robert Vale had weaponized.
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