Chapter 9 - The Name Grant Buried
For two days, I could not decide whether “the child” meant me. I was eleven when Mom crashed, but Grant had always spoken of me as if I were an object he had purchased and misplaced.
Ada traced the tape's missing section to a second recording. The lab could not restore the audio, but it found a faint time code. During those twelve minutes, Mom had apparently called a number registered to a private security company in Phoenix.
“Why would she call Arizona?” Maya asked.
“Maybe she wasn't calling Arizona,” Jonah said over the phone. “Maybe someone in Arizona was calling her.”
He had flown to Cedar Vale after receiving my message. Seeing him walk into the motel lobby made me feel both steadier and more furious.
“You could have come sooner,” I told him.
“I should have.”
“That's not an answer.”
“It is the only honest one.”
He did not ask me to call him Dad. That mattered more than I expected.
We searched the county's archived business registrations. The Phoenix security company had been dissolved, but its former director was listed as Alistair Venn, a retired federal witness-protection investigator.
Alistair agreed to meet us in a public library outside Tucson. He was thin, white-haired, and carried a cane he did not seem to need.
“Mara Vale contacted me in 1998,” he said. “She wanted information about protective relocation.”
“Did you help her?” I asked.
“I explained the requirements. She needed a prosecutable case and a cooperating witness.”
“Did she have one?”
“She believed she did.”
He looked at Jonah. “Your mother said Harlan Pike could identify the people behind the fires.”
“Could he?”
“He could identify one person.”
Alistair slid a file across the table. Inside was a photocopy of a handwritten statement from Harlan.
Grant Voss ordered the fires. Sheriff Bell made the reports disappear. The money went through a land company owned by someone called Northstar.
“Who was Northstar?” Maya asked.
Alistair shook his head. “Mara never found out.”
“What about my mother?”
“She came to me after the crash.”
The room seemed to lose oxygen.
“You knew she survived?” I said.
“I knew a woman using the name Miriam Vale survived a vehicle collision in Cedar Vale. I did not know whether she was your mother until years later.”
“Why didn't you tell me?”
“Because the relocation file was sealed, and because the person protecting her believed contact would endanger you.”
“Who protected her?”
Alistair's gaze shifted to Jonah.
Jonah stood up so quickly his chair struck the table.
“No,” he said.
Alistair continued. “Your father arranged the first safe location.”
I turned toward Jonah. “You knew?”
“I knew she might be alive.”
“Might?”
“I received one message. It said she was safe and that Grant believed her dead.”
“And you never looked for her?”
“I looked until the message stopped.”
“You both decided I was safer not knowing.”
Neither man denied it.
Alistair gave me a second document: a mailing receipt addressed to June. The package had been returned unopened.
“Your aunt refused it,” he said.
The betrayal cut deeper than Grant's threats. June had held the door shut on my mother twice: once by fear, once by choice.
Back in Cedar Vale, I found an unsigned page hidden in the cookie tin's false bottom. It listed three dates and three locations: the river, the diner, the quarry.
Maya compared them with the ledger. Each date marked a transfer of money to a company called Northstar Holdings.
“Northstar is still active,” she said.
“Who owns it?”
She stared at the screen.
“The registered agent is your aunt June.”
My stomach turned.
May you like
June had not merely protected the evidence.
She had been part of the machinery that buried it.
