Chapter 6 - Scarlett’s Bargain
Scarlett called again at midnight.
This time Lucia was ready. Detective Chen traced the signal while Lucia kept her talking.
Scarlett sounded exhausted rather than arrogant. In the background, rain struck metal.
“You burned the courthouse,” Lucia said.
“I started smoke in the hallway. I did not know the chamber would catch fire.”
“You locked us inside.”
“I needed the ledger.”
“Why?”
“Because page forty-seven proves my mother is not the woman you think she is.”
Lucia glanced at Chen, who silently signaled for more time.
“What else was on the page?”
“The name of the person who ordered your transfer.”
“Who?”
“I will tell you when Victoria is safe.”
“Safe from whom?”
Scarlett gave a strained laugh. “Ask Edmund why the same security officer who let me escape guarded Saint Orison the night it burned.”
The trace narrowed to an industrial district. Chen dispatched officers.
Scarlett continued. “Richard kept records in a warehouse beneath Whitmore Civic Holdings. I found them when I was nineteen. He told me Elena kidnapped me and Lucia was her replacement project. He said Victoria would abandon me if she knew Lucia survived.”
“And you believed him.”
“I was nineteen.”
“You were twenty-five when you forged charity transfers.”
“I signed what my father put in front of me.”
“That excuse is crowded tonight.”
Scarlett’s voice sharpened. “You think you are different because you wore a uniform instead of a gown. You have no idea what they trained me to do.”
“Then tell me.”
Silence.
“I was eight when Victoria brought me home,” Scarlett said. “Before that, Saint Orison taught us to answer to different names. They showed us photographs of families and punished us when we forgot details. They said love was a test. If we failed, we were returned to the dark room.”
Lucia closed her eyes.
For the first time, she saw beyond the slap to the terrified child in the photograph.
It did not excuse Scarlett. But it changed the shape of her cruelty.
“Where are you?” Lucia asked.
“Somewhere your detective will reach too late.”
Chen’s phone buzzed. The signal had begun moving.
Scarlett lowered her voice. “Page forty-seven was not removed at the courthouse. Edmund tore it out years ago. What burned was a copy.”
“How do you know?”
“Because the original is in my hand.”
A horn blared in the background. Tires screeched.
Scarlett gasped.
“Scarlett?”
A man’s voice came through the line, calm and close.
“You should not have called her.”
The connection ended.
Police found the phone beneath an overpass. Nearby cameras showed Scarlett entering a black van voluntarily, then struggling when she saw the driver. The license plate belonged to an Everly Foundation vehicle assigned to Edmund’s security chief, Malcolm Rusk.
Rusk had served at Saint Orison before joining the foundation.
Edmund claimed he had not seen him in two days.
By morning, Rusk’s apartment was empty. On the wall behind a bookcase, investigators found photographs of Lucia, Scarlett, Victoria, Mateo, and Detective Chen. Each was marked with dates and colored pins.
Mateo’s photograph had a red circle around it.
Chen ordered him into protective custody. Mateo resisted until they found a tracker beneath his car.
The DNA results arrived that afternoon.
Victoria Whitmore was Lucia’s biological mother with a probability exceeding 99.9 percent.
The news did not bring joy. It brought a new question.
Why had Elena warned that another woman might be Lucia’s mother?
Pike answered part of it after examining the neonatal records.
“The blood samples attached to Victoria’s file were switched,” he said. “Someone wanted future testing to fail. Elena corrected the record later.”
“Who had access?” Lucia asked.
“Richard, Edmund, the hospital director, and a nurse listed only as M. Cross.”
Miriam Cross.
Victoria asked Lucia to meet privately. They sat in the foundation chapel, a room built for donors who liked forgiveness carved into stone.
“I do not expect you to call me mother,” Victoria said. “But there is something you must know about Scarlett. Richard did not simply adopt her. He selected her because she resembled the baby we lost.”
Lucia felt cold.
“She was raised as my replacement.”
“Yes.”
“And when Richard learned I was alive?”
“He tried to have Elena arrested for kidnapping. Edmund stopped him.”
“Why?”
“Because Edmund had already discovered the truth about Richard’s first wife.”
Lucia turned.
Victoria’s voice dropped.
“Richard had a daughter before he married me. Her name was Miriam.”
Miriam Cross was not a nurse by birth.
She was Richard Whitmore’s daughter.
And Scarlett’s possible biological mother.
Victoria remembered Miriam as a silent girl who appeared at Whitmore dinners only twice. Richard introduced her as a distant cousin and later claimed she had been sent abroad for treatment. In both memories, Miriam watched Victoria with an intensity that had once seemed rude and now seemed desperate.
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One Christmas, Miriam handed Victoria a music box shaped like a swan. Richard threw it into the fireplace before Victoria could open it. The next morning he said the girl had stolen from him and would never return.
The burned music box still existed in a storage trunk at the Whitmore estate. Inside its warped base, investigators found a rolled photograph of two newborn girls lying side by side. One wore Victoria’s bracelet. The other wore none.
