Chapter 13 - The Boy Who Followed the Blue Scarf
Patrick did not remember running up the cemetery stairs.
One moment he was staring at the photograph; the next he was outside, shouting into his phone while Agent Ruiz called for an emergency transit alert.
Samantha answered on the third ring.
“He was with Lou,” she said, panic sharpening every word. “Lou went downstairs to stop a fight. When he came back, Samuel was gone.”
“Did Samuel leave a note?”
“No. His jacket is missing. So is the drawing he made of the woman in the scarf.”
Patrick closed his eyes.
Samuel had asked questions about Anna after hearing the cassette. He wanted to know why she was alone and whether she was afraid. Patrick had told him grown-ups were searching for her.
Samuel, who had watched his parents sell their wedding rings and his grandmother arrive with her clothes in a garbage bag, had apparently decided grown-ups were too slow.
The transit authority located the bus heading north toward Harrow. Police stopped it seventeen minutes later.
Anna and Samuel were no longer aboard.
The driver remembered them leaving near an abandoned railway station. The woman had seemed distressed. The boy held her hand.
Patrick, Samantha, Christopher, and Margaret followed Agent Ruiz to the station while Jacqueline remained at the federal office to identify Voss’s financial contacts.
Rain began again as they reached the tracks.
The old station had been closed for fifteen years. Graffiti covered the brick walls. Weeds grew through cracks in the platform. Inside, Samuel’s drawing lay beside a broken ticket window.
It showed a woman in a blue scarf standing between two families.
On the back, Samuel had written:
I told her Grandma is nice.
Samantha pressed the paper to her chest.
A faint sound came from the baggage room.
Patrick forced the swollen door open.
Samuel sat on the floor beside Anna Bell.
She looked so much like Christopher that Margaret stopped breathing.
The same high cheekbones. The same deep-set eyes. The same small scar near the chin, though Anna’s had faded with age. Her blue scarf was wrapped around Samuel’s shoulders.
A cut marked her forehead.
Samuel jumped up. “Dad, she was hiding from the bad man.”
Patrick crossed the room and pulled his son into his arms.
“You never leave without telling us.”
“I’m sorry.”
“You scared your mother half to death.”
“I found Aunt Anna.”
Anna flinched at the word aunt.
Margaret approached slowly.
“My name is Margaret.”
Anna’s fingers moved in a halting pattern.
Samuel interpreted. “She knows.”
“You understand sign language?” Samantha asked.
“A little. A kid in my class uses it.”
Anna signed again.
Samuel watched carefully. “She says she remembers your red coat.”
Margaret began to cry.
The day Evelyn died, Margaret had worn a red wool coat. She had held Christopher in the hospital corridor while a nurse told them the second infant had not survived. Anna could not have remembered that as a newborn.
Unless she had seen Margaret later.
“When?” Margaret asked. “When did you see me?”
Anna touched her temple, struggling.
Then she pointed at Christopher.
He stepped forward.
Her face hardened with fear.
Christopher stopped immediately and lowered his hands.
“I won’t come closer.”
Anna signed.
Samuel’s expression changed.
“What did she say?” Patrick asked.
“She says he came to Saint Agnes.”
Christopher shook his head. “I never went inside. Voss showed me a photograph from outside.”
Anna signed again, more urgently.
Samuel translated. “Not him. Someone wearing his face.”
Agent Ruiz exchanged a look with Patrick.
“A disguise?”
Anna reached inside her coat and removed a folded medical brochure. On the back was a sketch of a man with Christopher’s hair and features, but a line ran along his jaw like the edge of a mask.
Voss had used Christopher’s appearance to frighten her.
A train horn sounded in the distance, though the line had been abandoned.
Agent Ruiz drew her weapon.
Lights appeared beyond the rain.
A maintenance engine rolled slowly toward the platform.
Malcolm Voss stood in the cab.
Two men jumped from the rear before the engine stopped.
One seized Samantha. The other raised a weapon toward Samuel.
Christopher moved first.
He stepped between the gun and the boy.
The shot cracked through the station.
Christopher fell.
Margaret screamed.
Patrick rushed the gunman while Ruiz fired into the ceiling, forcing the second man behind a pillar. Samuel crawled toward Christopher, but Anna caught him and pulled him behind the ticket counter.
Voss entered through the platform door carrying a black case.
“Give me Anna,” he shouted, “and the rest of you walk away.”
Patrick struck the first gunman with a broken chair leg. Ruiz disarmed the second. Samantha ran to Christopher and pressed both hands against the wound high in his shoulder.
Voss grabbed Margaret by the hair and dragged her backward.
Patrick froze.
“Let her go.”
Voss held a blade to Margaret’s throat.
“The trust documents mean nothing without the original beneficiary.”
Anna stood.
She removed the blue scarf.
For the first time, she spoke aloud.
Her voice was rough but clear enough to carry across the station.
“I remember where you buried the first accountant.”
Voss’s face lost all color.
Sirens rose beyond the tracks.
May you like
Anna pointed toward the black case in his hand.
“And I know what is inside.”
