Chapter 19 - The Safe Deposit Key in Boston
|
In June, the week after Leo’s third birthday party, a certified bonded courier from Boston arrived at Diane Sterling’s office on Madison Avenue carrying a small, velvet-lined mahogany jewelry box sent by Mrs. Catherine Hayes—the mother of Marcus’s first victim, Evelyn.
Diane brought the box over to my brownstone that Friday evening while Noah was grilling cedar-plank salmon on the back patio and keeping an eye on Leo playing with the garden hose on the lawn.
Inside my quiet front study, I opened the mahogany box and lifted out a cream stationery card written in Mrs. Hayes’s elegant, looping script:
Dear Clara — Now that the Massachusetts court has officially closed the restitution file and moved Marcus’s old Beacon Hill storage lockers out of police evidence, the bailiff returned this box of personal effects that had been sitting unclaimed in the Boston probate vault since my daughter Evelyn’s death seven years ago. Most of it was Marcus’s old watches, which I had melted down for charity—but at the bottom of his watch case was an envelope with a New York birth certificate and a safe-deposit box key that didn't belong to Evelyn. Because of you and your father, my daughter finally has justice. If there is another victim out there, I know you are the only woman who will make sure the truth sees the light of day. With eternal gratitude — Catherine Hayes.
My brow furrowed as I lifted the velvet tray out of the mahogany box.
Lying at the bottom of the compartment was a heavy, tarnished brass safe-deposit key stamped with the logo of FIRST NATIONAL BANK OF PROVIDENCE, RHODE ISLAND — BOX #1104, alongside a yellowed, folded laminated newspaper obituary and a certified hospital birth record from 1989.
"Why would Marcus have a 1989 birth certificate from Rhode Island hidden inside his Boston watch box seven years ago?" I asked slowly, unfolding the certified hospital document under the desk lamp.
Diane leaned over my shoulder, adjusting her glasses.
The birth certificate was issued by Women & Infants Hospital in Providence, Rhode Island, for a baby boy born on March 14, 1989:
CHILD’S NAME: Marcus Julian Hayes.
MOTHER’S NAME: Margaret Vance Hayes.
Wait. That was Marcus’s own birth certificate—the exact date of birth he had used his entire life.
Then why was there a laminated newspaper obituary from the Providence Journal, dated July 22, 2009—seventeen years ago, when Marcus would have been twenty years old—clipped directly to the back of the birth certificate?!
With my heart suddenly kicking hard against my ribs, I turned the page over and looked at the 2009 newspaper obituary photograph.
Staring back at me from the grainy black-and-white newsprint was a twenty-year-old college student with dark hair and a warm smile—a boy who bore a passing resemblance to the man I had been married to, except his nose was straighter and his eyes were pale blue instead of dark brown!
And the headline beneath the photograph read:
BROWN UNIVERSITY SOPHOMORE MARCUS J. HAYES, 20, PRESUMED DROWNED IN NARRAGANSETT BAY SAILING ACCIDENT ALONGSIDE ROOMMATE.
The air in my study turned to absolute ice.
"Diane..." I whispered, my fingers going numb against the paper. "Read the second paragraph of the obituary."
Diane read the lines aloud, her voice dropping to a stunned whisper:
"Marcus J. Hayes, the sole heir to the Margaret Vance textile trust, was sailing off Newport on Friday evening with his dormitory roommate and scholarship student, Lukas Kael, 21, when a sudden squall overturned their twenty-foot sloop. While Kael managed to swim to a passing fishing boat three hours later, Hayes’s body was never recovered from the bay..."
I stared at the name in the newspaper clipping: Lukas Kael.
May you like
The man sitting in Clinton Correctional Facility right now—the man I had been married to for five years, the father of my child—wasn't Marcus Hayes OR Marcus Vance.
Seventeen years ago at Brown University, a penniless twenty-one-year-old sociopath named Lukas Kael had murdered his wealthy college roommate, Marcus Hayes, on a sailboat in Narragansett Bay—and three years later, after moving to Boston where nobody knew the dead boy’s face, Kael had used his dead roommate’s birth certificate and Social Security number to steal his identity and marry Evelyn Sterling!
