Chapter 20 - The Ghost from Narragansett Bay
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"Wait a second," Diane said, her legal instincts firing at lightning speed as she grabbed her phone from the desk. "If the man sitting in prison right now is actually Lukas Kael, who stole his dead college roommate’s identity after drowning him in 2009... then why didn't the real Marcus Hayes’s family notice someone using his Social Security number in Boston?"
"Look at the obituary," I said, pointing with a trembling finger to the survivor line at the bottom of the 2009 clipping. "Preceded in death by his parents, Thomas and Margaret Hayes. Survived only by his older sister, Brenda Hayes, 24, a nursing student in Providence."
Diane froze with her phone halfway to her ear.
"Brenda," I whispered, the final, horrifying truth clicking into place like the tumblers of a vault lock. "Brenda really was the real Marcus Hayes’s biological sister! Seventeen years ago, Brenda didn't grieve when her twenty-year-old brother drowned in Narragansett Bay—because Brenda was sleeping with his college roommate, Lukas Kael! The two of them murdered her own twenty-year-old brother on that sailboat so Brenda would inherit the family textile trust, and then she gave Lukas her dead brother’s birth certificate and identity so they could run their marriage-and-murder cons across New England and New York posing as brother and sister!"
A wave of pure, icy revulsion washed over me.
Brenda hadn't just murdered my father and Evelyn Hayes—she had helped her lover drown her own flesh-and-blood twenty-year-old brother in 2009 to start their spree!
"I'm calling the Rhode Island Attorney General and the NYPD Homicide Chief right now," Diane said grimly, hitting dial. "Once they match the prison fingerprints of 'Marcus Vance' against the 2009 Brown University student records of Lukas Kael, even the state parole board fifty years from now won't touch them—Wait."
Diane paused, staring down at the tarnished brass safe-deposit key from the First National Bank of Providence — Box #1104 still sitting in the bottom of the mahogany box.
"If Brenda and Lukas Kael stole the real Marcus Hayes’s identity in 2009," Diane asked slowly, "why is the receipt for Safe Deposit Box #1104 in Providence stamped as RENEWED IN PERSON — DECEMBER 24th of this past year?!"
My breath stopped dead in my throat.
I picked up the tiny yellow bank maintenance slip that had been wrapped around the brass key—Wait, Mrs. Hayes hadn't pulled that slip from the seven-year-old Boston evidence vault! A bank notice had been forwarded to the old Beacon Hill address last week and Mrs. Hayes had tossed it into the box thinking it was old paperwork!
I read the machine-printed timestamp on the Providence bank slip:
SAFE DEPOSIT BOX #1104 — BIOMETRIC & SIGNATURE ACCESS LOGGED: DECEMBER 24 (4:15 PM).
AUTHORIZED SIGNATORY PRESENT: MARCUS J. HAYES.
"That’s impossible!" I gasped, my heart slamming against my ribs. "On December twenty-fourth at four-fifteen in the afternoon, my husband was sitting in our living room in Westchester wrapping Leo’s dinosaur train set right in front of me! He didn't leave for the airport until Christmas morning!"
Then how had someone with the signature—and the biometric print—of Marcus J. Hayes walked into a bank vault in Providence, Rhode Island, at four-fifteen on Christmas Eve?!
Just then, my desk landline rang.
Thinking it was the security gate downstairs, I snatched up the receiver. "Hello?"
There was no static on the line—only the sound of distant ocean waves and gulls crying over a harbor pier, followed by a quiet, cultivated male voice I had never heard in my life:
"Hello, Clara. Catherine Hayes told me she sent the mahogany box to your West 82nd Street address today."
My hand froze around the receiver. "Who is this?!"
"Someone who has been waiting seventeen years for Lukas Kael and my dear sister Brenda to finally get locked inside a cage where they couldn't run anymore," the man on the phone said softly. "Lukas thought I drowned when he hit me with that oar in Narragansett Bay in 2009, Clara—just like he thought you wouldn't notice him going to Lake Tahoe on Christmas morning. Tell Diane Sterling not to call the Rhode Island police yet. I’m standing across the street from your brownstone by the park entrance right now... and it’s time I told you why your father really hired me to help him write that letter before he died."
May you like
Slowly, with the receiver still pressed to my ear, I walked to my front parlor window, pulled back the lace curtain, and looked across 82nd Street toward the stone wall of Central Park.
Standing beneath the blooming cherry trees in the golden June twilight, holding a bouquet of white hydrangeas identical to the ones my father used to plant every summer, was a man with pale blue eyes looking straight up at my window.
