and she was tempted to stop. To close her computer, get back to work, and forget about all of it. But she navigated back to a new search and entered Rachel Ann James obituary, California.
This time, it was the first link in her results. It was a short paragraph from a local paper in Richmond just a few miles north of Berkeley. No details were given about how she’d died, just the year and her age, twenty-seven. Rachel is survived by her parents, Nancy and Ervin James of Richmond, California, and brother, Maxwell (35). No mention of her, the granddaughter they didn’t want.
Eva stared at the screen, listening to the blood pump in her ears. Eva had been eight. She tried to match up the childhood she remembered with this new information. Her time with Carmen and Mark. The return to the convent, when the nuns had reached out to her family again. Somewhere in there, her mother had died. And yet, her grandparents, Nancy and Ervin, finally freed from the nightmare of having an addict daughter, had still said no.
She thought about printing the obituary, taking it downstairs and knocking on Liz’s door. Asking her how any of this gave her power. As far as she was concerned, it felt like a thousand tiny cuts piercing her skin, a pain with no center, just a radiating fire that consumed her.
But instead, she cleared her search and closed her computer, settling herself into the darkness, and got to work fitting this new rejection, this new heartbreak alongside all the rest.
Claire
Saturday, February 26
That Rory lied about his last weekend with Maggie is interesting, but not incriminating in a legal sense. Of course, he would make himself look sympathetic when recounting the story to me, his new girlfriend, and I can’t begin to guess why Maggie might have changed her mind and gone anyways. But Maggie’s reference to a scary argument chills me, because I know what Rory’s temper looks like, how easily she could have ended up at the bottom of that staircase.
But the note doesn’t prove anything other than they fought. Which was widely reported at the time. What nags at me is how Charlie Flanagan is connected to that weekend in 1992. That’s the key to figuring out everything. Perhaps he was the one to organize the payoffs Aunt Mary mentioned, illegally skimming them from the foundation’s account.
A quick check of the time tells me I have just a half hour until I’m supposed to meet Kelly, so I go into the kitchen and grab a Diet Coke from the fridge and take a sip, staring out the back window. As I wait for the caffeine to hit my bloodstream, I imagine Charlie releasing whatever he has to the media. Huge exposés in the New Yorker, Vanity Fair, the New York Times, stripping Rory of all his power. I know it’s a leap, but the fantasy still energizes me.
I set the can on the counter and head upstairs in search of a pair of black pants and a white top.
* * *
When I arrive at the coffee shop, Kelly is already there, waiting in her car, and I open the door and slide in.
“Ready?” Kelly asks.
“Let’s do it.”
Kelly’s phone rings as we hit the end of the block. “Jacinta,” she says into the phone. “I’m on my way to work.” She listens for a moment, and then curses. “Okay, I’ll be there in five minutes.”
She hangs up and turns the car around. “Sorry,” she says. “My daughter, Jacinta, has been working on this project for her art history class and she left the poster supplies in my trunk.”
“I don’t mind,” I tell her.
“Normally, I’d leave her to sweat it out, but she’s working with a partner and I don’t want to punish her for Jacinta’s carelessness.” She sighs. “This project has been a pain in the ass from day one.”
“What is it?”
“Compare and contrast two twentieth-century artists. Deliver an oral presentation with visuals.” She rolls her eyes. “Berkeley takes its arts education very seriously.”
“How old is your daughter?” Kelly can’t be much older than her late twenties.
“Twelve.”
She glances at me, catching my surprised expression. “I had her when I was only seventeen.”
“That must have been hard.”
Kelly shrugs. “My mother nearly killed me when she found out I was pregnant. But then it was buckle down to business.” We stop at a red light, and she glances at me. “My mom is my rock. I couldn’t work or go to