the young man who had disappeared into the woods with my sister and Margot Green and Doug Billingham nearly twenty years ago.
York's message said: "Sorry it took me so long to get this. You asked about Raya Singh, the victims girlfriend. We only had a cell on her, believe it or not. Anyway, we called up. She works at an Indian restaurant on Route 3 near the Lincoln Tunnel." He gave me the name and ad dress. "She's supposed to be there all day. Hey, if you learn anything about Santiago's real name, let me know. Far as we can tell, he's had the alias for a while. We got some hits on him out in the Los Angeles area from six years ago. Nothing heavy. Talk to you later."
I wondered what to make of that. Not much. I headed to my car, and as soon as I started to slide in, I knew something was very wrong.
There was a manila envelope sitting on the driver's seat.
I knew it wasn't mine. I knew I hadn't left it here. And I knew that I had locked my car doors. Someone had broken into my car. I stopped and picked up the envelope. No address, no postage. The front was totally blank. It felt thin. I sat down in the front seat and closed the door behind me. The envelope was sealed. I slit it open with my index finger. I reached in and plucked out the contents.
Ice poured in my veins when I saw what it was:
A photograph of my father.
I frowned. What the...?
On the bottom, neatly typed on the white border, was his name and the year: "Vladimir Copeland." That was all. I didn't get it.
I just sat there for a moment. I stared at the photograph of my be loved father. I thought about how he had been a young doctor in Lenin grad, how so much had been taken away from him, how his life ended up being an endless series of tragedies and disappointments. I remember him arguing with my mother, both of them wounded with no one to strike at but each other. I remembered my mother crying by herself. I remembered sitting some of those nights with Camille. She and I never fought, weird for a brother and sister, but may be we had seen enough. Sometimes she would take my hand or say that we should take a walk. But most of the time we would go into her room and Camille would put on one other favorite dopey pop songs and tell me about it, about why she liked it, as if it had hidden meanings, and then she'd tell me about some boy she liked at school. I would sit there and listen and feel the strangest contentment.
I didn't get it. Why was this photograph...?
There was something else in the envelope.
I turned it upside down. Nothing. I dug with my hand to the bottom. It felt like an index card. I pulled it into view. Yep, an index card. White with red lines. That side-the lined side-was left blank. But on the other side, the side that was plain white, someone had typed three words all in caps:
THE FIRST SKELETON
"You know who sent the journal?" Lucy asked. "Not yet," Lonnie said. "But I will." "How?" Lonnie kept his head down. Gone was the confident swagger. Lucy felt bad about that. He didn't like what she was making him do. She didn't like it either. But there was no choice here. She had worked hard to conceal her past. She had changed her name. She had not let Paul find her. She had gotten rid of her naturally blond hair-man, how many women her age had naturally blond hair?-and replaced it with this brown mess.
"Okay," she said. "You'll be here when I get back?"
He nodded. Lucy headed down the stairs to her car.
On TV it seems so easy to get a new identity. Maybe it was, but Lucy hadn't found that to be the case. It was a slow process. She started by changing her last name from Silverstein to Gold. Silver to Gold. Clever, no? She didn't think so, but somehow it worked for her, still gave her a link to the father she had so loved.
She had moved around the country. The camp was long gone. So were all her father's assets. And so, in the end, was most of her father.
What remained of Ira Silverstein, her father, was housed in