She noticed the pink envelope before removing her coat.
“You didn’t open it.”
“What did you know?”
Claire sat in the chair that still bore our mother’s needlepoint cushion.
“I knew Florence when she used another last name.”
“What name?”
“Florence Pike.”
I stared at her.
“You mean Adrian Pike is related to her?”
“He is her nephew.”
“Why does her nephew care about Mom?”
Claire clasped her hands.
“Because she once worked for his father.”
Our mother had been a bookkeeper for a local children’s charity before she vanished.
I remembered donation drives, summer fairs, and the heavy boxes of files she brought home during tax season.
I had never thought those papers mattered.
Claire opened her satchel and removed a family photograph.
The picture showed our mother standing beside a group of volunteers in front of the old Hope House community center.
A younger Florence stood at the far end, holding a ledger.
Behind them was a man with a narrow face and a silver pocket watch.
Claire tapped the man’s image.
“That is Malcolm Pike.”
I recognized him from a newspaper photograph.
He had been praised for funding scholarships until his death ten years earlier.
Claire then unfolded a second photograph.
Our mother stood at a bus station beside a teenage boy whose face had been scratched out with a pen.
On the back, somebody had written a date three days after her disappearance.
“Where did you get this?” I asked.
Claire’s eyes filled.
“Florence sent it to me last month.”
“And you said nothing?”
“I was trying to learn whether it was real.”
I wanted to shout.
Instead, I heard myself ask the question that had kept me awake for seventeen years.
“Was Mom alive after she left?”
Claire nodded.
Chapter 5: What the Mailbox Had Marked
Claire explained that she had received three anonymous letters over the previous month.
Each contained a photograph and a demand that she sign a statement declaring our mother unstable.
The proposed statement described Ruth as a confused woman who had stolen charity money.
Claire had refused to sign.
“Why didn’t you go to the police?” I asked.
“I did.”
“What happened?”
“They recorded the messages but couldn’t identify a crime from the letters alone.”
She had then contacted a lawyer, Naomi Sloane, who was tracing the charity’s dissolution records.
Last Thursday, Naomi found a reference to a sealed deposit made in our mother’s name.
The deposit had not been opened after Malcolm Pike’s death.
