A Name from Twenty-Four Years Ago
Chapter 04 - A Name from Twenty-Four Years Ago
The secondary camera showed Claire entering the employee floor at 7:49.
She had Emma’s badge in her hand.
At 7:52, she came back out.
Claire stared at the screen.
Victoria stepped away from her.
“You planted my bracelet?”
Claire’s composure broke.
“No. I was told to put something in the locker. I didn’t know what it was.”
“By whom?” Julian asked.
Claire looked at Emma.
Then at Julian.
“I can’t say.”
Julian’s voice hardened.
“You can say it now, or you can explain it to the police.”
Claire began to cry.
Emma almost laughed at the cruelty of it. Thirty minutes earlier, Claire had watched her cry in front of a ballroom full of strangers.
Now Claire wanted sympathy.
“I got a call three days ago,” she said. “Someone said Emma Reed couldn’t be allowed to speak to Julian tonight.”
Julian looked at Emma.
“Speak to me about what?”
Emma’s stomach tightened.
She had not told anyone.
In the pocket sewn inside her uniform was a letter her mother had given her that morning.
A letter with Julian Mercer’s name on it.
Emma reached inside her jacket.
Victoria watched closely.
Claire whispered, “That’s what they wanted.”
Emma unfolded the old paper.
“My mother asked me to give you this.”
Julian did not take it immediately.
“Who is your mother?”
“Laura Reed.”
The blood left his face.
Victoria stared at him.
Julian whispered the name again.
“Laura?”
Emma nodded.
“You know her?”
Julian looked suddenly older.
Twenty-four years earlier, before the hotel empire and magazine covers, Julian Mercer had been a nineteen-year-old kitchen worker at the old Halston Hotel.
Laura Reed had been a nineteen-year-old housekeeper.
They had been in love.
Then one morning, Laura disappeared.
Julian had spent years believing she had left without saying goodbye.
Emma held out the letter.
“My mother said you were lied to.”
Julian slowly took it.
The letter was dated twenty-four years earlier.
May you like
And the first line read:
Julian, your father offered my family fifty thousand dollars to disappear before you learned I was pregnant.
