Chapter 7 - Flight 273 to San Juan
Kayla Ruiz came to my house on a Tuesday morning, and she would not come inside at first.
She stood on my porch with her cab company jacket zipped to her chin and said she had two hours off and that she had decided on the drive over that she owed somebody the truth.
I made her coffee and we sat at the kitchen table, and Nora was at preschool, so we had the house to ourselves.
"It was January eleventh," Kayla said.
"I picked her up on Bay Street, down at the end by the marina.
She had one bag.
She paid me in cash and she asked me to take her to the international terminal, not the regular one."
"Did she say why?"
I asked her.
Kayla wrapped both hands around the mug and looked at the table.
"She said she was getting out before it got worse."
I waited.
"She said it twice," Kayla said.
"Once when she got in and once at the curb.
Then she gave me a twenty-dollar tip and told me not to tell anybody I brought her."
I asked her whether she remembered the flight.
"Two seventy-three," Kayla said.
"San Juan.
She booked it under a different last name than the one on her license.
Vega.
She printed the ticket at the library on the corner two days before, because I saw the printout in her bag."
I sat back in my chair.
Marissa Vega.
That was the name Marcia Fenwick had used when she mentioned the trusted family name from before the marriage.
Marissa's maiden name.
"Did you drive her back from the airport?"
I asked.
"No," Kayla said.
"That's the thing.
I never saw her again.
I've been driving that route for eleven years, Mrs. Whitfield.
People come back from airports.
She didn't."
She pulled a folded piece of paper out of her jacket and slid it across the table.
It was a cab receipt with the date and the destination printed on it, and the last name Vega circled in pen.
"Why didn't you tell the police?"
I asked her.
Kayla looked up at me then, and her eyes were wet.
"Because a man called my dispatcher in February and said he was with the insurance company and wanted to know if I'd driven a woman named Marissa Cole anywhere in January," she said.
"And I said no.
I don't know why I said no.
Something about it felt wrong."
I understood exactly why she said no.
Marcia Fenwick's bank records arrived in my email that same afternoon, forwarded through my lawyer, and I sat at the kitchen table and read the columns of numbers twice because I did not want to believe what I was seeing.
There were three cash withdrawals in Puerto Rico over six weeks.
One in San Juan on January twelfth for four hundred dollars, one in Ponce on the nineteenth for three hundred, and one in Mayagüez in late February for two hundred and sixty.
Then nothing.
Six weeks of a woman spending money in a place, and then silence, as if she had set something down and walked away from it.
I printed the page and set it beside Kayla's receipt on the table, and I started to see the shape of something I had been refusing to see since the night the card appeared in my mailbox.
That evening I called Cole's insurance agent myself and pretended to be a secretary from his old office.
I want to be clear about this, because I am not proud of it.
I lied to a woman in a call center in Columbus, and I asked her to confirm that a claim had been filed on policy number ending 4471, and she confirmed it to me without a moment's hesitation, because I sounded like somebody who was supposed to know.
A claim on Marissa's life policy.
Filed in March.
While my stepson, at that very same time, was filing for custody of her daughter.
I hung up the phone and sat in the dark hallway outside Nora's bedroom for a long while, listening to her sleep, and I thought about what it meant for a man to file for custody and a death benefit on the same woman in the same month.
My phone rang at eight forty that night.
I almost did not answer it, because the number came up with no name and an area code I did not know.
It was a man with a soft accent and an old voice, and he said he was a priest at a parish in Old San Juan.
"Are you the woman caring for the little girl?" he asked me.
"I am," I said.
"There was a woman here last December," he said.
"She called herself Marissa Vega.
She stayed in our shelter for nine days.
She was afraid of someone, and she would not say who.
Before she left, she asked me to keep a copy of a letter for her daughter, in case the daughter ever came looking."
I could not speak for a moment.
"Father," I said finally, "do you still have it?"
"I have it," he said.
"And Mrs. Whitfield, you should know that she asked me to hold it until the girl was safe."
I asked him what made him sure the girl was not safe now.
"Because someone called this parish two weeks ago," he said, "asking whether a woman had ever stayed here under that name."
May you like
He paused.
"It was not you, and it was not the police."
