Chapter 8 - The Letter in the Manila Envelope
The priest emailed the scan the next morning, and I printed it at the library because my printer at home kept jamming and I did not want to sit in my kitchen and read my stepson's name on a piece of paper that had been written by a woman who was supposedly gone.
I called my lawyer, Ellen Pryor, and asked her to clear her conference room for an hour on Thursday afternoon, and I asked her to invite Cole's attorney and any officer of the court willing to listen.
I did not tell Cole.
I wanted him to hear it at the same time I did.
Ellen met me at the door of her office at three o'clock.
"Are you sure about this?" she asked me.
"I'm sure," I told her.
Cole came in twenty minutes late with his lawyer, a thin young man in a gray suit, and he did not look at me except once, at the door, and then he examined the room instead, the way people do when they are trying to decide where the exits are.
We sat at the long table, and Ellen turned on the recorder, and I set the manila envelope down in the middle of the table.
The letter was four pages long, written in blue ink on lined paper, and I had read it through eleven times the night before, so I knew where the pauses were.
I read it aloud.
"I am writing this because I am afraid of what will happen to Nora if I don't leave a record somewhere."
Cole's lawyer made a note.
Cole did not move.
"In November I found a drawer in Cole's desk that was supposed to be locked.
In it were three credit-card statements in my name that I never opened, two bank notices from Ohio, and a document with my signature on it that I did not sign."
I looked up.
Cole was looking at the table.
"I took photos of everything and sent them to my aunt, because I did not know who else to trust.
I want it on the record that I did not abandon my daughter.
I left because I believed that if I stayed, Cole would use her to get to my family's trust, and I could not let that happen while I was in the house where he could watch me."
I turned the page.
"I am not asking anyone to forgive me.
I am asking whoever reads this to make sure my daughter grows up with someone who will not lie to her."
I turned the last page.
"If something happens to me, look at the life policy.
I never signed it, and I never agreed to be insured by him."
I set the letter down.
For a moment nobody spoke.
Then Ellen slid a second document across the table and said she was entering the forgeries into the record, and Cole's lawyer asked for a recess, and the judge's clerk, who had joined by phone at Ellen's request, said that we would keep going.
Cole did not say a word the entire hour.
It was his lawyer who finally spoke.
"Mrs. Whitfield," he said, "your stepson will of course cooperate with any review."
"Then you won't mind him telling us the code to the storage unit on Ridge Road," I said.
Cole looked up at me for the first time that afternoon.
I had learned about the unit three days earlier from Marcia Fenwick, who had found the key on a ring in a kitchen drawer Marissa had left behind and had held on to it because it had a tag with a name on it that was not Cole's.
Marissa's maiden name.
A U.S. marshal served the search warrant that evening, and I waited in the parking lot with Ellen while they worked, because I was too angry to go home.
They found Nora's passport in a manila envelope, along with a second notarized page with my signature on it that I had never seen and a photocopy of a flight itinerary to Puerto Rico with a return date left blank.
The judge awarded me temporary permanent custody of Nora the following morning, pending a federal review of Marissa's disappearance.
I drove straight to the preschool from the courthouse and I picked up my granddaughter early.
She came running down the little ramp with her backpack bouncing, and she stopped two steps short of me and looked up at my face and asked me if I was mad.
"No, baby," I said.
"Gramma won."
She thought about that.
"Does that mean I get to stay?" she asked.
May you like
"Yes," I said.
And I knelt down on the sidewalk outside the preschool and held her, and for the first time since the day at the pool, I let myself cry where somebody could see me.
