Chapter 4 - The Woman Using My Name
Adrian insisted on driving.
I called Eleanor.
He called the bank.
By the time we arrived, police were already outside.
The woman using my identity was gone.
She had entered the vault.
Opened Rose’s box.
Then left through an employee corridor before security realized the identification was fraudulent.
The box remained.
Empty.
Almost.
Inside was a single music-box cylinder.
And a photograph of my mother.
Someone had written across it:
SHE SHOULD HAVE STAYED DEAD.
I stopped breathing.
Adrian took the photograph before Lucia could see it.
“Who knew about this box?”
The bank manager checked old records.
Rose.
A trustee named Margaret Vale.
Eleanor.
And—
Charles Winthrop.
Celeste’s father.
Adrian’s jaw locked.
Charles Winthrop wasn’t simply a businessman.
He had served as outside counsel for the Vale family for thirty years.
He knew their trusts.
Their properties.
Their secrets.
Including Rosalind.
Eleanor arrived shortly afterward.
The moment she saw the music cylinder, she nearly collapsed.
“My mother made that.”
“Your mother?”
“Lucille Vale composed the melody.”
She had also built three music boxes for her daughters and granddaughter.
One for Vivian.
One for Rosalind.
One for Eleanor herself.
Each cylinder carried a different variation.
“Why?”
Eleanor looked toward the bank employees.
“Not here.”
We moved into a private office.
Then she told us the first truth.
The melody had never been merely a family song.
Lucille Vale had married into immense wealth but distrusted her husband.
During the 1970s, she discovered he was using Vale-owned galleries to move stolen European art through shell collectors.
She kept evidence.
But she feared paper could be destroyed.
So she encoded names and storage locations into music.
Different melodic phrases corresponded to specific properties.
The choreography provided numbers.
Steps.
Turns.
Directions.
“The falling star was a key?”
Eleanor nodded.
“My mother taught Rose because Rose had perfect recall.”
“And Vivian?”
“Not all of it.”
Adrian looked disturbed.
His mother had died when he was seventeen.
Car accident.
Another tragedy inside a family apparently constructed from them.
“What happened to Rosalind?”
Eleanor closed her eyes.
“Charles said she stole evidence and ran away.”
Charles Winthrop.
Again.
“He was nineteen then,” Adrian said.
“His father worked for us.”
So the Winthrops had been intertwined with the Vales for generations.
Eleanor continued.
The night Rosalind disappeared, she had confronted Eleanor’s husband, Henry Vale, about the stolen art.
Then the conservatory burned.
Police found Rosalind’s bracelet.
No body.
Henry insisted she was dead.
Charles Winthrop Sr. handled the investigation privately.
Case closed.
Until tonight.
“Why would Rose hide if she survived?”
Eleanor looked at me.
“Because she thought I chose Henry over her.”
“Did you?”
Silence.
That was enough.
Then Lucia asked:
“Who’s Henry?”
Eleanor whispered:
“My husband.”
Adrian’s grandfather.
Dead twelve years.
Apparently.
I no longer trusted death.
The bank manager returned.
Police had identified the woman using my name from exterior cameras.
Adrian looked at the image.
“Celeste?”
No.
The woman resembled me.
But she was older.
Perhaps fifty.
Eleanor stared.
Then whispered:
“Vivian.”
Adrian froze.
“My mother is dead.”
Eleanor stood so quickly the chair fell backward.
The bank manager turned the laptop toward us.
Adrian’s mother, Vivian Vale, had supposedly died nineteen years earlier.
Yet a woman with her face had just stolen Rose’s safe-deposit box.
Then Eleanor said something even stranger.
“That cannot be Vivian.”
“Why?”
She pointed at the woman’s left hand.
Six fingers.
Adrian frowned.
“My mother had five.”
May you like
Eleanor whispered:
“But Rosalind was born with six.”
