Chapter 9 - What Thomas Knew
Thomas Patterson had died five years earlier.
Heart attack.
At least that was what everyone believed.
He had always been kind to me.
Too kind, perhaps.
He called me Rebecca once during our engagement.
When I corrected him, he claimed he had confused me with a coworker.
Now I knew better.
Thomas had known me as a child.
Helen confirmed it.
Thomas was a young paramedic who responded to the fire.
He met Diane that night.
They married two years later.
Mark was born the following year.
The connection between our families began before I even knew Mark existed.
But the cassette suggested Thomas had been inside the house before emergency services officially arrived.
Why?
Police retrieved old dispatch records.
Thomas’s ambulance had not been sent until twelve minutes after the neighbor called.
Yet his voice appeared on a recording made before the fire spread.
He had already been there.
Detective Coleman searched Thomas’s old employment history.
Before becoming a paramedic, he had worked part-time security for a private psychiatric clinic.
The same clinic where Diane had briefly been treated.
Then another connection emerged.
My mother had been a patient there after Hannah’s birth.
Diane knew my mother before becoming our babysitter.
My parents had not randomly hired her.
Diane had approached them through a childcare referral.
I began to understand why my mother distrusted her.
Maybe she discovered the connection too late.
But why drug two six-year-olds?
The old cassette gave us only fragments.
Then the clinic recovered another cloud recording.
Video twenty-two.
Diane sat beside Emma.
No medication yet.
She held an old photograph.
“Hannah?” Emma asked.
Diane froze.
“How do you know that name?”
Emma pointed toward a little girl in the photograph.
“She tells Mommy things.”
Diane leaned closer.
“What things?”
“That you made her sleepy.”
My skin crawled.
Emma had apparently seen photographs somewhere.
Maybe overheard conversations.
Maybe constructed pieces through childhood imagination.
I did not care how.
What mattered was Diane’s response.
She immediately took out her phone.
Called someone.
“The child knows about Hannah.”
A distorted voice answered.
Male.
“Then handle it.”
Diane whispered:
“I already tried that once.”
The recording ended.
Mark watched the clip beside Detective Coleman.
He looked destroyed.
“That isn’t my father.”
“What?”
“The voice.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes.”
“Who is it?”
Mark stared at me.
“I don’t know.”
Then his expression changed.
“Wait.”
He replayed the clip.
Again.
Then again.
He looked toward me.
“My mother has a brother.”
I had never heard of one.
“His name is David Collins.”
“Where is he?”
Mark swallowed.
“My mother told me he died before I was born.”
Detective Coleman turned her laptop toward us.
David Collins was not dead.
He lived forty minutes away.
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And according to property records, he had recently purchased a house under another name.
Directly across the street from Emma’s preschool.
