Chapter 9 - The Man Who Watched Her Run
By 3:00 a.m., Founders’ Night had ended without founders, speeches, or music.
The guests went home with rumors.
I stayed.
I should have left.
Instead, I sat in a hotel room worth more per night than my mother’s monthly rent and stared at a picture of a man I might have called Dad.
David Mercer had kind eyes.
That made me angry.
I wanted him to look cruel. Easier that way.
Sebastian knocked once and entered only when I answered.
He carried two mugs of coffee.
“I don’t drink coffee after midnight,” I said.
“Neither do I. Tonight appears poorly organized.”
I took the mug.
For a minute, we sat in silence.
“Why didn’t you find us?” I asked.
He looked at the floor.
“I believed Clara hated me.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“No.”
He rubbed both hands over the cane handle.
“I chose the company.”
There it was.
Not a villain’s excuse.
A coward’s confession.
“When Andrew showed me the transfer and Clara disappeared, I believed she had betrayed us. Later, I began to doubt it.”
“How much later?”
“Five years.”
I laughed quietly.
“I was seven.”
“I know.”
“And you still did nothing.”
“Andrew told me Clara had threatened to release documents proving I authorized early Atlas payments. He said if I contacted her, she would destroy Valle Hospitality.”
“So you protected your company.”
“Yes.”
“Over your daughter.”
His eyes filled.
“Yes.”
I hated him a little for saying it honestly.
It would have been easier if he lied.
At 7:15 a.m., Nathan called.
He had found one living employee from 1999 who worked the service desk the night Clara fled.
Joseph Park lived in Evanston.
He was eighty-three.
He agreed to meet.
Joseph opened his apartment door wearing slippers and a Cubs sweatshirt.
When he saw Sebastian, he said, “Took you long enough.”
I liked him immediately.
He remembered my mother.
“Clara was scared, but she wasn’t running from police.”
“Who was she running from?” I asked.
Joseph looked at Sebastian.
“Your son.”
Sebastian went still.
Joseph continued.
“Andrew came downstairs ten minutes after Clara left. No wheelchair then, obviously. He told me if anyone asked, Clara had stolen money and attacked him.”
“What did you see?”
“Clara had blood on her sleeve. Baby in one arm. Folder under the other. She asked for a taxi.”
“Did she say anything?”
Joseph smiled sadly.
“She said, ‘If my father asks, tell him I tried.’”
Sebastian looked away.
Joseph walked to a cabinet and removed an old key.
“She gave me this.”
He placed it in my palm.
“Why keep it?”
“Because she said someday a girl with her eyes might come back.”
My throat closed.
“What does it open?”
Joseph pointed toward the hotel visible across the lakefront skyline in the distance.
“Something your family pretends doesn’t exist.”
He turned the key over.
Stamped into the metal were two numbers.
B-17.
Sebastian whispered, “The old sub-basement vault.”
Joseph nodded.
“And if Clara was right, what’s inside is the reason they wanted her gone.”
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