Chapter 7 - The Person Who Had Helped Richard
The answer was Richard’s mother, Elaine.
I had not considered her because she lived in Charleston and visited only a few times a year.
She had always been polite to me.
Cool toward Daniel’s memory, but never openly cruel.
When Marissa sent a preservation request relating to the disputed communications, Elaine called me herself.
“You’re dragging this too far.”
“Did you help Richard contact Susan?”
Silence.
“Elaine.”
“I helped him draft something.”
My stomach sank.
“Why?”
“Because somebody needed to think clearly.”
“About my daughter?”
“About Richard’s marriage.”
There it was.
Elaine viewed Lucy’s connection to Daniel as a threat to her son.
Not to Lucy.
Not to me.
To Richard.
She believed I had never made enough room for him.
“You kept Daniel’s last name in Lucy’s school records.”
“It is her legal name.”
“You displayed photographs.”
“He was her father.”
“You spent Christmas Eve with his parents.”
“They are her grandparents.”
Every normal fact sounded offensive when Elaine listed it.
Finally she said:
“My son deserved a wife who was fully married to him.”
I answered:
“And my daughter deserved adults who understood she didn’t become half-orphaned just to make Richard comfortable.”
Elaine hung up.
Her involvement explained another clue.
The weekend I was in Chicago, she had been visiting.
She and Richard boxed several of Daniel’s belongings.
Richard later claimed contractors misplaced them.
Elaine admitted one bin was taken to a donation center.
Another went into Richard’s office because he had not decided what to do with it.
The third remained unaccounted for.
I felt physically sick.
Family photographs.
Letters Daniel had written Lucy while I was pregnant.
A recording of him reading Goodnight Moon because he traveled often for work.
Things money could not replace.
Richard called them clutter.
Elaine called them unhealthy.
Neither asked me.
Then Susan told me about one more missing object.
A leather-bound journal Daniel had kept during Lucy’s first year.
“He showed it to us once,” she said. “He wrote letters to her in it.”
I remembered.
Blue leather.
Daniel had written one page each month.
I thought it was inside the lost bins.
Susan’s voice became careful.
“Amanda, if Richard has been going through Daniel’s things…”
“Yes?”
“There’s something in that journal he may have misunderstood.”
“What?”
Susan hesitated.
May you like
“Something Daniel wrote about you.”
For the first time, Richard’s obsession with erasing Daniel seemed tied to more than jealousy over Lucy.
