Ashes of a forgotten wife

Chapter4

Chapter 4: The Woman in Reading Room B

Evelyn's POV

Thursday morning came in gray and cool, the kind of Goldport morning that smelled like wet stone and coffee.

Evelyn told Sandra she was running an errand. She did not say more than that.

She arrived at the Goldport Central Library at nine fifty-five and found Reading Room B on the second floor, tucked between the history section and a wall of tall windows. The room was mostly empty. Two elderly men read newspapers at opposite ends of a long table. A woman in a green coat sat near the window with her back to the door.

Evelyn sat down across from her.

The woman turned around.

Evelyn had never seen her before. She was perhaps fifty years old, with grey at her temples and a face that had once been pretty and still held the memory of it. Her eyes were red-rimmed, as if she had been crying recently or had not slept in a very long time.

"Emilia," the woman said, as if trying the name out. Then, quieter, "Evelyn."

"Who are you?" Evelyn asked.

The woman folded her hands on the table. "My name is Patricia Cole. Five years ago, I drove the car that followed you to Goldport Bridge."

The air in the room did not change. The elderly men turned their newspaper pages. A pigeon walked along the window ledge outside.

Evelyn did not move.

"Keep talking," she said.

Patricia's hands tightened on the table. "I was hired through a third party. I was told it was a surveillance job, that I only needed to follow you and report your location. I didn't know..." Her voice broke slightly. "I didn't know what those two men were going to do to you until I saw them push you. By the time I realized, you were already in the water."

"And you drove away," Evelyn said.

"Yes." No excuses. Just the word.

Evelyn looked at her steadily. "Why are you coming to me now? It's been five years."

"Because the person who hired those men just hired someone to find you," Patricia said. "I still have contacts in that world, people who trade information. Three weeks ago, rumour started flying that someone had paid a private investigator to trace a woman who survived the Goldport Bridge incident five years ago." Patricia leaned forward. "It's not Anthony Valour who hired the investigator. I checked."

"Then who?" Evelyn asked.

Patricia said the name.

Evelyn sat very still.

"Tonia," she said flatly.

Patricia nodded. "Your cousin knows you're alive. She's known for two months. And she's very afraid."

Evelyn leaned back in her chair and looked at the ceiling for one moment, then back at Patricia.

"She's afraid because if I'm alive," Evelyn said, "then everything she built is standing on sand."

"Yes," Patricia said. "She framed you for that theft, she arranged your death, she took your husband, and she has raised her son in your place. If you resurface with proof, her entire life collapses."

"And what do you want from me?" Evelyn asked.

Patricia reached into her bag and pulled out a sealed envelope. She set it on the table and pushed it across.

"Inside that envelope is an audio recording from the night the plan was made. You'll hear two voices. One is Tonia's. The other belongs to a man who worked for the Valour family for twelve years, a fixer named Vincent Cole." She paused. "He was my husband."

Evelyn's eyes dropped to the envelope.

"He died fourteen months ago," Patricia continued. "He left me that recording. He kept it as protection, he said. I kept it because I didn't know what else to do with it. When I heard you were back in Goldport, I knew it was time to do something with it."

Evelyn picked up the envelope.

It was heavy for something so small.

"You understand," Evelyn said carefully, "that this recording alone may not be enough. Courts need more than audio."

"I know," Patricia said. "But it's a start. Moreover, I know where Vincent kept the rest of his files." She met Evelyn's eyes. "I'll give you everything…All of it. But I need something from you first."

"What?"

Patricia's voice dropped low. "My son, Francis. He's twenty-three. He doesn't know what his father did. He has a clean life, a good job, and a future. When this comes out, and it will come out, I need your word that you will protect him. That you won't let what his father did touch him."

Evelyn looked at this woman who had driven a car away from a crime and carried it for five years in silence.

She was not a good person.

But she was a desperate mother.

Evelyn understood desperate mothers better than almost anything.

"You have my word," Evelyn said.

Patricia exhaled slowly, as if she had been holding that breath for five years.

Evelyn tucked the envelope into her bag and stood.

"Don't contact me again unless I contact you first," she said. "And if anyone asks, we've never met."

She walked out of the reading room and down the library stairs and through the big front doors into the cool gray morning.

On the pavement outside, she stopped walking.

Her phone was buzzing. It was Mirabel from Valour Industries.

"Miss Cross, we've completed your background check. We'd love to have you start on Monday if you're available. Benjamin has apparently told his father three separate times today that he's choosing his own caregiver this time."

Despite everything in her bag and everything in her chest, Evelyn almost smiled.

"Monday works perfectly," she said.

She put the phone in her pocket and started walking.

Behind her, in a black car parked across the street from the library, a man lowered his camera and looked at the photographs on his screen.

The last photo showed Evelyn's face clearly, mid-step, chin lifted, expression unguarded.

The man sent the images to a number and typed three words below them.

Found her… Confirmed.