Chapter 4 – THE CHILD EVERYONE FORGOT
Richard grabbed the newspaper.
“What daughter?”
Victoria looked at him as if she’d been waiting decades to speak those words.
“Your sister, Richard.”
Eleanor closed her eyes.
Her daughter, Grace, had been seven years old when she disappeared during a family gathering in 1998.
Grace was Richard’s much younger half-sister, born during Eleanor’s second marriage.
The little girl had loved red ribbons and refused to sleep without her stuffed white rabbit.
One afternoon, she vanished from the manor’s garden.
Police searched the surrounding forest for weeks.
No body was ever found.
Richard had been away at college at the time, and his mother had fallen apart under the weight of the investigation.
Victoria had entered the family months later as a business consultant.
“Your mother accused innocent people,” Victoria said. “She destroyed reputations.”
Eleanor stepped toward her.
“I accused the people who had access to Grace that afternoon.”
Victoria’s expression hardened.
“Be careful.”
Samuel opened his briefcase again.
“There’s something else.”
He withdrew a sealed envelope delivered to his office three days earlier.
Inside was a photograph taken at a small-town train station in 2004.
A teenage girl stood beside an unfamiliar woman.
The girl’s face was partially turned away.
But tied around her wrist was a faded red ribbon.
On the back someone had written:
She survived. They changed her name.
Sophie leaned closer.
“Grandma… who’s ‘they’?”
Before Eleanor could respond, a loud crash came from the hallway.
Someone had broken the glass cabinet containing the family’s old security recordings.
And the one original tape from the day Grace disappeared was missing.
Sophie discovered the back door was open and saw Richard’s longtime security chief, Charles Mercer, running toward the garage with the tape case.