Gwen tugged the yellowed paper from the file and passed it over to Oriana. Oriana had to take a moment to figure out what she was looking at.
It was an old-fashioned sonogram. It was a baby. It was dated June 1975.
The mother was Henrietta Johannes.
Oriana’s jaw hung open with surprise. “My goodness.”
“I found it just the other day in a stack of old hospital records,” Gwen admitted. “Everything ends up here, including everything the hospital doesn’t know what to do with. I was thinking of calling someone, in fact. I was wondering what to do with it. But now, here you are, as though you read my mind and knew to come down here and see it.”
Oriana’s heart thumped. Everything she’d heard was that Larry desperately wanted a child. Obviously, Gwen knew that too.
“What do you think this means?” Oriana asked, her voice catching.
Gwen raised her shoulders. “I’m not the smart type. Not from the city. Didn’t go to college.”
Oriana knew that Gwen was putting on a show of sorts. She looked Gwen dead in the eye and said, “He wouldn’t have killed her if he knew she was pregnant.”
“No,” Gwen admitted. “But we don’t know if he knew.”
Oriana set down the old and primitive-looking sonogram and crossed her arms. “Is it possible that the baby wasn’t his? Was she having an affair?”
“Nobody’s ever made any mention of that,” Gwen said. “And in this town, somebody would have known. Somebody would have talked.”
“So you think he did something to her.”
“I don’t know,” Gwen said. “It’s possible that the baby made her realize something about herself. It’s possible she realized she needed to get out.”
“He wouldn’t have let her leave without a fight,” Oriana breathed.
“No, I imagine not,” Gwen said, her face glum. “I wish I could tell you I remembered what happened to her. I wish I could tell you I remembered someone more than a very small, meek-looking woman who let her husband boss her around and yell at her in public. But that’s what I remember. That’s what everyone around here remembers. But what people don’t know is what we see right here in this file.” She dotted the tip of her finger against the sonogram. “It changes things.”
“A baby always does,” Oriana said.
Fifteen minutes later, Oriana left the records’ office and walked back through the snowstorm to the hotel, where she found Reese awake and watching an old movie starring Al Pacino. Overcome with what she’d learned, she put on herpajamas and crawled into bed beside him. She burrowed her face in his chest and let herself cry and cry.
What she knew for sure was that fifty years ago, a young woman named Henrietta had come up against a horrifying situation. She didn’t know what had happened to her after that.
But whether Henrietta was alive or dead, Oriana knew that Larry didn’t care about her. Maybe he’d never cared about anyone but himself. And now that he was extremely wealthy and famous, none of it mattered, not to him.
Chapter Fifteen
All night and into the morning, snow fell across Nederland and the Rocky Mountains, trapping Oriana and Reese inside. Mercifully, their hot tub remained out of the way, which allowed them to sit in the bubbles and watch the white pile up. No surprise that Monica couldn’t make it out of Denver that day. It meant that Oriana and Reese would extend their trip a little while. It meant that they would wait till Monica could make it in. It meant more steak dinners and movies in bed, more pretending like the rest of the world could go on without them. Oriana felt she’d never been more in love with Reese, nor more afraid that by the end of the year she would lose him.
When the snow clouds cleared and the plows rolled through the mountain roads, Monica called to say she was heading up. By then, Oriana had secured Larry’s brand-new paintings in an airtight warehouse that would protect them from the elements. As Oriana and Reese waited for Monica, they had breakfast at the hotel and went for a walk through the sparkling snow of downtown. They happened to pass by Gwen and a little fluffy black dog, which popped up to lick Oriana’s hand and say hello.
“Have I missed anything on the news yet?” Gwen asked Oriana knowingly.
Oriana winced. She knew that people like Gwen wanted Henrietta’s case to be solved as soon as possible. But there was still so little she understood. She couldn’t very well bring what she had to the cops yet, either. It was thinner than ice after the first freeze.
“These things take a little time,” Oriana offered finally.
“Sometimes they take more than fifty years,” Gwen said. Her face was morose.
When they parted ways, Reese slung his arm around Oriana and nestled her close. “You’re doing everything in your power to figure this out,” he assured her. “It’s going to be all right.”
Three hours later, Oriana met Monica in the parking lot outside the warehouse. Reese was back at the hotel resting, which gave Oriana and Monica plenty of time to dig into the topic they loved most: the art world and all its strange variables and characters. Oriana threw her arms around Monica. “It’s so incredible to see you! You look amazing as always.”
Monica laughed outright and squeezed her back hard. “What’s it been? Ten years? Fifteen?”
