Chapter 3 - THE NAME IN THE RECORDS
The lawyer Camila hired arrived in a battered green sedan and introduced herself as Naomi Bell, a woman who had spent fifteen years representing tenants, dockworkers and people who discovered that the signature on a document did not always belong to the person named beneath it.
Naomi accepted Camila's explanation without marveling at the size of the estate. They sat at a public library in Ashford rather than inside Vincent's house. Mia arranged picture books on a carpet near the circulation desk, watched by Mrs. Alves, who had volunteered to come along without asking for any special permission.
"We don't start with the Curados," Naomi said. "We start with what your mother knows and what you can corroborate."
Elena appeared on the video screen from a quiet room at her dialysis center. She had asked a hospital social worker to sit beside her. Camila was relieved to see someone who could notice if her mother became unwell or distressed.
Elena looked smaller than she had on Sunday. Still, when Naomi introduced herself, she straightened with the old careful dignity Camila recognized from crowded waiting rooms and landlords' offices.
"I worked for the Curados," she began. "My name then was Helena Voss. Voss was my mother's surname. Elena Serrat was my legal birth name. I had no criminal reason to change it, but I did have a frightened one."
She explained that she had worked as a junior clerk for the harbor authority before taking a temporary post at the estate. Vincent and Adrien had inherited different kinds of responsibility from their father: Vincent the operating businesses, Adrien the shipping archives and an interest in the workers their father regarded as replaceable. Their arguments were legendary among the staff. Adrien questioned the ownership of Berth 6, a parcel used for decades by independent fishermen until the Curado group secured a long lease. The paperwork contained competing maps and an old maritime trust dating back to the North Star.
"Adrien found records showing that the trust had promised to fund safety improvements along the coast," Elena said. "Money had been collected from tenants. None of the promised work was finished. There was an account nobody could reconcile."
"Who controlled it?" Naomi asked.
"Their father at first. After his death, the account passed through trustees. One of them was a man named Owen Baird."
Vincent had never mentioned Baird. Camila wrote down the name.
"Why did Adrien disappear?"
Elena glanced at the social worker, then back at the camera. "He was going to deliver copies to a maritime inquiry. On the night he left, somebody followed him toward the old private dock. I heard shouting. I found his jacket near a boat, blood on the sleeve. When I went to call the harbor police, Desmond told me the brothers had arranged a private meeting and I should go home."
"Did you see a body?" Naomi asked.
"No."
"Did you see Adrien leave the dock?"
"No."
"Then what did you know for certain?"
Elena hesitated. "That he was hurt. That the papers disappeared. That the next morning Vincent told the household Adrien had taken a boat into the storm."
Camila thought of Vincent's face when Mia sang the compass rhyme. "Did you believe him?"
"I believed he believed it. There is a difference."
Elena admitted that Adrien had given her the right half of a silver compass. The left half remained with Vincent, though she did not know that for years. In the concealed hinge Adrien had put the location of a documentary cache, not a fortune or a weapon, but evidence about title to the harbor land and money owed to workers whose families had been ignored. He had asked Elena to keep her half if anything happened to him.
"Where is it?" Camila asked.
"I gave it to someone who promised to return it to Adrien if he lived."
"Who?"
"Desmond Ferraro."
The answer hurt because Camila had trusted Desmond with the paper boat, the threatening letters and her daughter's safety. She told Naomi that the head of security had been in the photograph at the dock twenty-seven years earlier. Naomi did not conclude that he was guilty. She asked for the image, the original envelope and the officer's report reference so the timeline could be verified.
After the call, Camila walked with Mia beside the library's little garden. Her daughter wanted to know why Grandma Elena had cried. Camila told her the truth in the size a three-year-old could carry: Grandma had remembered something sad and was getting help telling people about it.
"Can I tell her the song?" Mia asked.
"Of course. The song belongs to her too."
On the journey back, Mrs. Alves admitted that she had worked for the Curados when Adrien disappeared. She remembered the official announcement and the house full of people who suddenly would not meet one another's eyes. She also remembered a second detail, insignificant at the time: Vincent's right hand was bandaged the morning after the disappearance, and he stopped wearing his father's signet ring for months.
"You think he hurt his brother?" Camila asked.
"I think something happened that morning. I was a cook then. People told cooks a great deal because they assumed we couldn't do anything useful with what we heard."
Mrs. Alves explained that Desmond, younger then, had argued with Vincent on the back steps. She had heard only one sentence: "The boy is alive, and you know it." At the time she assumed it concerned a dockworker's injured son. Now she wondered whether she had misunderstood.
Camila brought the recollection to Naomi rather than confronting Vincent. It belonged beside other testimony, not above it. Naomi requested that Mrs. Alves write down what she remembered, including uncertainties. When the statement was complete, Mrs. Alves signed and dated it. She looked oddly relieved.
That evening Vincent came to the apartment to explain that the cottage had been entered through an old estate gate and that an unknown occupant had left before security arrived. Desmond said the place contained blankets, a heating unit and maps of the coast, but no identification. Camila asked whether they had reported the intrusion to local authorities. Vincent said they had.
"And did you tell them about your brother?"
"I said the occupant might know something about him."
"Did you tell them you may have been wrong about his death?"
Vincent's gaze went to the little green shoes lined up beside Mia's door. "Not in those words."
"Then use those words."
He looked at her for a long moment. "You're not afraid of insulting me."
"I am afraid," she replied. "I'm just more afraid of what happens when everyone keeps protecting your feelings."
Vincent called the investigating officer in her presence and corrected his statement. Camila listened without speaking. The small honesty mattered more to her than his earlier expressions of concern.
Two days later, an investigator from the harbor authority came to inspect archived leases. Her name was Laila Chen. She had learned about renewed questions surrounding Berth 6 from Naomi, who filed a preservation request. Laila asked for records from the old trust, including correspondence signed by Owen Baird. Vincent authorized access to business records, though he insisted that his lawyers first separate unrelated private materials. Laila explained the limits of that request and obtained the proper orders for what the estate refused to provide voluntarily.
Camila watched the process from a distance. It surprised her to discover how ordinary scrutiny looked. Nobody shouted. Nobody produced an elegant confession beneath a chandelier. People compared page numbers, photographed seals, described missing files and asked why a document from one year had been inserted between two from another.
Late that afternoon Laila found a ledger marked EASTERN NAVIGATION TRUST. A page appeared to have been carefully cut out, leaving a narrow strip caught in the binding. The remaining columns listed assessments paid by small-boat owners. Against most names, the reimbursement column was empty.
"This is a lot of money," Camila said when Laila showed her an authorized summary.
"The amount matters," Laila answered. "But so does the fact that some people were told their family's access to the coast depended on paying it."
Mia came running up the hall carrying an otter drawing and stopped when she saw the ledger. She pointed at the ink drawing stamped on its cover: a compass with two stars.
"Like my song," she declared.
Everybody looked at her. Camila wanted to gather the child and leave before another adult decided that a toddler was the missing piece of a criminal investigation.
Instead Laila crouched and said, "Then it must be a lovely song."
Mia sang the first line, out of tune and with complete confidence. Laila's expression remained warm. But Vincent, standing in the doorway, had gone pale.
"My mother wrote that song," he said.
Camila shook her head. "Elena said her father taught it to her."
"Then somebody is mistaken," Vincent replied.
Laila closed the ledger gently. "Or the song has more than one history. We should find out before making it evidence of anything."
May you like
When she turned the book over, a paper fell from the cracked spine. It was a receipt for a private storage vault in the name of the late Estelle Curado. The vault had been accessed three weeks earlier.
The signature on the receipt belonged to Desmond Ferraro.
