by R. G. Belsky
If Grayson knows, he won’t say. And Devlin told me that day at his house, he never found out their identities. I went back over the list of people Anne Devlin “befriended” following Lucy’s disappearance. I made a list of people with children who were never found and remained classified as missing after all these years. I assume that some of them might be in that grave, but I can’t be sure. I can’t be sure either that Anne Devlin didn’t kill other children besides those six whose bodies might turn up sometime in the future or else never at all.
I also continue to wonder about the deaths of Sandy Marston and Louise Carbone.
Why did Marston come running out of that farmhouse waving a gun when he knew he would be cut down by sharpshooters surrounding the place? Okay, probably because he’d killed a guy in a bar and he knew he had nothing to lose. But what if it hadn’t happened that way? Again, we only had Grayson’s account of the incident, and I knew now that he had lied about so many other things.
And what about Big Lou? The young federal agent who shot her to death even though she was unarmed got promoted and received a big pay raise. I tried to talk to him, but he stuck to his official version of the story. Did Grayson buy him off for his silence? I have no proof of any of this.
But I believe in my heart that Grayson saw an opportunity to keep Marston and Big Lou quiet about what they knew and he’d taken it. I didn’t know exactly how he did it, and I probably never will. But the deaths of Marston and Big Lou seemed too convenient for his Senate campaign to be just a coincidence.
I am suspicious, too, about other things—and not convinced that either Elliott Grayson or Patrick Devlin told me the whole story of everything they know.
For one thing, who was the body of the little girl found in the Dutchess County grave that was supposed to be Lucy Devlin? And where did the body come from? Did Grayson somehow know about the murder of another little girl and keep it secret, knowing he might need it to pull off that subterfuge? Or—and I hesitated to even consider the possibility—was that body really Lucy, just like Marston’s note claimed, and Grayson was lying about her being alive to keep me quiet about the rest?
Also, did Patrick never suspect that it was Grayson who had helped abduct Lucy after their conversation about the horrors going on in that house with her mother? And, it also seemed awfully coincidental that it was Grayson who oversaw the exhumation of the six bodies that Patrick buried in New Hampshire if there really was no connection between either of the men on all this.
The biggest question, though, the one that continues to haunt me, is who wrote that original e-mail. The one to Anne Devlin that started it all with the claim of seeing Lucy with a biker named Elliott in Mountainboro, New Hampshire. Without that e-mail, none of this would have happened and the secrets of Lucy Devlin and the others might have remained hidden forever.
I’ve run all sorts of possibilities through my mind.
It could have been Teddy Weller, Grayson’s primary opponent, who wanted to smear him politically. Maybe even Grayson himself, since the results helped him get elected. Maybe Sandy Marston or Big Lou to help in their extortion efforts against Grayson. Maybe Patrick Devlin did it as some sort of penance for dealing with his guilty conscience over those kids’ bodies he helped his wife bury in that grave. Or maybe even Anne Devlin herself, to ensure that she stayed in the public eye because she reveled in playing the tragic mother in search of her long-lost daughter.
Any of these was possible, I suppose.
But there’s one other name I’ve been thinking about, too.
What if Lucy sent that e-mail?
Okay, it sounds crazy, I know. But think about this:
All of the people I’ve mentioned would have known some of the things in that e-mail. About the motorcycle convention in Mountainboro. About Elliott Grayson. About the birthmark on Lucy’s shoulder. About how much she loved Cheerios and Oreo cookies. But, as far as I can tell, none of them would have known about all these things. There was only one person who did. Lucy Devlin herself.
Maybe she found out about Anne Devlin dying of cancer.
Maybe she’d seen another interview with her before I’d done mine and came up with the idea for the e-mail.
Maybe she found out she was adopted and decided to put all these events in motion in the hope she could find her real mother after all these years.
Maybe Lucy Devlin just didn’t want to be forgotten.
CHAPTER 58
I HAVE THIS dream about meeting my daughter again. Two dreams, actually.
The first dream is the happy one. Lucy has grown up and become a beautiful woman. She looks a lot like me, but prettier—and she has all of my good qualities and none of my bad ones. When we meet for the first time, she tells me she’s watched me on television and always admired me from afar. Even before she knew I was her mother. She tells me all about her own child, an adorable little girl, too—and how I’m a grandmother now. Then I take her in my arms and I hold her. I tell her that I’m sorry I left her for so long. I tell her that I’ll never leave her again. I tell her she’s the one good thing I’ve ever done in my life.
The second dream is more perplexing. In this one, I’m sitting in a car outside a house that I’ve never seen before. Grayson has told me Lucy lives inside, but for some reason I can’t go up and knock on the door. Instead, I just sit in the car and do nothing. Eventually Lucy comes out of the house. Again, I want to run to her, but I can’t—my legs won’t move. I simply watch as she walks away down the street outside of her house, just like she did that long-ago day in New York City, and disappears on me all over again.
In the letter Louise Carbone had sent to her own daughter, she said: “We make a lot of decisions in our life, and sometimes wish later that we could take some of them back. To go back in time and change everything and make it right again. That’s what I wish I could do. But it’s too late for that now.”
I know that’s true for me, too. I can’t change the past, and I can’t change the things that have occurred because of the decisions I made. I changed Lucy’s life irrevocably when I gave her up that first day in the hospital. The person she is today, whoever that is, would be nothing like the person she might have been if I hadn’t set all of this in motion back then. It’s too late to go back and try to undo all that.
I fear that is the meaning of the dream about not being able to get out of the car. That I know deep inside that it is too late for me to become a part of Lucy’s life, and for her to be a part of mine. That the best thing I can do—the only logical choice I have—is to leave things as they are. That I can’t ever fix the damage I’ve caused, no matter how hard I try.
And yet …
I’m not a particularly religious person, but I am a spiritual one. I believe that there is a God and an order to the universe and a reason for everything that happens to us. So many different events had to come together to get me this close to Lucy. The original e-mail; Anne Devlin dying of cancer; the Senate candidacy of Elliot Grayson; the bizarre series of events that took place over a period of years in the tiny town of Mountainboro, New Hampshire; the revelations about what Patrick and Anne Devlin did; the fact that Grayson—the person who orchestrated the abduction of their daughter—was the one who helped dig up the bodies buried there. I can’t believe all of this was simply coincidence. I believe that some sort of higher power in the universe has drawn me and Lucy together after all this time for a reason.
In the end, I guess that the feeling I’m most left with—even more than the guilt, the sadness, and the regrets—is hope.
Hope that maybe it really isn’t too late.
Hope that I get one more chance to put the broken pieces of my life back together again.
Hope that this time I can do it right.
EPILOGUE
Once her daughter is safely home from school again, the mother tells herself she must stop worrying so much.
Yes, there is danger and evil out there in the world—but there is also much th
at is good.
Sometimes it leaves a mother uncertain over what to do.
She suffered so much in her own childhood.
So she knows she must be careful now not to overreact and not to be overprotective and not to do anything that might prevent her daughter from having a normal life.
In the end, the mother tells herself, you just have to trust your instincts and believe that everything will work out all right.
On the TV screen in front of her, reporters are interviewing Elliott Grayson—who’s just been elected to the US Senate.
At one point, as she knows they will, they ask him about breaking the Lucy Devlin case.
Afterward, the newscast goes to a broadcaster named Clare Carlson who does a recap of the whole story.
She is fascinated by all of it.
Especially fascinated by Clare Carlson.
Yes, she decides, sometimes you just have to trust that everything will work out all right in the end.
Then, the woman who a long time ago used to be Lucy Devlin, goes to her own daughter.
She hugs the little girl tightly and tells her how much she loves her.
There might be a lot of uncertainty in this world.
But there is one thing Lucy Devlin knows for sure.
There is no greater love than a mother for her daughter.
Nothing that a mother wouldn’t do for the sake of her daughter.
Nothing at all.
