Chapter 2 - The Name on the Tag
The words hung in the mist like suspended lead. Before Clara could lunge forward to grab the lapels of that damp wool coat, Elena took two swift steps sideways toward the service stairs leading back up to Wacker Drive.
"Don't run from me again!" Clara lunged, her fingers brushing the coarse wool of Elena's sleeve, but Elena pivoted with surprising force, catching Clara’s forearm in an iron grip that had once hoisted twenty-pound car seats with effortless efficiency.
"Go back to the restaurant, Clara," Elena said, her voice dropping into a flat, clinical register that brooked no debate. "Go see if your daughter is still sitting where you abandoned her. Or did you leave her unattended with strangers, just like you did five years ago?"
The strike was vicious, precise, and aimed directly at the unhealed scar of Clara's guilt. The grip on Clara's arm loosened, and Elena bounded up the concrete steps two at a time, vanishing into the stream of umbrellas on the upper street before Clara could force her paralyzed limbs to follow.
Clara did not chase her up the stairs. The woman's parting barb had detonated in her chest.
Just like you did five years ago.
Clara turned and sprinted back along the riverwalk, ignoring the water pooling in her leather flats, heedless of the stares from commuters huddled under awnings. She pushed through the brass doors of L’Aura, gasping, soaked, her hair plastered to her skull. The maître d' took one look at her wild eyes and stepped forward with hands outstretched, as if preparing to physically restrain an intruder.
"Ma'am, please, you cannot—"
Clara shoved past him, her heart hammering an erratic, suffocating cadence. She rounded the mahogany partition near booth twelve.
The booth was empty.
The small plate with the half-eaten brioche and the glass of untouched apple juice still sat on the white cloth, but the child in the scuffed patent-leather shoes was gone. The red vinyl seat was bare.
"Where is she?" Clara spun around, grabbing the nearest waiter by the shoulder of his black waistcoat. "The little girl who was sitting right here! Where did she go?"
The young man recoiled, his eyes darting toward his manager. "She... her guardian came, ma'am. While you ran out into the street. A gentleman in a dark raincoat. He paid their tab in cash and they walked out the north exit."
"What did he look like?" Clara demanded, her fingers digging through the fabric of the man's vest. "Did you see his face?"
"He had a cap on. Glasses. Look, lady, I don't check IDs for afternoon tea—"
Clara let go of him, turning her wild gaze over the empty table. That was when she saw it. Tucked beneath the rim of the girl's porcelain plate was a small, laminated paper rectangle. It was a school library pass from an elementary academy on the North Side, its edges frayed from being slid in and out of a small pocket.
Clara snatched it with trembling fingers.
Printed on the card was a standard student barcode, the seal of Saint Jude’s Episcopal Day School, and a small, color photograph of the girl from the booth. Below the photo was a name:
Lily Vance.
Not Maya.
Clara stared at the plastic card until the letters blurred. Maya had been three years old when she was taken from the backyard gate of their Kenilworth home on a Tuesday afternoon while Clara had stepped into the kitchen to answer a phone call from the hospital regarding her husband’s autopsy reports. Three years old. Her daughter would be eight now.
The child in the photo had Maya’s chin—the slight, cleft indentation that Clara’s husband had carried—and the exact crescent-shaped birthmark high on her right temple, half-hidden beneath dark bangs.
May you like
Clara turned the card over. Written in black permanent marker on the back, in precise, slanted handwriting that Clara would have recognized anywhere in the world, was a single line:
Room 204, River North Suites. Don't call the police, or you will bury an empty box.
