Chapter 8: The People Who Needed to Know
Gerald's contact was a woman named Rosalind Vance.
She was a senior investigator with the state attorney general's office, and she had been building a file on Franklin Marsh for four years.
Gerald told me this over the phone the next morning while I was still in my kitchen, still in my robe, and not yet ready to understand the scale of what was happening.
"Four years?" I said.
"He's done this before.
Your mother was not the first and she was almost certainly not the last.
Rosalind's team has two other women — both former employees, both bound by similar agreements, both afraid to come forward without corroboration."
"The agreement my mother kept."
"Is exactly the corroboration they've been missing." A pause.
"Nora, what your mother held onto for thirty years may be what finally makes this possible."
I sat down at the kitchen table.
My mother had been twenty-two, and frightened, and alone, and she had still thought to keep a copy.
I met Rosalind Vance in Gerald's conference room that afternoon.
She was calm and unhurried in the way of someone who had learned not to show urgency, because urgency made witnesses second-guess themselves.
"We've been watching Marsh for a long time," she said.
"We've had testimony.
We've had patterns.
What we have not had is original documentation from the period in question."
"The agreement is dated thirty-one years ago," I said.
"Yes.
And his current attorneys will argue it reflects a different legal and cultural era." She paused.
"That argument becomes significantly harder to make when you have the victim's own written account, dated three months ago, describing what that era meant to her personally."
"My mother's letter."
"If you're willing to provide it."
I had thought about this overnight.
I had made tea at two in the morning and sat at the kitchen table with both documents in front of me and thought about what my mother would have wanted.
She had kept everything.
She had built the case herself.
She had written: *Do what is right.
You always have.*
"Yes," I said.
"I'm willing."
Rosalind nodded once.
"There's someone else who should be in this conversation.
I've been in contact with one of the other women — she's been waiting for something like this.
She'd like to speak with you if you're open to it."
"What's her name?"
"Patricia.
She was twenty-four when she worked for Marsh.
She's sixty now."
The number sat in the room between us.
"Set it up," I said.
I spoke with Patricia by phone that evening.
She was from Ohio, a retired schoolteacher, and she cried twice during the call and apologized both times and I told her both times not to.
"I kept my agreement because I had children," she said.
"I kept thinking, if I do anything, he'll find a way to come after them."
"I understand."
"Your mother — I never met her.
But the fact that she kept those records—" Her voice broke slightly.
"It makes me feel less alone in it."
"She kept them for exactly that reason," I said.
"I really believe that."
"What happens now?"
"My lawyer and the investigator are working together.
It's going to take time.
But there's enough now."
"Do you think he'll actually face something?
After all this time?"
I thought about Marsh's voice on the phone.
*You don't know what you're starting.*
I thought about my mother's photograph.
The sun on her face.
*The last day I was afraid of him.*
"Yes," I said.
"I do."
There was quiet on the line.
"Your mother sounds like she was an extraordinary woman," Patricia said.
I looked out my kitchen window at the evening coming in.
"She was," I said.
"I'm still learning exactly how much."
I had one more call to make that night.
Diane's number was still in my phone.
I had not deleted it, even through everything.
Old habit.
Long history.
She picked up on the fourth ring.
She sounded like she hadn't been sleeping either.
"Nora."
"I opened the box," I said.
A long silence.
"And?" she said finally.
"And I know everything.
I know about Franklin Marsh.
I know about the agreement.
I know you found her documents during her surgery recovery and said nothing." I kept my voice completely even.
"I know you called his legal team within two weeks of her death."
The silence on her end was different now.
"I'd like you to come to Gerald's office on Thursday," I said.
"There are things we need to discuss."
"Nora, I want you to understand—"
"Thursday," I said.
"Ten o'clock.
Gerald's office."
I ended the call.
May you like
I sat at the kitchen table until it was fully dark outside.
Then I got up, put the kettle on, and stood at the window while it boiled, watching the lights come on in the houses across the road — all those ordinary rooms, all those ordinary evenings, all those lives going quietly forward without anyone knowing what it had taken to get here.
