The Wife They Burned novel · Chapter 14 of 32

Chapter 14: The Nanny

"October sixth," I said.

"That's what it says."

"Marshall flew to Zurich on the second. She had it destroyed while he was gone."

The detective looked at me over the laptop.

"Or while he was making sure he was gone," Abel said.

Nobody answered that.

The detective closed the screen.

"A heater that's been crushed can't tell us it was planted," she said. "So I need the people who were there. Who was in that cottage besides your daughter?"

"The nanny."

"Where is she?"

I didn't know.

She had held Junie the day she was born, because I was bleeding and Marshall was on a call.

She'd been with us every day for five years.

And she had left Highmoor the week after the fire without saying goodbye to me.

The night man found her for me in one phone call.

"Bridgeport," he said, on Lantern House's back steps on Monday night, with his thermos. "Her sister's place, off the boulevard. She got a check from the missus, she told my wife. A big one, and a letter that came with it."

"What kind of letter?"

"The kind lawyers write."

Abel drove me there on Tuesday.

The sister's house was a narrow two-family with a sagging porch and a plastic Santa by the steps.

The sister opened the door, looked at me, and started to shut it again.

"Please," I said. "Tell her it's Ada. Tell her I'm not angry."

After a minute, the nanny came down the hall.

She was smaller than I remembered.

She was wearing a long-sleeved cardigan buttoned to the wrists, in a house that was far too warm for it.

She saw me and put both hands over her mouth.

I went up the steps and put my arms around her, and she held on to me.

"I tried," she kept saying into my shoulder. "I tried, I tried."

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