Chapter 12: The Tarmac

"My name is not Miss Fitzhugh," I said.

"It was," the woman said. "Until you were two years old."

She opened the leather folder under the gate lamp and held it out through the falling snow.

Inside was a photograph of a man and a woman on a boat deck, laughing, with a toddler on the man's shoulders.

The toddler had a small, fresh scar through her left eyebrow.

I looked at it for a long time.

"That's from a fall off the nursery steps," the woman said. "It's in the pediatrician's notes. You were eighteen months old."

"I have that scar," I said.

"Yes, Miss Fitzhugh. I know."

She told me the rest standing in the snow, in a quiet, steady voice.

My parents had owned Fitzhugh Shipping and Steel.

They had died in a plane crash when I was two.

Their business partner, Edgar Haldane, had been named my guardian and the executor of my trust.

He had taken me from the funeral and never brought me back.

"He told the family you had died in the crash," she said. "Your grandfather buried an empty casket, and has searched for you for twenty-four years."

"He took me in," I said. "He told everyone he took me in."

"He took you in, and he took everything else," she said. "Your trust is part of the Fitzhugh fortune."

"For twenty-four years Edgar told us you were well and living abroad. Every month this firm sent him your statement in a gold-edged envelope."

I stood there with my suitcase at my feet.

I had watched that envelope go into his study every month for as long as I could remember.

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