“Knowles,” Michael said, waking up his laptop and beginning to work. “That’s the name they gave Mariana’s baby. They didn’t give Lily Mariana’s maiden name, likely because they didn’t want her publicly connected to the family. But where did Knowles come from?”
We found the name further back in the family tree; it was Mariana’s grandmother’s maiden name. So Lily started life without being given her mother’s name, or her father’s, either.
Lily had spent her life in foster care. The records were sealed—even to Ransom Wells—but there was a one-page summary from a report made in 1969, when Lily was moved from one family to another. Hostile behavior, the report listed laconically under the heading “Notes.” The reason for the transfer was only listed as suicide of family member.
I wanted to shake the truth out of whoever had written those four words and nothing else. Suicide of family member? Lily would have been seventeen in 1969—the year after she’d come to visit Beth with bruises on her face. The next year, when Beth had asked what happened to her foster family, Lily had said, Bad things.
Maybe those bad things had really been suicide. Maybe they had been murder. If murder, was this unnamed family member Lily’s first victim? Or was the first victim David, the groundskeeper?
“I have more questions than answers,” I said to Michael as I handed him the paper. “This is going to drive me crazy.”
“Tell me about it,” Michael said. “Read this.”
It was a newspaper clipping from 1975. A man named Lawrence Gage had been shot in his bedroom in Phoenix, Arizona, in an apparent home invasion. Gage was divorced, and he was in bed alone. The intruder came through a screen door, killed Gage, and took some cash and valuables. No one could think of any enemies Gage, a retiree, could have had. The crime was especially distressing because Gage was shot in the face.
“Another victim,” I said.
“Read the last part,” Michael said.
The final paragraph stated that Gage had lived in Phoenix for four years, ever since he retired. He had moved from Claire Lake, Oregon, where he had spent all of his career running a department store.
If Gage was from Claire Lake, and Lily had killed him in Phoenix—if she was his killer, which Ransom seemed to think—then it wasn’t random. Lily had tracked Gage to a different city. She had targeted him. Why?
Ransom Wells had kept this article in his file all these years. Why?
I looked up. My eyes locked with Michael’s, and we asked each other the question silently before I said it aloud. “Lily’s father?”
“I checked the dates,” Michael said. “Mariana was nineteen when Lily was born. Lawrence Gage lived in Arlen Heights then. He would have been forty-three.”
I thought of Ransom saying, Mariana was taken advantage of, pure and simple. She was practically a child. And then she was ashamed.
“He could have known Mariana’s family,” Michael said. “He was wealthy and ran a department store. They would have moved in the same circles.”
He could have been a friend of the family, which meant he could have met teenage Mariana. Perhaps he had assaulted her; perhaps he had only fooled her. The result was the same either way. Lawrence Gage went on with his life as if nothing had happened, and Mariana was sent to the Elizabeth Trevor House for Women to have her baby in secret. A little girl.
And then, years later, had he woken to see that little girl grown into a woman, standing over him in bed with a gun to his face?
What had driven Lily to the extremes she’d gone to? It was convenient, and so modern, to simply say that mental illness had been the reason. When mental illness was combined with a neglectful and possibly abusive childhood, you had a recipe for a serial killer, or so the research said. You had someone you could put in a box, someone you could point to and say: See? Look at that person. That person isn’t me.