But now suddenly Oliver disagreed. And he demanded to take the fall for me. Oliver was a survivor; it’s what he did best. Let’s say Vera went looking for her biological family, who knew what danger she was in? I knew nothing about the family, other than that they left a days-old newborn baby on the side of the road. If Oliver was going to do this, he couldn’t go in blind. There was something I had never told him, and it was time he knew.

I stood up from the kitchen bar stool.

“Come with me. I need to show you something.”

Then I headed for the stairwell.

“What do you need to show me?”

And I started to climb.

“If you’re going to go the police and confess, you need to know everything that happened that night.”

I led Oliver up one flight of stairs, past the watchful eyes of the stained-glass couple, up a second flight, to the door I seldom opened. The creepy library. It groaned as I pushed it, releasing a waft of musty air. It wasn’t late at night, but it was black as tar inside the room. Through the darkness I saw movement, felt a presence, heard a whisper, and I clutched Oliver’s arm. My hand searched the wall for the light switch, found it, and scattered the ghosts with a click. Eddies of dust motes swirled in the dim light, and I coughed to clear my lungs.

Still holding on to Oliver’s arm, I walked him along the bookshelves stacked with rare, priceless volumes, past the fireplace hearth where the family had been brutally murdered. In the corner sat an old chest covered in over a decade’s worth of dust. The lock had long ago rusted apart. I opened it, and inside it was filled with mementos belonging to Oliver’s ancestors. Photographs of his grandmother Olivia holding a teenage Debra’s hand. Newspaper articles about his great-grandmother Alvera’s work in the women’s rights movement, her marriage announcement, Olivia’s birth certificate, a century-old missing persons report.

I picked up a golden-brown leather journal, oddly shiny against the dust-covered items surrounding it. I had examined it recently and suspected Vera had also, before her disappearance.

“Check this out,” I said. “It’s your great-grandmother’s journal. I wonder if Vera found this when she was looking into Alvera for her suffrage movement project.”

The first entry, written in Alvera’s beautiful copperplate script, dated back to February 1898. Oliver looked over my shoulder as I read aloud: