Chapter 12 - THE LETTER FROM A DEAD MAN
The number Richard used was a prepaid phone.
Police traced its activation to a convenience store forty miles north.
The store camera showed a man in a baseball cap buying it with cash.
The face was Richard's.
Detective Morris instructed me to answer only what she told me to answer.
I typed under her direction.
WHERE ARE YOU?
Richard replied two minutes later.
SAFE FOR NOW.
Morris had me ask what he wanted.
His answer came quickly.
A DEAL.
Then another.
I TALK TO POLICE WITH MY OWN LAWYER PRESENT.
I GIVE THEM EVERYTHING.
MARTIN GOES DOWN.
EVELYN TELLS THE TRUTH.
Robert read the messages over my shoulder.
His expression was unreadable.
"He thinks he gets to negotiate."
Helen said, "If he has useful evidence, he probably does."
Robert looked at her.
"He stole from me."
"Possibly."
"He lied to me for thirty years."
"Almost certainly."
"He may have helped hide what happened to Daniel Mercer."
"Which is why investigators may trade something to learn what he knows."
Robert turned away.
Justice feels clean when you imagine it from a distance.
Up close, it is often a room full of people deciding which guilty person knows enough to help catch another.
Morris took over communication.
Richard agreed to surrender the next afternoon at the office of a criminal-defense attorney named Samuel Price.
He refused to disclose his location before then.
He also refused to send the letter electronically.
"Why contact Anna?" Daniel asked.
Morris looked at him.
"He says he did not trust any phone number connected to your family."
"But he trusts hers?"
"He says Evelyn underestimated her, which makes her harder to control."
I did not know whether that was a compliment.
Coming from Richard, I did not want it to be.
Daniel stared at my phone.
"What does the letter say?"
"We will know tomorrow," Morris said.
He hated waiting.
That night he knocked on my guest-room door.
I opened it but stayed in the doorway.
"Can we talk?"
"For a few minutes."
He looked at the chair I still kept beneath the doorknob at night.
His face tightened.
"You think I would come in here?"
"I think I need to sleep."
"That is not what I asked."
"I am not debating what makes me feel safe."
He nodded.
"Okay."
He looked down the hallway.
"I gave Morris the video statement."
"Thank you for telling the truth."
"You should not have to thank me for that."
"I was not thanking you for doing me a favor."
He understood.
"Right."
He rubbed his palms against his jeans.
"I keep thinking about what you said."
"Which part?"
"That Mom trained me."
I waited.
"When I was little, if Dad and Mom argued, she would come into my room afterward and tell me Dad had upset her."
His eyes stayed on the carpet.
"She would ask me to go hug her in front of him."
I said nothing.
"If he said no to something, she would tell me to ask."
"Because he would say yes to you."
"Yes."
"If my sister Melissa challenged her, Mom would tell me Melissa was jealous because I was the favorite."
I had never heard him say that.
"Did you believe her?"
"For years."
"And now?"
He laughed quietly.
"Now I think being the favorite meant I was the easiest one to use."
There was truth in that.
There was also danger in turning himself too quickly into another victim in a story where he had hurt me.
I said it.
"What your mother did to you explains things."
He looked at me.
"It does not erase what you did to me."
His eyes filled.
"I know."
This time the words sounded different.
He left without asking me to comfort him.
That was new.
The next morning, a mobile DNA technician came to the house at Daniel's request.
Robert and Daniel provided cheek swabs for a legal paternity test.
The results would take several days.
Robert told Daniel again that the result would change nothing for him.
Daniel replied, "It will change what I know."
Robert nodded.
For once no one tried to force another person to feel better.
At 2:00 p.m., Richard surrendered.
Morris called us at 3:18.
He had a lawyer.
He also had three banker boxes, two encrypted drives, a small metal cash box, and a sealed envelope with Daniel's full legal name written across the front.
"Is that the letter?" Daniel asked.
"Richard says yes."
"From Daniel Mercer?"
"Yes."
"When was it written?"
"1998."
Daniel sat down.
He would have been two years old.
"Why did Richard have it?"
"He says Mercer mailed it to him with instructions to deliver it when you turned eighteen."
Daniel's face hardened.
"He did not."
"No."
"Why?"
"He says Evelyn threatened to expose his role in the quarry fight and destroy his career if he contacted you."
Daniel laughed bitterly.
"So he chose his career."
"That is what he says."
Morris paused.
"There is more."
Richard claimed Daniel Mercer did not die at the quarry.
He said the brothers fought after Mercer announced he intended to stop Evelyn's marriage to Robert and publicly claim the baby she might be carrying.
Richard believed Evelyn was using Mercer to create chaos and told him to leave her alone.
The argument turned physical.
Mercer fell down a short embankment and injured his shoulder.
He was alive.
Richard drove him to a motel because Mercer refused medical care.
The next morning Mercer disappeared.
Richard panicked and called his father, who then contacted Detective Paul Webb, a family acquaintance.
Paul told Richard to report Mercer missing and say he had been traveling west.
"Why would a detective tell him to lie?" I asked.
"Richard says Paul was protecting Evelyn."
"Why?"
Morris's voice tightened.
"Because Paul Webb was Evelyn's uncle by marriage."
Another hidden family connection.
Robert closed his eyes.
"Of course."
Morris continued.
Paul arranged for Mercer's Bronco to be removed from the quarry access area and later sold through a shell company because there was blood inside from the fight.
Not enough to prove a killing.
Enough to frighten Richard.
The old detective buried the vehicle from the investigation to protect the family from scandal and to protect Richard from assault charges.
Years later, Mercer contacted Richard from New Mexico.
He was alive.
He had changed his surname and was working construction.
He claimed Evelyn had written to him telling him the baby was Robert's and threatening to accuse him of harassment if he came back.
So he stayed away.
"Did he know Daniel was his son?" Robert asked.
Morris hesitated.
"He suspected it."
Daniel covered his face.
Morris said Richard had letters to support portions of the story.
Handwriting experts would need to authenticate them.
The most important letter was addressed to Daniel.
Because it was private correspondence recovered in a criminal investigation, Morris could not simply hand it over without processing, but Richard consented to release a scanned copy once investigators photographed it.
Daniel received it that evening.
He sat alone at the dining table for almost an hour before opening the envelope containing the copy.
I stayed in the next room.
Eventually he called my name.
I walked in.
His face was wet.
"Can you read it with me?"
I almost said no.
Then I sat across from him.
He slid the letter between us.
The handwriting was uneven.
The first line said, To the boy I believe may be my son.
Daniel's breath broke.
I waited.
He read silently for several minutes.
The letter was not dramatic.
That made it worse.
Mercer wrote that he had loved Evelyn badly and selfishly.
He wrote that he had no right to disrupt a child's life based only on suspicion.
He wrote that he had been told the baby was Robert's.
He wrote that if the boy ever learned otherwise, he wanted him to know his absence was not indifference.
He wrote that he had made mistakes and feared making another one by appearing at the door of a family that had moved on.
At the end he wrote, If you are mine, I hope the man who raised you was better to you than I knew how to be.
Daniel put his head in his hands.
I sat across from him, crying quietly despite myself.
Not for the marriage.
Not even for us.
For a child who had been used as a secret by adults who all told themselves silence was protection.
After a long time Daniel looked up.
"He died in 2009."
I frowned.
"The letter says that?"
"Morris told me. Richard found the death record years later."
"Did Richard ever tell your mother?"
"Yes."
"When?"
"2010."
I understood immediately.
Daniel did too.
Evelyn had known for sixteen years that Daniel Mercer was dead.
Yet she and Richard had used his identity to create Bellweather.
The dead man had become useful again.
Daniel looked at me with a kind of horror.
"She used his name to steal Dad's money."
I nodded.
"And she named me after him."
He pushed away from the table.
"She used both Daniels."
His phone rang.
The caller was Melissa, his older sister.
He answered.
Her voice was loud enough that I heard it from across the table.
"Daniel, Mom is at my house."
He stood.
"What?"
"She showed up ten minutes ago."
"Call the police."
Melissa started crying.
"I cannot."
"Why?"
Her next words changed everything.
Robert reached for his car keys too.
Morris stopped both men with one sentence.
"If Evelyn brought Sophie there to make you rush in, do not reward the tactic."
Daniel looked furious.
"That is a child, not a tactic."
"Exactly."
Morris's voice hardened.
"Which is why we treat the child's safety as the priority, not your need to confront your mother."
Daniel froze.
The distinction hit him.
He slowly put the keys down.
I watched him choose not to turn fear into action for the first time since this began.
It looked painful.
It also looked adult.
Robert called Melissa back on speaker.
We could hear Sophie talking in the background about colored pencils.
That sound gave everyone enough air to think.
Melissa whispered that Evelyn was sitting at the kitchen table, perfectly calm, asking for tea.
That was the detail that frightened me most.
She had brought a child into a crisis and still expected someone else to make refreshments.
May you like
"Because she has my daughter with her."
