Chapter 6 - The Woman They Buried Without a Funeral
Vincent moved faster than I expected.
He shoved me behind the stone altar as glass shattered.
One of his guards returned fire from the doorway.
“Stay down.”
“Noah—”
“He’s secured upstairs.”
Another shot.
Then another.
I clutched the metal box against my chest.
“Who are they?”
“I don’t know.”
“That answer is getting old.”
“So is being shot at.”
The emergency lights flickered on.
A man rushed the chapel entrance.
Vincent’s guard tackled him.
Two more security men arrived from the opposite corridor.
Within less than a minute, it was over.
One attacker escaped.
One was injured.
One was restrained.
Vincent crouched beside him.
“Who sent you?”
The man smiled through blood.
“Your family.”
Vincent’s face changed.
“My family is dead.”
The man laughed.
“Not all of it.”
Police flooded the building.
The chapel became a crime scene.
I sat in an empty exam room, clutching my father’s letter.
Vincent entered thirty minutes later.
“Hospital administration wants us gone.”
“I don’t blame them.”
“We leave for Maine.”
“Now?”
“Yes.”
I looked at him.
“You think Claire is still there?”
“If the files were hidden for twenty-seven years, someone may have learned what was in them before we did.”
My phone rang.
Daniel.
I answered instantly.
“Where are you?”
“Rachel.”
He sounded exhausted.
“Where are you?”
“Portland.”
“Maine?”
“Yes.”
I stood.
“Why?”
“Claire called me.”
My eyes closed.
“She’s alive.”
“I know.”
“How?”
“We found Dad’s files.”
Silence.
Then Daniel started crying.
My brother almost never cried.
“She had the baby, Rachel.”
“I know.”
“He’s alive?”
I looked through the glass at Noah being transferred into a secure ambulance with a nurse.
“Yes.”
Daniel made a sound between a laugh and a sob.
“Is he okay?”
“Not completely. But I think I know what’s wrong.”
“Can you help him?”
“Yes.”
I had no proof.
But I needed the word to be true.
“Where are you exactly?”
“St. Agnes.”
Vincent’s head snapped toward me.
“We’re coming.”
We reached Maine just before midnight.
St. Agnes Recovery Center sat in the woods outside Portland.
It looked less like a hospital and more like a private retreat.
Too quiet.
Too isolated.
Daniel was waiting in the lobby.
He grabbed me and held on.
Then he saw Vincent.
His arms dropped.
“Who the hell is that?”
“Long story.”
“Castrovani?”
“Longer story.”
Vincent ignored the hostility.
“Where is Claire?”
Daniel’s face went gray.
“They moved her.”
“When?”
“An hour ago.”
“By who?”
“Staff said family authorized it.”
“What family?”
Daniel looked at me.
“I thought you did.”
My stomach dropped.
Vincent turned to his security chief.
“Lock down exits. Get vehicle logs.”
A nurse approached.
“You can’t do that.”
Vincent looked at her.
“Call the police.”
She did.
Then the fire alarm went off.
Everyone looked up.
Smoke began pouring from the west corridor.
Not an accident.
Vincent shouted orders.
Daniel ran toward the patient wing.
I grabbed him.
“Claire isn’t there.”
“How do you know?”
“Because whoever took her wanted us looking inside.”
We went outside.
Police and fire crews arrived.
One of Vincent’s men found tire tracks behind a service building.
Fresh.
A black SUV.
No plate.
Daniel looked like he might collapse.
“I was this close.”
I grabbed his shoulders.
“You are not losing her again.”
“How do you know?”
“Because she survived nine months.”
That night, we moved Noah to a pediatric center in Portland under an alias.
I finally had the records necessary to make sense of his episodes.
The mutation involved an enzyme pathway responsible for maintaining glucose during prolonged fasting.
Rare.
Dangerous.
Manageable if recognized.
Noah had been going too long between feedings overnight.
The episodes were not mysterious.
They were preventable.
I changed his feeding schedule.
Added cornstarch under specialist guidance.
Ordered genetic confirmation.
For the first time, medicine felt simple.
The danger around him was not.
At four in the morning, Vincent sat beside Noah’s crib.
“You were right,” he said.
“About what?”
“The doctors kept saying he’d grow out of it.”
I looked at the sleeping baby.
“He would have grown into seizures.”
Vincent’s jaw tightened.
“Isabella knew something was wrong.”
“She saved him once.”
“Yes.”
“Maybe twice.”
He looked at me.
I handed him another document from the box.
It was a death certificate.
Isabella Castrovani.
Date of death: six months earlier.
Cause: Blunt force trauma from vehicle collision.
Then I placed a second document beside it.
A private pathology record.
Same name.
Same date.
But one line had been highlighted by my father years earlier in another case and copied into the file structure Isabella later used.
Blood type: AB negative.
“What?”
Vincent stared.
“Isabella was O positive.”
He looked at me.
“How do you know?”
“Prenatal records in the file.”
His eyes widened.
“That body wasn’t hers.”
Neither of us spoke.
Vincent stood.
“My wife is alive.”
I looked at him.
“Maybe.”
His phone rang.
Unknown number.
He answered.
A woman’s voice whispered one sentence.
“Vincent, don’t come looking for me.”
His face collapsed.
May you like
“Isabella?”
The call ended.
