might finally let her know the truth of what had happened. But the hope in her voice was crushed as quickly as it had arisen.
“Only that the real Max Albion died forty-seven years ago in Kansas, age four. And the wife’s maiden name, according to the marriage certificate, was Alicia Osborn. There’s one who died fifty years ago in Iowa, age three months. Copies of both those kids’ birth certificates were sent to Fleming’s office on 53rd within a couple of weeks of each other. And that was nearly twenty-five years ago. It gave them enough of a background to get them past the foster care people. But for the rest — including Fleming — there are no birth records, no social security records, no voting records, no driver’s licenses, no nothing.”
“But that’s not possible, is it?” Caroline protested. “I mean, they owned their apartments—”
“There aren’t any records of any of them ever either owning or renting apartments in The Rockwell,” Oberholzer broke in. “In fact, nothing in The Rockwell has ever changed hands — a Romanian corporation built it and still owns it.”
“Romanian?” Caroline echoed. “But that used to be part of the USSR. How could—”
Once again, Oberholzer answered her question before she’d finished asking it. “Everything’s paid out of a Swiss bank. And I mean everything — taxes, maintenance, utilities, the works. Nobody in that building ever paid directly for anything.”
Caroline shook her head. “That’s not true — Irene Delamond gave me a check—”
“On an account that traces back to the same Swiss bank. They all had checking accounts and they all had credit cards, but all of it traces back to that one bank, and — needless to say — they’re invoking Swiss banking law. When you get right down to it…” His voice trailed off, and then he grunted in disgust. “When you get right down to it, I just don’t know.”
And that had been the end of it.
As weeks had turned into months, and months into years, the story had slowly faded from the city’s consciousness, though a couple of the tabloids still tried to revive it now and then, especially around Halloween.
And The Rockwell still stood empty, year after year. For the first year, Caroline had refused even to get close enough to the building to see it. Indeed, when the city had been blanketed by an early snow the very day after everyone in the building had vanished, Caroline’s first impulse had been to get out of the city entirely, to move away to someplace where it was warm, and she knew no one, and there would be no memories.
No memories for her, or for Ryan, or for Laurie.
“That’s the stupidest idea I’ve ever heard,” Kevin Barnes had said when she’d told him what she was thinking of doing. “You can’t run away from memories, no matter how hard you try. And what are you going to do? At least here you have a job, and a place to stay, and friends.” He’d gone on to catalog everything else she would be leaving behind, and by the time he’d finished, she’d all but abandoned the idea. Still, as the winter closed in with even more snow and cold than that first storm had presaged, Caroline had wondered more than once whether she shouldn’t change her mind again. But as Laurie had regained her strength and both she and Ryan had returned to school, they had all begun to settle into a pattern that, even if not what she might have wished for, was at least giving a structure to their life.
She found an apartment on the East Side, closer to the shop, one that at the beginning she could barely manage to support on the money she was making at Antiques By Claire. But all through that first fall and into the winter, her business had grown, and though at first it had been nothing more than the morbid curiosity of a certain class of women whose motivation was more to milk her for gossip about The Rockwell than to seek advice on decorating, it was her skill that kept bringing her new customers even after that first interest in the mystery died down.
Finally, two years ago, Caroline found herself walking across the park to stand at the corner of 70th and Central Park West to gaze at the building whose denizens had nearly cost her children their lives.
It stood as it always had, brooding darkly, its turrets etched against the sky, its windows curtained, its stone as black with grime as ever.
Yet even despite its grime, there was none of the look of an abandoned derelict about it. Rather, it appeared to be in some kind of suspended animation, as if whoever lived in it would soon be coming back.
Since that day two years ago, she found herself going back again and again, sometimes only glancing at the building, but sometimes lingering for half an hour or more, gazing at it, trying to fathom what might really have been happening inside its walls. What had happened to those people who had seemingly come from nowhere, and vanished as utterly as if they’d never existed at all.
But they had existed, and they still existed, and as the years had passed, her determination to discover the truth about them had sometimes flagged, but never disappeared.
There had been so little to go on.
A Romanian corporation.
And a man named Anthony Fleming. “Of course he’s got no more background than the rest of them,” Oberholzer had said. “And I’d bet my badge Fleming wasn’t his real name anyway.”
But it was all she had to go on. She’d tried to find out more about the corporation that owned The Rockwell, but gotten no farther than the police. Every letter she’d sent had disappeared as completely as the man she’d married. Finally she’d given up writing letters and hired a lawyer, and it had cost her nearly a thousand dollars in legal fees just to find out that the lawyer could accomplish no more than she.
After that she’d begun haunting the libraries and the bookshops, but had no idea of what she might be looking for, and at last she’d turned to the Internet, spending more hours than she was willing to admit even to herself searching every database she could find for something — anything — that would point her in the right direction.
And finally, two weeks ago, she’d found something.
She’d been at one of the genealogical sites, using its search engine, typing in the last names of the neighbors one by one. The combination she’d been searching was
By the time she read through half the entries, it had become clear that most of the ‘Birtins’ listed had originally been named something else, but had come from a small town in northern Romania — Birtin — whose simple spelling had apparently been far easier for the clerks at Ellis Island to master than the polysyllabic surnames many of them had received from their fathers. Each name had held a link to a family web site or bulletin board, and Caroline had followed every single link.
Most of them had proved utterly useless — nothing more than genealogical trails that dead-ended at Ellis Island. But near the end of the list she’d found the link that had eventually led her to the train that was now moving slowly north through the mountains of Eastern Europe. That link had connected to a family forum bulletin board that had held a strange message:
The heading was milesovich OR milesovici from birtin? followed by a message:
“I have part of a letter to my great-grandfather, Daniel Milesovich, from his sister-in-law, Ilanya Vlamescu, who lived in a village called Gretzli, outside a town in Romania named Birtin. She wanted to send her son and daughter to America because of something that was making children die. Does anyone know anything about this? It would have been after 1868.”
Caroline had read the message over and over again, telling herself it meant nothing, that it was undoubtedly an outbreak of plague, or smallpox, or influenza, or any of the other epidemics that had swept back and forth across Europe over the centuries.
But it didn’t
Just
She’d left a reply asking for further details, and two days later had received an email from a woman named Marge Danfield, who lived in Anaheim, California. “I don’t know much more,” Mrs. Danfield had written. “The date on the letter is illegible, but my great-grandfather immigrated in 1868. The letter is in Romanian, and the handwriting isn’t good. I’ve attached a copy of the translation, but I don’t know how accurate it is. Frankly, it sounds like my father’s sister was a little crazy, which wouldn’t surprise me at all — my mother always claimed the Romanian side of my dad’s family must have been Gypsies because they tended to be superstitious about everything. I don’t know much more about my father’s great-great aunt than what’s attached. According to a family
