Page 143 of Nobody's Fool

“Yes,” Archie says.

Just like that. I knew it, of course. Had figured it out a while back. But to hear him just say it like that still hit me anew.

“As you pointed out, she wasn’t an exact match but they resembled each other, like sisters maybe. We also had eleven years of aging to explain that. Plus the shaved head, yes. Plus, right, we paid search engines so that the photos you’d get if you searched for Victoria would be ones we recently photoshopped. It was enough.”

“Seems like a big risk,” I say.

“What do you mean?”

“That someone would see through her.”

“No, not really. For all the reasons you mentioned. We had the resources to keep the media and law enforcement at arm’s length. We used her supposed fragile mental health to get her home right away. The FBI and press might have wanted us to cooperate more, but whenthe family tells you she doesn’t remember, what can you do? You move on to other cases.”

Archie sits a little straighter, warming up to the story now. “But even if someone did figure it out, so what? Suppose we were somehow caught. What laws were we breaking? It might be weird or even unethical, but if you found out we wanted someone to pretend to be our daughter—that’s not against the law.”

I had no answer to that.

“Even if you left here now and defied the NDA and told the world about it—well, for one thing you could never prove any of this. But even if you could, what could you charge us with?”

“But I could prove it,” I say.

“What?”

“I got DNA from Anna’s body during the recent autopsy after she was killed.”

“You what?”

“I also swiped Thomas’s glass of iced tea when I was at his house. I tested his DNA against the DNA from the police morgue. There’s no sibling match.”

For the first time I see the pain leave Archie’s face and the cold businessman emerge. He points a finger at me. “Now that—stealing DNA from a corpse—that’s against the law.”

“I know,” I say.

“And she’s now been cremated.”

“I know that too. You cremated her in case someone wanted to exhume the body for the DNA. You were smart. You were careful.”

“We broke no laws,” he says again.

“True,” I agree. “You just paid a woman to pretend to be your missing daughter.”

Archie’s eyes widen, and I worry I’ve gone too far.

Thomas speaks up. “It wasn’t like that.”

I turn to him. “So what was it like?”

“You won’t understand.”

I spread my hands. “Try me.”

“I thought the whole idea was crazy too, but—and this is going to sound even crazier—it worked. Once she came into our lives, we all grew to love Anna. She became my sister. Not just playing a part. Shewasmy sister. I loved her like that. I confided in her. Like I used to with Victoria. You met my daughter at my house. Vicki. We named her for my real sister—but for both my daughters, she was their favorite aunt. Hell, their favorite relative. They traveled together. She took them out on their birthdays. My daughters—her nieces—haven’t stopped crying since she was murdered.”

“Do they know the truth—”

“No, of course not.”

“—that she wasn’t really their aunt Victoria.”

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