Chapter 8 - The Gate Behind Lily
I knelt beside her chair. "She shut it after you went through?"
Lily nodded. "I heard the click. Then I couldn't find you."
"What did she say before that?"
"She said you were by the blue doors. I told her I wasn't allowed past the rope. She said I could go because it was a special day."
I looked at Grace, who was drying dishes without making a sound. Neither of us wanted Lily to see our faces.
"You did nothing wrong," I told her. "A grown-up was supposed to keep that door safe."
"But I went after the duck."
"The duck didn't make the gate unsafe."
Later I called Detective Shah and repeated Lily's words. She warned me not to rehearse questions with my daughter. "Let our child interview specialist do this carefully. Memory is important, and so is her peace of mind."
That night I sat in Anna's old office. Her folders smelled faintly of paper and orange blossom hand cream. She had underlined a sentence in a grant proposal: Safety is what we do before a child needs saving.
In the bottom drawer I found correspondence about the pool renovations. One letter was addressed to Vivian. Anna had written, I cannot approve an event route that bypasses the staffed entry. Please repair the service gate before opening it to the public.
The letter was dated two years earlier, six months before Anna's fatal car accident.
I called the center's former facilities manager, Mr. Cho. He remembered Anna arguing about the gate. "She wouldn't sign off on it," he said. "After she died, they told me she'd changed her mind."
"Who told you?"
May you like
"Vivian. She showed me minutes with Anna's signature."
The meeting in those minutes, he added, had taken place on a day Anna was in the hospital with pneumonia.
