“Mara is waiting in the lobby,” Caleb said, his voice dropping as he tapped his leather notebook with his pen. “She says Jonah found something in the city registry.”
Evelyn looked down at her small velvet clutch, her finger still rubbing her bare ring finger. “What kind of registry?”
“He wants to show you before we leave,” Caleb said.
They walked out of the ballroom, leaving the hum of three hundred wealthy voices behind them. The transition from the carpeted warmth of the ballroom to the cool, stone-paved hotel garden was sudden, the air smelling of damp garden soil and wet brick.
Jonah was sitting on a stone bench under a dying maple tree, the blue light of a digital tablet illuminating his glasses. He pushed them up his nose as Evelyn approached, his face pale in the screen’s glow.
“The server from the old clinic was archived in 2008,” Jonah said, his voice rapid and focused on the data. “It took three days to bypass the encryption on the medical records from September 2006.”
Evelyn sat on the edge of the stone bench, her coat pulled tight. “Jonah, those records are under seal.”
“They were,” Jonah said. “But the clinic used a third-party server that didn’t clear its cache when the clinic closed. Look at this.”
He handed her the tablet, and Evelyn saw her own name, Evelyn Harper, and the date of her admission: September 14, 2006.
“The doctor on call was Ellery Marsh,” Jonah said, pointing to a scanned PDF file. “The official report says you had an abruptio placentae. A natural emergency.”
“It was,” Evelyn said, her hand going to her stomach. “My body couldn’t hold the baby.”
“Look at the digital ledger on the second tab,” Jonah said. “There is a cashier’s check for forty-one thousand dollars drawn on a shell account called Ellery Marsh Holdings. It cleared three hours before you were admitted.”
