...And Never Let HerGo

her.
    Only those who have suddenly lost their connection to someone they love—not lost to death, simply lost—can begin to understand the agony of this vigil. Anne Marie Fahey was a young woman blessed with fair beauty as natural as a rose. She was the survivor of adversities that would have beaten a lesser woman, and yet still full of hope and, most of all, love. And now, in the first week of the summer that promised to be her happiest, she was inexplicably missing. This was the emptiest and most agonizing conclusion that her family and friends could come to.
    And for Kathleen, one of two sisters among the six Fahey siblings, there were questions that returned to haunt her. She had spent the time as she waited for the police looking around the apartment to see if there was a note, maybe something Annie had jotted down in her day-runner, some clue to where she might be. The little blocks in her sister’s calendar were mostly filled, but with prosaic notations—birthdays Annie wanted to remember, monthly notations of the anniversary of the day she’d met Mike, baby showers, lunches, some dinner dates. There was nothing there that looked even slightly ominous.
    But Kathleen was soon almost as shocked as she was worried. She had found a number of notes and cards in Anne Marie’s drawers, and they weren’t all from Mike Scanlan. Annie was a sentimental pack rat, and she had saved all manner of sentimental mementos from Mike—ticket stubs from
Tosca
at the Grand Opera House, theRussian ballet, the Luther Vandross concert—and even souvenirs from the pope’s visit to Baltimore. Those were all in the top drawer of her bedroom dresser.
    But in the top drawer of a hutch in Annie’s living room, Kathleen had found an envelope that read
Anne Marie Fahey,
and beneath that,
Personal and Confidential.
Kathleen opened the envelope and inside was a long and complicated letter from a man who clearly knew her sister very well indeed, a man who appeared to know all of them and seemed intimately acquainted with their family relationships and plans. Scanning the pages was almost like reading a foreign language; this person knew about them and yet he was someone Kathleen barely knew, and not someone she could ever picture in her younger sister’s life.
    And yet he must be. The first letter ended, “All I want to do is make you happy and be with you. I love you.”
    That letter wasn’t signed, but it didn’t really have to be; all the letters and notes in the envelope were written on the letterhead of the law firm of Saul, Ewing, Remick and Saul— FROM THE DESK OF THOMAS J. CAPANO .
    Thomas Capano. Kathleen’s thoughts flashed back to the previous fall; her friend Bud Freel, who was a Wilmington city councilman, had mentioned something to her about Tom Capano and Anne Marie. He’d heard a rumor that they were dating. It was so preposterous then—and now—that Kathleen had looked at Bud dumb-founded. She had dismissed it from her mind so quickly that there was no time for a solid memory to form. Anne Marie had never talked about Capano to her family. How could she be involved with him and not mention it, when they were all so close? They had banded together when they were only children, the six of them against the world. It was impossible to believe that Annie might have held back such an important secret from her sister and her brothers.
    Kathleen had casually asked Annie about Tom Capano, and she had laughed and said they were just friends—that he sometimes stopped by the governor’s office on business. That had been enough for Kathleen; she had almost forgotten about their conversation. No, Capano was the last person in the world anyone would have connected to her sister in any significant way.
    Kathleen didn’t really know Tom Capano well, but she knew him. Everyone in Wilmington, probably everyone in Delaware, did. The whole Capano family was legendary, and Tom was a political power-hitter, wealthy, older, and married. Kathleen had met himsometime in the early eighties when she worked as a waitress and bartender at O’Friel’s, through Bud Freel, whom she used to date. Kathleen hadn’t seen Tom Capano for a year, and that was at the closing of Bud’s other place: Buddy’s Bar.
    She stared at the letters in her hand. They seemed to suggest that Annie hadn’t told her the whole truth about a hidden place in her life. Kathleen knew she had to tell Mike about the letters and notes from Tom Capano. But, first,