Chapter 3 - The Letter Beneath the Floorboards|
By sunrise, Anna had learned three things about the Calloway estate.
First, the house had more security cameras than a small airport.
Second, every member of the household seemed to know something she didn't.
Third, Daniel had not slept in the bedroom they shared for almost six months.
Marcus brought her breakfast at seven. She accepted the coffee but left the food untouched.
“Is there a telephone I can use?”
“Of course.”
“I want to call my friend Clara.”
“I'll arrange it.”
Anna studied him.
“Does everyone here answer questions with promises to arrange things?”
Marcus's mouth twitched.
“Only when Mr. Calloway is listening.”
She almost smiled, then remembered why she was there.
Clara answered on the third ring.
“Anna? Oh, thank God. I've been calling you all night.”
“I'm safe.”
“Where are you?”
Anna looked through the glass doors at the lake beyond the garden.
“At my husband's family home.”
“That's not the same as safe.”
“No. I suppose it isn't.”
She told Clara enough to explain the armed guards, the attack, and the revelation about her father. She left out the details that sounded too impossible to say aloud.
Clara listened without interrupting.
When Anna finished, her friend said, “Come to my apartment. We can call a lawyer.”
“I don't know if I can leave yet.”
“Anna, you don't owe those people another minute.”
“I know.”
But she didn't know how to walk away from the photograph of the woman who resembled her. She didn't know why her father had hidden a secret for decades, or why someone was willing to attack a mansion to retrieve it.
And she didn't know why Daniel had chosen her.
After the call, Anna went looking for Edward.
She found him in a conservatory at the back of the house. He was sitting beside a table covered in old documents, wearing reading glasses and looking older than he had the previous night.
“I want the truth about my father.”
Edward closed the folder.
“So do I.”
“Then start with Elena.”
He studied her face.
“Elena was my only daughter. She believed the organization could be transformed into something legitimate. She wanted the family to leave its criminal business behind.”
“Sounds reasonable.”
“It was also dangerous. Several people depended on the old arrangement. When Elena began collecting evidence of financial crimes, she disappeared.”
“Was she murdered?”
“We never found her body.”
“That's not an answer.”
“No,” Edward admitted. “It isn't.”
He slid a small envelope across the table.
“We found this in an abandoned property in Indiana six months ago. It was addressed to your father.”
Anna recognized the handwriting immediately.
Her father had written birthday cards in the same careful, slanted script. He always used blue ink and pressed too hard on the paper.
She opened the envelope.
Inside was a single sheet.
If anything happens to me, don't trust the Calloways. The truth is beneath the house where the winter roses grow. Protect the girl. She knows nothing.
Anna read the note twice.
“What girl?”
“We don't know.”
“Was it me?”
“Possibly.”
She stared at him.
“You married your son to a woman whose father left a warning about your family, and nobody thought to tell me?”
Edward's expression hardened with shame.
“Daniel believed your father might have taken the ledger. He thought marrying you would bring him closer to the truth without frightening you.”
Anna felt sick.
“So I was an investigation.”
“At first,” Edward said. “I cannot defend that decision.”
“Did he love me?”
Edward looked toward the glass wall.
“I believe he did. But love doesn't make a dishonest beginning harmless.”
It was the first sensible thing anyone in the family had said.
Anna put the letter back into its envelope.
“Where did my father live before he died?”
“Indiana. A small town called Bellweather.”
“I grew up there.”
“Then perhaps you know the house mentioned in the letter.”
Anna did.
The house had belonged to her grandmother, a modest white farmhouse with a sagging porch and a garden that her father had refused to sell even when money was tight. Winter roses had grown beside the old stone well, although Anna had not seen them since childhood.
Her father had kept the house after her grandmother died. When Anna was seventeen, he sold it to pay medical bills. A developer demolished it two years later.
“There is nothing left,” she said.
Edward folded his hands.
“Are you certain?”
“I watched the bulldozers.”
“Then the letter may refer to another property.”
A quiet knock interrupted them.
Daniel stood in the doorway.
“I need to speak to Anna alone.”
“No,” Anna said.
He stopped.
She stood, holding the envelope.
“You can speak in front of your father. I'm done with private conversations that leave me discovering the truth from strangers.”
Daniel swallowed.
“I didn't marry you to hurt you.”
“You married me to investigate my father.”
“I thought I could understand what happened to Elena. I thought the answers would come quickly, and then—”
“Then you fell in love with me?”
He looked at her.
“Yes.”
She wished he had lied.
Instead, his honesty arrived like another wound.
“You could have told me.”
“I was afraid you'd leave.”
“So you made certain I had no reason to stay.”
Daniel took a step toward her.
“Anna, I know I have failed you.”
“You haven't failed me once. You've made choices. Repeatedly.”
She placed the envelope on the table.
“I want my own lawyer. I want access to every document containing my name. And I want to know whether you married me because of something my father did.”
Daniel nodded slowly.
“You'll have everything.”
“Not because you permit it. Because I have a right to it.”
She walked out of the conservatory.
Behind her, Edward asked his son, “What else haven't you told her?”
May you like
Daniel's answer was almost inaudible.
“Everything about the night Elena disappeared.”
