Chapter 18 - The Package from Augusta
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Enzo didn't let go of Jade’s waist as his new head of security, Matteo—Luca’s older brother, a former Marine recon sniper—stepped quietly into the library alcove holding a padded yellow legal mailer stamped with the return address of the KENNEBEC COUNTY PROBATE COURT — AUGUSTA, MAINE.
"Sorry to interrupt, Boss, Donna Elena," Matteo said respectfully, keeping his voice low so the captains in the dining room wouldn't hear. "A bonded legal courier from Maine just delivered this to the gatehouse. We X-rayed it and swabbed it for chemical traces—completely clean. The courier said the probate judge in Augusta was instructed by the late Trooper Frank Miller’s will to hold this secondary physical package for sixty days after his death before delivering it in person to Jade Mercer."
Jade’s brow furrowed as she took the yellow padded mailer from Matteo.
Frank Miller.
Two months ago, when Enzo had walked into The Rusty Anchor, he had told her that retired Maine State Trooper Frank Miller—the man who had rescued her on the highway outside the burning Catskills compound in 2008 and hidden her in the Maine foster system—had died of a stroke in October, and that the digitization of his safe-deposit box had been what alerted Grigori Volkov’s hackers to her name.
"Why would Frank set up a sixty-day delayed physical delivery after his death?" Jade wondered aloud as Matteo stepped back out and closed the library door.
She tore open the padded mailer over Enzo’s mahogany desk and tipped the contents onto the leather blotter.
Out slid an old, battered Nokia brick cellphone from 2008 with a charged lithium battery pack taped to the back, a laminated Maine State Police evidence tag, and a handwritten letter on lined yellow legal paper written in Frank Miller’s shaky, unmistakable block handwriting—dated October 10th of this year, four days before he supposedly died of a natural stroke!
Jade unfolded the yellow page, and as she read the first paragraph, the blood drained from her face.
Kiddo — If this package is in your hands sixty days after my funeral, then the probate lawyer followed my instructions, and it means I didn't die of a natural stroke. Last week, a woman with a scarred left wrist showed up in my small town in Maine asking questions about the 2008 Sullivan County fire. If they get to me, I purposefully put a dummy flash drive with your South Boston address into my county bank box so you would be forced to fight back and draw Grigori Volkov out into the open before they caught you sleeping.
"Wait," Jade breathed, her heart suddenly slamming against her ribs as she looked up at Enzo. "A woman with a scarred left wrist?!"
"Read the rest of it," Enzo said sharply, stepping close behind her and reading over her shoulder.
Eighteen years ago, when the FBI raided the burned ruins of the Red Sparrow compound in the Catskills, they found nine small bodies in the locked basement barracks where the smoke inhalation got them before the roof fell in, Frank’s letter continued. You were Number Nine. Nine bodies plus you makes ten. For eighteen years, I never told you this because I wanted you to have a normal life—two other kids got out of that compound alive on the night of the fire before the FBI arrived.
Jade’s hands began to tremble against the yellow paper.
Twelve kids in the house.
For eighteen years, the crushing guilt that had woken her up screaming at three in the morning in every foster home and cheap studio apartment was the belief that when she had set fire to Grigori’s study to escape after killing the head instructor, the fire had spread to the basement barracks and killed the other eleven children trapped inside!
"Two other kids survived the fire?!" Jade gasped, tears of shock stinging her eyes. "Who?!"
May you like
She read the final lines at the bottom of Frank Miller’s letter:
Number Four—a ten-year-old boy—escaped into the woods an hour before you did. And Number Twelve—the five-year-old girl you carried out of the basement window on your back before you passed out by the road—didn't die in the ambulance like the troopers told you. A high-ranking federal official adopted her under a sealed file that night. Turn on the 2008 Nokia phone in this envelope and listen to the voicemail I recorded the night they came into my house in Maine.
