Chapter 5 - seventeen seconds of darkness)
Someone seized Emily’s wrist in the dark.
She tried to scream, but a hand covered her mouth. A familiar voice breathed against her ear.
“Ruth sent me. Don’t fight.”
Officer Daniel Holt pulled her through a gap behind the filing cabinets just as Marcus entered the office. The hidden space was barely wide enough for two people. Emily’s back pressed against cold stone. Holt held one finger to his lips.
Beyond the panel, Marcus clicked on a flashlight.
“Emily?” he called.
The gentleness in his voice was worse than anger.
Voss found the brass key. “She was here.”
Holt’s jaw tightened. The small red light on his body camera was dark. Emily pointed to it.
He leaned close enough to whisper. “Signal blocker. Camera shut down when I entered.”
The hidden phone recording in Emily’s pocket had stopped too.
Marcus opened the drawers one after another. “She took photographs.”
“How do you know?” Voss asked.
“The folders aren’t aligned.”
Even terrified, Emily understood something important. Marcus did not know she was a few feet away. He knew only that she had discovered the room.
Holt guided her along the passage. They moved sideways between stone walls while Marcus and Voss searched the office. The path sloped upward and ended behind an iron grate concealed beneath shrubs at the side of the house.
Holt forced it open. Dawn air rushed in.
They crossed the wet lawn to an unmarked sedan hidden among the pines. Ruth sat behind the wheel. Her face collapsed with relief when Emily climbed into the back.
“Did you find the ledger?” Ruth asked.
“No. Only files.”
“The files won’t be enough. Marcus owns the properties through other people.”
Holt started the car. “They’re enough for a warrant.”
“From which judge?” Ruth replied. “Marcus plays golf with two of them, and Voss has the third one terrified.”
Emily took out her phone. The photographs she had captured were gone. Her gallery showed only ordinary images from before that morning.
“He erased them.”
Holt checked the device. “Remote access.”
“But I recorded them talking.”
The audio file remained, but when Holt played it, they heard only static. Seventeen seconds in the middle contained voices, too distorted to identify. Marcus had built his secret rooms to swallow evidence.
Ruth drove them to a vacant farmhouse owned by her late brother. There, Holt explained how Lena’s call had led him to the motel and how a camera across the highway had captured a dark sedan leaving minutes before he arrived. The plates belonged to the city police department.
“Voss,” Emily said.
“Probably. I need proof that survives his friends.”
“My folder said intake on September eighteenth.”
Ruth looked at the calendar. “Four days.”
“Marcus knows she found the basement,” Holt said. “He’ll move everything.”
Emily stood by the farmhouse window. Through the glass, she could see the distant road and miles of empty fields. She had escaped Blackwood House, but she felt no safer. Marcus knew her habits, her bank accounts, her medical history. He would describe her as unstable. Pregnant. Confused. If he found her, he would call it concern.
Her phone rang.
Marcus.
Holt motioned for her to answer and switched on his body camera. The red light blinked this time.
“Where are you?” Marcus asked.
“I went for a drive.”
“Without your car?”
Emily looked at Holt.
“I know about the basement,” she said.
Silence.
Then Marcus sighed, as if she had disappointed him.
“Come home, Emily.”
“Did you take Anna?”
“I can explain everything.”
“Is she alive?”
“Come home.”
“Tell me where she is.”
Marcus’s voice softened. “Do you remember the night Anna disappeared? You called her from the diner six times. You begged her to pick you up because you were drunk at a party.”
Emily stopped breathing.
No one outside the family knew that. She had been nineteen, frightened and ashamed. Anna left work early to get her. She never arrived.
“How do you know?”
“She told me.”
The room seemed to narrow around Emily.
“When?”
“This morning.”
Marcus ended the call.
Holt replayed the body-camera recording. Marcus’s voice had been captured clearly. It was the first evidence connecting him directly to Anna.
Emily should have felt hope. Instead, she heard the last two words again.
This morning.
If Marcus was telling the truth, Anna had survived eleven years in whatever world existed beneath Harbor House.
If he was lying, he had chosen the one lie powerful enough to bring Emily back.
Holt’s radio hissed on the farmhouse table. A dispatcher’s voice announced an urgent countywide alert.
Emily Vale, age thirty, nine months pregnant, had been reported abducted by an armed police officer named Daniel Holt.
The alert described Holt as unstable and dangerous.
May you like
It instructed every unit in Bellwether to shoot if he resisted.
Outside, sirens began to rise from three directions.
