Chapter 3 - The Empty Space
Owen did not go back into the ballroom. He called the police from the kitchen manager's office, asked Mina to preserve the wedding video, and drove Ivy to his friend Ben Torres's apartment while two officers met him there. Ben was an elementary-school principal, the kind of man who could make a child feel safe without pretending the world was perfect.
Ivy sat at Ben's table drawing careful circles on scrap paper. "Are they mad because I pushed it?"
"They're mad because something they wanted hidden was heard," Owen told her. "That's different."
"But Aunt Natalie said a good family doesn't make trouble."
He knelt beside the chair. "A good family tells the truth, even when it makes a mess."
He went home with an officer to check the townhouse. Nothing looked overturned. No broken windows. No forced locks. That was worse. Whoever had entered had used a key.
In Ivy's bedroom, the blue quilt was tucked smooth. The crayons stood in a mason jar. But the wooden music-box house on her dresser was missing.
Owen leaned against the doorframe. His brother Adam had built the little house for Ivy's sixth birthday. Its roof lifted to reveal a winding mechanism that played four notes from a song their mother used to hum. Since Adam's arrest, Ivy had wound it at bedtime whenever she missed him.
"There's your notebook," the officer said, pointing at a spiral pad on the bed.
It belonged to Ivy, covered in drawings of trains and stray cats. Owen flipped through it and found one page torn cleanly away. On the next page, pressed deep into the paper, was a child's drawing of the music-box house. Beneath it Ivy had written: DADDY SAYS LISTEN TO THE FOURTH NOTE.
He stared. "How long has she known that?"
The officer photographed the page and the room. Owen remembered Adam pressing the toy into Ivy's hands at their last prison visit, saying, "If anyone tells you our family is only its worst day, remember we were a family long before that day."
His phone rang. Margaret.
"Martin has the house," she said without greeting. "But I don't think he knows how to open it. There's something you should understand about the fire."
May you like
"What?"
"The night custodian wasn't supposed to be inside. And someone made sure the back exit would stay locked."
