Chapter 7 - The House Was Not Empty
Ethan spun around.
A shadow moved at the end of the hall.
“Police!” Ortiz shouted. “Show me your hands!”
The figure ran.
Ethan ignored Ortiz’s order and chased him down the back stairs. Claire heard a crash, a grunt and then glass breaking.
By the time she reached the kitchen, Ethan stood beside a shattered patio door.
“He got out.”
Ortiz’s partner sprinted into the yard.
Claire saw blood on Ethan’s knuckles. “Are you hurt?”
“Not mine.”
On the kitchen island lay The Secret Garden.
Claire stared at it.
“Was that there before?” Ortiz asked.
“No.”
The intruder had brought it back.
Ethan opened the cover.
Several pages had been cut into a hollow rectangle. Inside rested a brass key and a folded sheet of paper.
Anna’s handwriting.
Michael,
If you’re reading this, I failed to get Lily away safely. The records are not at the lake house. Your father thinks I copied them onto a drive. I didn’t. The originals are somewhere he will never search because he thinks sentiment makes people weak.
Ask Claire about the blue room.
Ethan looked up. “What blue room?”
Claire knew immediately.
At the Whitmore estate in Connecticut, there had once been a nursery painted pale blue. Ethan’s mother, Margaret, had kept Michael’s childhood things there after he grew up. Charles hated the room and ordered it locked after Margaret died.
“I haven’t been inside since I was twenty-two,” Ethan said.
Claire held up the brass key.
Ortiz stopped them. “Nobody goes anywhere until my team clears it.”
They drove to the estate at dawn with police ahead of them.
The mansion sat behind iron gates in a wash of gray morning light.
Charles arrived in another car, furious.
“You have no right to tear apart my home.”
Ortiz showed him a warrant.
“That gives us the right.”
Victoria came too, wrapped in a black coat over her blue gown.
The blue room was on the third floor.
The brass key fit.
Inside, dust covered a crib, a rocking horse and shelves of old children’s books.
Claire walked to the window.
Something blue had always bothered her about Anna’s message.
Not the room.
The paint.
She scraped a fingernail along a patch behind the radiator.
A section of wallboard shifted.
Ethan pulled it loose.
Behind it sat a metal document case.
Charles whispered, “Don’t.”
Ortiz turned toward him.
Too late.
Ethan opened the case.
Inside were bank ledgers, photographs, a flash drive and a sealed DNA report.
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On the envelope, in Anna’s handwriting, were five words:
LILY IS NOT MICHAEL’S DAUGHTER.
