Chapter 5 - The Foundry After Dark

The foundry smelled of iron and old machine oil. I'd learned to ride a bike in its loading bays. Now wind rattled the boarded windows.

Mr. Bell, our seventy-year-old plant manager, met us under the security light. He held a flashlight and a set of keys.

"I was doing the evening check," he said. "The cage was locked at six. At nine it wasn't."

Inside, file drawers hung open. Someone had cut the cable on the backup security recorder, but the old camera over the tool crib still worked because Bell had wired it to a separate system years earlier.

"Your mother never trusted the new gadgets," he told me. "Said a thief shouldn't get to turn off every eye with one switch."

We watched the grainy feed. At 8:42 p.m., a person in a maintenance jacket entered the corridor. The hood hid their face. They carried a small hard case, came out four minutes later, and left through the side door.

"Can you identify them?" I asked.

Bell shook his head. "But look at the shoes."

White dress sneakers. I'd seen a pair like them beneath Harper's reception gown during our rehearsal. That didn't prove anything. It did make my pulse jump.

Dad opened the empty cage. He touched the outline of dust where Mom's metal case had stood. "The deed copies were in here. The trust certificate. The seal."

A folded sheet lay beneath the bottom drawer. It was a photocopy of a document headed INTENT TO CONVEY, with my mother's name typed beneath a line where her signature should have been. The buyer was an unfamiliar company called Marlowe Holdings LLC.

I lifted the page by its corner. "Why not Alder Ridge?"

"Because they're hiding who's behind the buyer," Dad said.

Bell was still examining the footage when he made a small sound. He paused the image. The stranger's sleeve had ridden up. For a fraction of a second, the camera showed a tattoo on the inner wrist: three tiny black stars.

I knew those stars. I'd kissed them the night I proposed.

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Then the phone at Bell's desk rang. He answered and went rigid.

"Mr. Mercer," he said, holding out the receiver, "it's your fiancée. She says she has your mother."