Chapter 16 - The Woman at the Gate
The SUV had been abandoned less than two miles away behind an old church.
Margaret and Rebecca were gone.
Jack wanted to join the search. The sheriff refused.
“You are a witness and a family member,” Sheriff Elaine Porter told him. “You will make my job harder, not easier.”
Jack knew she was right.
He hated her for being right.
They moved everyone to Sentinel’s nearby operations center while deputies searched the river house and surrounding roads.
Claire sat in a conference room wrapped in a gray blanket someone had found in the emergency cabinet.
Ethan was in another room with an attorney.
Charles had refused one.
“I want the truth more than I want protection,” he said.
At 7:14 p.m., the front desk called Jack.
“There’s a woman at the gate asking for Claire.”
Jack and Sheriff Porter went to the security monitor.
Rebecca stood outside.
Alone.
Her hair was tangled. There was dried blood near her temple. But she was upright.
Claire ran in behind them.
“Open it.”
Porter held up a hand. “First we confirm.”
Rebecca looked directly into the camera.
“Claire, your mother hated lilies.”
Claire made a sound halfway between a laugh and a sob.
“My mother hated lilies,” she told Porter. “She said they smelled like funeral homes.”
The gate opened.
Rebecca stepped inside and collapsed into Claire’s arms.
Minutes later, sitting with water and a paramedic, she told them what happened.
She had returned to the Vale estate that morning through the old linen passage. Charles had given her a key weeks earlier.
She planted the memory card under the device tray and hid the black phone in the passage.
Margaret caught her before she could leave.
“She locked me in a room above the garage,” Rebecca said. “When the evacuation started, she moved me to the SUV.”
“How did you get away?” Jack asked.
“She left the SUV at the church and made a phone call. I kicked the passenger door until the damaged lock opened.”
“Where did Margaret go?”
Rebecca looked at Charles.
“To Martin Shaw.”
Claire leaned forward. “Why?”
Rebecca reached into her shoe and pulled out a tiny folded piece of paper.
“Because this is what they were really trying to destroy.”
She opened it.
May you like
It was a safe-deposit box number.
And beneath it was Evelyn Mercer’s handwriting.
