Chapter 3 - A Door Left Open

Nora didn't remember crossing the marble lobby. She remembered Adrian taking her elbow, the cold air outside, and the black town car pulling toward the curb beneath the hotel's gilded awning.

"Show me," he said.

She held out her phone. He studied the photograph and called someone named Lena. "Get to Nora's building. Don't touch anything. Call the police if the door's open."

"Who is Lena?"

"A private investigator. Former detective. Best person I know when the other side plays dirty."

Nora pulled her arm free. "You knew they'd come after me?"

"I knew they might. I didn't know they'd move tonight."

"Then why didn't you warn me?"

Adrian met her gaze. "Because you told me that if I listed every risk, you'd spend the whole evening imagining your mother begging you not to go."

It was true, and it irritated her more.

Twenty minutes later they reached the narrow brick building where Nora lived above a laundromat. Police lights washed the street in blue. Lena Ortiz waited on the stairs, tall and tired-looking, with a leather jacket and a notebook already open.

"No forced entry," Lena said. "They had a key or a very good lock picker."

Nora stepped into her apartment. Drawers hung open. Books lay face down. The old sewing machine by the window had been pulled apart. She dropped to her knees in front of it.

"They took the bottom panel."

Adrian crouched beside her. "What was in there?"

"I don't know. Mom made me promise never to throw the machine away." Nora touched a scratch on the wood. "She used to say it held more than stitches."

Lena examined a broken hinge. "Someone knew exactly where to look."

Nora pictured Celeste's calm face while her phone vibrated. "It wasn't a coincidence."

From beneath a floorboard near the wall, she noticed a strip of blue thread. Her mother had stitched blue thread into hems whenever she wanted Nora to find something later: lunch money, a birthday note, a key.

She pulled the board loose. A small paper envelope lay in the gap. Inside was an old photograph of Eleanor Ashcroft standing beside Nora's mother, both smiling outside a hospital. On the back, in her mother's handwriting, were the words: ASK WHY THE FIRE STARTED IN THE ARCHIVE.

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Lena's radio crackled. She listened, then looked at Adrian.

"The old Ashcroft archive?" she said. "Someone called in a fire there five minutes ago."