Chapter 14 - The Choice

Evelyn nearly dropped the phone. "Let me speak to him."

A rustle, a muffled cough, then Daniel's voice. "Eve, don't—"

The line went dead.

Maya called the hospital. A security guard had been found unconscious near the service entrance. Daniel's bed was empty. A camera showed a man in scrubs pushing him through a side corridor, but the face was hidden by a surgical mask.

"Grant has help inside the hospital," Maya said. "We can't trust ordinary channels."

Evelyn looked toward the lake. "Then we stop using ordinary channels."

The flash drive was in her cardigan pocket. She had not told anyone—not even Maya—that she had switched it with a blank one before the evidence bags were sealed. She removed it now.

"This is what they want. Make a copy."

Maya borrowed a laptop from an officer. The drive required a password. A single line appeared on the screen: WHAT DID LUCY GIVE ME?

Evelyn remembered the last summer she'd seen Lucy: a frightened girl at the kitchen door, carrying a little brass music box. Daniel had taken her inside. Evelyn was at the grocery store and learned about the visit only afterward.

"A music box," she said. "Try MUSICBOX."

The drive opened. Inside were scanned bank ledgers, an audio file, and a video recorded just two days earlier. Daniel sat in his workshop facing the camera, looking frightened but lucid.

"If you're watching this," he said, "Grant has found out what I kept. My father and Judge Bell were using lakefront land deals to wash stolen money. Lucy discovered it. She came to me because she was scared."

He paused, as though even the memory hurt.

"I told her to go to the police. I didn't know her brother was already helping them. By the time I got there, Lucy was gone."

A car door slammed outside the workshop. Maya closed the laptop. Evelyn had heard enough to understand the danger, but not enough to forgive Daniel's silence.

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The video continued for three more seconds, showing Daniel lean toward the camera.

"There is one thing I never told Evelyn," he said. "Lucy didn't disappear alone."