Chapter 4 - The House with Two Sets of Keys
Adrian stepped between Keene and the wardrobe. “Nobody enters this room without my permission.”
Keene raised his hands. “Of course. We're all trying to help.”
“Who owns the replacement lock?”
Keene paused. “Your mother authorized improvements.”
“My mother could barely sign her name in her final week, according to the records you sent me.”
“Medical recovery varies.”
Adrian had built a logistics company from a failing trucking office. He knew when a man was talking to buy time.
“Leave the house,” he said.
Celeste stepped forward. “This is absurd. Martin is our lawyer.”
“He was my mother's lawyer. I'm terminating his access to this property.”
Keene's smile vanished. “That may be more complicated than you understand.”
After they left, Adrian waited until their footsteps faded. He opened the wardrobe. Lucy emerged clutching a cracked phone.
“My brother Ben is in the caretaker cottage,” she said. “He found Mom's old phone. They know he has it.”
Mateo knew the cottage. It stood beyond the greenhouse, out of sight from the mansion. Adrian called the county sheriff's nonemergency line, asked for a welfare check, and gave the precise location. Then he called his sister, Nora, a public defender in Philadelphia.
She answered on the fourth ring. “Did you finally remember Mom's birthday?”
“Nora, I need you home.”
“What happened?”
“I think someone hid two children on our estate.”
There was a hard silence.
“Tell me you're not calling from the main hall,” she said.
“Why?”
“Because three weeks before Mom died, she mailed me an unsigned deed. I thought it was a mistake.”
“To what?”
“The cottage. Half the land behind it. And a trust for a family named Alvarez.”
Lucy gripped Adrian's sleeve. “That's us.”
Nora inhaled sharply. “Adrian, I also got a letter yesterday. It had Mom's signature, but the handwriting wasn't hers.”
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“What did it say?”
“Stop asking about the Alvarez children. The next death will be yours.”
