Chapter 8 - What Margaret Hid

As the technician photographed the tile, Nora noticed a pencil mark on the cardboard wrapping. Margaret had written a date and a tiny star. Nora used to draw the same star on the inside cover of every notebook she owned. For an instant, she was ten years old again, sitting beside her mother at the breakfast table, arguing over who got the last strawberry.

“I thought Mom stopped trusting me after the settlement,” Nora said.

“Did she?” Adrian asked.

“She stopped talking to me about the company. I called it interference. Maybe she was trying to protect me.”

“Or maybe she was disappointed.”

Nora looked at him sharply. He held up his hands. “I'm not accusing you. I'm saying we don't get to turn her into someone who never felt anger. She loved us. She could still be angry.”

Nora ran a thumb along the cardboard. “You sound like her.”

“No. She would have said it more kindly.”

That earned the first genuine smile either of them had managed since the trouble began. It vanished when Harris lifted the photograph. The faces on the paper were young and hopeful, and the red circles looked like targets.

The pitcher stood on a tray in the pantry, untouched since Adrian ordered the staff to leave it alone. Deputy Harris had photographed it and arranged for it to be collected as evidence.

When Adrian mentioned the handle, Harris returned with an evidence technician. They examined the thick decorative glass while Nora watched from the doorway.

A tiny sealed compartment had been worked into the base of the handle. Inside was a rolled scrap of waterproof paper.

Harris recorded its removal. She let Adrian read the message without touching it.

IF I'M GONE, LOOK UNDER THE BLUE TILE. THE CHILDREN ARE NOT THE ONLY ONES THEY TOOK.

Margaret's handwriting was unmistakable: narrow, slanted, forever rushing toward the end of the line.

“The blue tile,” Adrian murmured. “Her sunroom.”

But the sunroom had been renovated after her death. Celeste had called the original flooring dated and had replaced it with white stone.

Mateo appeared at the pantry door. “Mrs. Blackthorn asked me to save one tile before the workers came.”

“Where is it?”

“In the potting shed. She told me never to move it unless someone asked about the blue.”

They drove to the shed with Harris. Behind a wall of empty terracotta pots, Mateo lifted a warped wooden box. Inside was a blue ceramic tile wrapped in Margaret's old cardigan.

Its underside held a metal plate with a number etched on it: 417.

“Bank box,” Nora guessed.

Harris called the number into her notes. Adrian looked at the cardigan, remembering how Margaret had draped it over him during a storm when he was small.

Underneath lay a photograph of six children standing in front of Blackthorn's former warehouse. Three had been marked with red circles.

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One of the circled children was Lucy's mother, Sofia Alvarez.

Another was Mateo's younger sister, Isabel, who had vanished twenty years ago.