Chapter 13 - Echoes in the Dark Water
My hands shook so violently that the lid of the metal box slipped, clattering against the steel table with a sharp clang that made me flinch.
*Yesterday.*
Brian had been in Dover yesterday afternoon while I was signing the final deed transfer in Portland. He had told me he was at the physical therapist's office in Concord, working on the leg he supposedly fractured during the fire that consumed his father's workshop.
He had been here. In this vault. Breathing this same chilled, recycled air.
I left the tape on the table and reached into the first manila envelope. Inside were dozens of black-and-white photographs, their edges curled and brittle with age. I laid them out across the felt surface under the single incandescent bulb overhead.
The first photograph showed a rustic, two-story timber cabin situated on the edge of a black, glass-like lake. Pine trees hemmed it in on all sides, dense and suffocating. Standing on the rotting dock was Harold Vance as a young man, barely thirty, his jaw squared and his eyes glaring into the lens with that same cold, predatory detachment I had learned to fear too late.
Beside him stood Evelyn, wearing a floral dress that seemed far too light for the overcast sky. Her arms were wrapped tightly around herself, her face pale, her gaze turned away from the camera, toward the dark water.
I flipped to the second photograph.
It was taken inside the cabin. A long, wooden table occupied the center of the frame, surrounded by empty mason jars and glass carboys identical to the ones the state police had hauled out of Harold’s cellar in biohazard drums. On the table lay an open leather-bound ledger.
The third photograph made me choke back a sob.
It was Brian. He couldn't have been more than seven years old. He was sitting on the wooden dock where his mother had stood, wearing red rubber boots and an oversized woolen sweater. In his small hands, he held a dead crow, its wings pinned flat between his fingers while Harold’s hand—heavy, calloused, bearing the gold signet ring Brian now wore on his own pinky finger—rested firmly on the boy’s neck.
Not an embrace. A grip. A hold that forced the child to stare directly down into the dead bird’s open, glossy beak.
On the back of the photograph, written in Evelyn’s sharp, left-leaning script, were the words:
*He doesn't cry anymore. Harold says the tears dilute the work. God forgive me, I helped him make the child blind to it.*
I shoved the photographs back into the envelope and grabbed the velvet box. When I popped the catch, there was no jewelry inside. Instead, resting on yellowed silk, were three glass ampoules, each containing a dark, amber liquid that caught the dim light like liquid honey. The wax seals around the corks were stamped with the initials *H.V.*
The same chemical. The accelerant Harold had mixed into the Christmas packaging—the corrosive compound that had turned my living room into an inferno in three seconds flat.
I snatched the cassette tape from the box, shoved the ampoules and the envelopes into my tote bag, and shut the safety deposit box.
When I stepped out through the vault gate, Martha looked up from her desk, her brow furrowing as she saw the sheer panic etched into my features.
"Everything all right, Mrs. Vance?"
"Fine," I breathed, barely slowing down. "Everything is fine."
I practically sprinted up the limestone steps and burst through the heavy glass double doors into the blinding June sunlight. The heat hit me like a physical wall, thick and humid.
I rounded the corner toward the back parking lot, my heart hammering against my ribs like a trapped bird.
My car was still idling in the space under the shade of an overgrown willow tree.
The driver’s side door was closed. The passenger side door was closed.
But as I drew closer, my blood turned to ice water.
May you like
The rear window of the station wagon was rolled down three inches. And standing beside the passenger door, his hand resting casually on the hot roof of the vehicle, was a man in a slate-gray windbreaker, leaning down to speak to Tessa through the glass.
***
