Chương 10
“Yes.”
“Do not let it disappear.”
“I won’t.”
“You don’t know who works for Malcolm.”
“I know.”
“No, you don’t. None of us do.”
He was silent.
Nora heard voices in the background and the scrape of a file drawer.
“What else did you find?” she asked.
“Nothing yet.”
“That means something.”
“It means nothing yet.”
“Lucas.”
“My father removed several boxes from company archives in 2019. The inventory lists them as personal.”
“Where did they go?”
“His house in Connecticut.”
“The house Malcolm helped clear after the funeral?”
Another pause.
“Yes.”
The Connecticut house had been closed since Daniel’s death. Lucas traveled there the next morning with Priya, an investigator, and Celeste.
Nora was not invited.
She told herself this was reasonable. It was private property and part of a legal review. She still spent the day checking her phone while pretending to help Marisol fold laundry.
At four in the afternoon, Celeste called.
“We found a tape,” she said.
“What kind?”
“Microcassette. My father’s voice is on it.”
Nora sat on the couch.
Lucas and Celeste had searched Daniel’s library while investigators examined labeled document boxes. In the back of a desk drawer, beneath old tax receipts, Celeste found a recorder and three tapes. Two contained Daniel dictating letters. The third captured a conversation dated February 14, 1998.
The recording was incomplete and badly degraded.
Daniel could be heard asking Malcolm why the alarm system had been disconnected. Malcolm replied that the contractors had needed to test new wiring and that no one was supposed to be in the east wing. Daniel said Ana had warned them. Malcolm responded that Ana had also plugged in her equipment.
Then came a sentence clear enough to change everything.
“If we do not give the insurer one cause, they will discover all of them.”
Nora closed her eyes.
“Does he admit blaming my mother?” she asked.
“Not directly.”
“Of course not.”
“Daniel says her statement has to disappear.”
“And Malcolm?”
“He says he can make her understand.”
Nora looked at her braced wrist.
“What does that mean?”
“I don’t know.”
“You do.”
Celeste’s breath caught. “I know what it sounds like.”
Nora stood and walked to the window. A delivery bicycle moved through traffic below. Across the street, a man carried a toddler on his shoulders while holding two grocery bags. The child kept covering his father’s eyes, and the father kept pretending to walk into a tree.
“Why are you telling me this?” Nora asked.
“Because it concerns Ana.”
“It concerns your father.”
“Yes.”
“What are you going to do?”
“I don’t know.”
Nora laughed softly.
“What?”
“That answer is becoming difficult to accept.”
Celeste did not respond.
Later that night, Lucas came to the apartment without asking.
Keisha almost refused to let him in. Marisol, who disliked conflict but hated hallway scenes more, opened the door.
Lucas carried a paper bag from a bakery and the exhausted expression of someone who had recently discovered that grief could be revised against his will.
“I brought cookies,” he said.
Keisha looked into the bag. “These cost nine dollars each.”
“I didn’t know.”
“That is not helping your public image.”
He sat with Nora at the kitchen table while Keisha and Marisol watched television in the next room at a volume too low to conceal their attention.
Lucas placed a photocopy of the photograph between them.
“My father knew,” he said.
“Yes.”
“He knew the panel was unsafe before the fire.”
“Yes.”
“I spent my life believing he rebuilt the hotel after an accident.”
“He rebuilt it after a choice.”
Lucas looked at the photograph. “Malcolm was in charge of construction.”
“And Daniel owned the project.”
“I’m not defending him.”
“It sounds like you’re dividing the guilt.”
“Maybe I am.”
Nora waited.
He rubbed his thumb against the edge of the paper. “I hated him for dying without seeing me. Now I find out he spent years trying to tell the truth to everyone except the people who needed it.”
“My mother called that his favorite kind of courage.”
Lucas looked up.
“She said Daniel liked to confess where forgiveness was likely.”
He sat back.
“That’s cruel.”
“Yes.”
“Was she?”
“Sometimes.”
He nodded, accepting this because it made Ana less useful as a saint.
Nora appreciated him for that.
Lucas opened the locket, which he had brought in a small evidence sleeve at Priya’s insistence. “Do you know when this photograph was taken?”
“A week after the fire.”
“Where?”
“A hospital garden.”
“How do you know?”
“My mother wrote it on another copy.”
“There’s another?”
“Somewhere in the storage unit, unless it was taken.”
“Why were their initials engraved together?”
“I don’t know.”
Lucas turned the locket over.
Under brighter light, they saw that the initials did not form a decorative monogram. They surrounded a tiny engraved number: 214.
Nora stared.
“My storage unit is 214.”
“That seems impossible.”
“It is.”
She took the locket.
The number had been present for decades, long before Nora rented the unit. The coincidence irritated her because it suggested meaning where none should exist.
Then she remembered the old Palm Room.
“Was 214 a room number?” she asked.
Lucas searched the hotel’s digital floor plans on his phone. Current Room 214 was a guest room in the west wing. Before renovation, the second floor had used a different numbering system.
He called the hotel archivist.
Fifteen minutes later, she sent a scanned blueprint.
In 1998, Room 214 had been a musicians’ storage room behind the Palm Room.
Ana’s locker.
The next morning, the outside investigators opened the sealed former storage area, which had been incorporated into a wall during renovation.
The entrance was located behind decorative paneling in a private dining alcove. Removing it required a contractor, a hotel engineer, and written approval from the preservation board because the paneling was historically protected.
Malcolm’s attorneys objected.
May you like
The board overruled them.
Nora attended with Lucas and Celeste. She wore a knit cap and large glasses to enter through the loading dock, which made Keisha tell her she looked like a graduate student avoiding taxes.
