Chương 5
His third was curiosity.
That bothered him most.
He should have deleted it.
Instead, he took a screenshot.
Then he noticed the timestamp.
5:42.
Three minutes after Marcus had supposedly been informed that Carla might meet him.
Daniel looked toward the compliance office.
Someone knew.
The question was who.
He walked outside the building.
The evening air was cooler than he expected.
People moved along the sidewalk heading home.
A man in a blue jacket argued quietly on the phone.
A teenager balanced a drink on top of a stack of books.
Two coworkers laughed outside a restaurant entrance.
The city continued without caring about his crisis.
He appreciated that.
There was something comforting about a world that refused to stop.
Daniel called Carla.
She answered after three rings.
“Where are you?”
“Outside.”
“That’s not what I asked.”
He looked up at the building.
“Did you tell anyone about Marcus?”
“No.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes.”
“Carla.”
Silence.
Then:
“I told Maria.”
“When?”
“After we left the room.”
“Anyone else?”
“No.”
Daniel looked at the unknown message again.
“Someone knows.”
Her voice changed.
“What happened?”
“I got a message.”
“What did it say?”
He read it to her.
She did not respond.
“Carla?”
“That’s not possible.”
“Why?”
“Because only one person knew I was considering meeting Marcus.”
“Who?”
Another pause.
Daniel closed his eyes.
“Who?”
“My brother.”
Daniel opened his eyes.
“What?”
“My brother knew.”
“Why would your brother know?”
“Because I called him last night.”
“Why?”
Carla’s voice became quieter.
“Because Marcus mentioned something in his email.”
“What?”
“He mentioned my father.”
Daniel said nothing.
The traffic noise filled the silence.
“Carla.”
“I know.”
“What does your father have to do with Patterson?”
“I don’t know.”
“You’re lying.”
The words came out before he could soften them.
Carla did not get angry.
That worried him.
“You’re right.”
Daniel waited.
“My father worked for the county before I did.”
“How long?”
“Twenty-eight years.”
“And?”
“And he was involved in the Patterson investigation.”
Daniel felt the pieces shifting.
Not fitting.
Shifting.
“That’s why Marcus contacted you.”
“Yes.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Because I didn’t know if it mattered.”
“You didn’t know if your father being connected to the case mattered?”
“He was never accused of anything.”
“That’s not what I asked.”
Carla went quiet.
Daniel heard something in the background.
A door closing.
“Where are you?”
“At home.”
“Are you alone?”
Another pause.
“No.”
Daniel’s grip tightened around the phone.
“Who is there?”
Carla did not answer immediately.
Then she said:
“Marcus.”
The Letter Found Beneath the Floorboard Changed Everything He Thought He Knew About Home and Loyalty
The police officer placed the envelope on Daniel Mercer’s kitchen table and told him not to touch it, but Daniel had already seen his own name written across the front in handwriting he had spent twenty years trying to forget.
He stood there with one hand still holding the dish towel he had been using when the knock came, staring at the faded blue ink and the uneven letters that belonged to his younger brother.
Evan had been dead for six years.
“Where did you get that?” Daniel asked.
The officer, a woman named Carla Reyes who looked exhausted in the way people did when they had repeated the same explanation too many times, glanced toward the floorboards near the hallway.
“Your contractor found it while replacing the damaged wood after the pipe leak.”
Daniel looked down.
The repaired section of the floor was only a few feet away from where he stood every morning while making coffee.
Six years of footsteps had passed over that spot.
Six years of pretending the house was just a house.
“You’re sure it’s his handwriting?” Carla asked.
Daniel did not answer immediately.
He hated that she asked.
He hated even more that she already knew the answer.
Evan’s handwriting had always looked rushed, as if his thoughts were moving faster than his hand could follow.
Daniel reached for the envelope and stopped.
The officer watched him carefully.
“You should probably read it somewhere you feel comfortable,” she said.
Daniel almost laughed.
There was no comfortable place in that house anymore.
The kitchen still had the scratch on the cabinet door from when Evan had dropped a toolbox while trying to fix a broken hinge.
The living room still had the stain near the window from the night they spilled an entire bottle of wine and argued until sunrise.
The hallway still held the small dent in the wall from when Daniel had thrown a picture frame during the worst fight they ever had.
The house had kept everything.
Daniel was the only one who had tried not to.
“I don’t understand,” he said quietly.
Carla folded her arms.
“Neither do I.”
That answer bothered him more than a confident explanation would have.
For years, Daniel had believed the worst things about Evan because believing them had been easier than admitting he might have been wrong.
Evan had disappeared from his life months before the accident.
Not physically.
Not at first.
He had simply stopped answering calls.
Stopped showing up for family dinners.
Stopped visiting their mother.
Stopped being the person Daniel thought he knew.
Then came the argument.
The final one.
The one neither of them apologized for.
Three weeks later, Evan died when his truck went off a mountain road during a storm.
Everyone called it an accident.
Daniel called it the consequence of a life falling apart.
That was the story he had carried.
That was the story that allowed him to sleep.
Carla placed a small card beside the envelope.
“This was found with it.”
Daniel picked it up.
There was only one sentence.
If you’re reading this, I ran out of time.
His fingers tightened around the paper.
“Did he write this recently?”
“No.”
“How do you know?”
May you like
“Because the ink matches the rest of the letter, and the paper has been sitting under that floor for years.”
Daniel looked toward the hallway again.
