Chapter 4 - WHAT THE WATCH REMEMBERED
Harper stared at the page.
“My father is alive.”
Victor examined the printout.
“Someone wants you to believe that.”
Diana grabbed Harper’s arm.
“We need to leave.”
“The doors are locked.”
Victor crossed to the security panel and entered a code.
Nothing.
Then he removed a slim metal tool from his wallet.
Diana stared.
“You carry lock picks?”
“I dislike being told where I can stand.”
Thirty seconds later, the service stairwell opened.
They descended six floors before Victor stopped.
“What’s wrong?” Harper asked.
“The message.”
“What about it?”
“If Thomas is alive, why announce it now?”
Diana answered first.
“Because Harper found the watch.”
Victor nodded.
Harper looked at it again.
The cracked crystal.
The initials.
“What’s special about it?”
Victor held out his hand.
“May I?”
Harper gave it to him.
He turned the winding crown.
Nothing.
Then he pressed it inward.
A tiny compartment opened along the back plate.
Diana gasped.
Inside was a miniature brass key.
Harper almost laughed.
“Another key.”
Victor removed it carefully.
“Your mother liked layers.”
Outside, they drove not to Victor’s home but to a twenty-four-hour diner near the river.
Harper sat in a booth wearing a mafia boss’s tuxedo jacket, hotel slippers, and Diana’s evening gown while a waitress named Marge poured coffee without asking questions.
Chicago was apparently that kind of city after midnight.
Diana wrapped both hands around her cup.
“I’m sorry.”
Harper looked at her.
“For tonight?”
“For years.”
“That’s a large apology.”
“I know.”
Harper waited.
Diana stared into her coffee.
“When Mom got sick, she told me things she didn’t tell you. I thought that meant she trusted me more.”
Her mouth twisted.
“Then I realized it meant she was trying to keep you innocent.”
“And you hated me for it.”
“Yes.”
The honesty hurt.
Diana wiped beneath one eye.
“I became Dad’s replacement wife without noticing. His hostess. His fixer. The pretty daughter who smiled at lenders and made excuses.”
Harper remembered every charity dinner Diana had attended beside Charles.
Every vacation she had canceled.
Every relationship that had mysteriously ended when Charles needed something.
Diana had been cruel.
She had also been trapped.
Both things could be true.
Victor returned from making a call.
“The brass key belongs to a station locker.”
Harper looked at the train ticket.
“317.”
Union Station still had an old bank of privately maintained storage lockers in a secured luggage area.
Locker 317 opened with Thomas’s tiny key.
Inside sat a battered leather satchel.
Harper’s hands trembled as she unbuckled it.
There were construction photographs.
Inspection reports.
And a cassette tape.
Diana frowned.
“What are we supposed to do with that? Find 1998?”
Victor’s mouth almost twitched.
“My mother never threw electronics away.”
At Elena Rossi’s apartment, an old cassette player sat in a cabinet.
Harper inserted the tape.
Static filled the room.
Then her mother’s voice.
Harper’s knees nearly buckled.
Thomas, stop. If Charles finds out—
A man answered.
Charles already knows.
Harper gripped the table.
Thomas Mercer.
She had never heard his voice.
The recording continued.
Anthony Rossi is moving pension money through the warehouse accounts. Charles is covering the permits. I copied everything.
Evelyn sounded frightened.
Then take it to the police.
Anthony owns people there.
A pause.
Then Thomas said something that changed everything.
Victor’s father doesn’t know.
Victor froze.
The tape continued.
Salvatore Rossi thinks the money is going into legitimate construction. Anthony is stealing from his own brother.
Victor sat slowly.
For years, he had believed his father had built the family empire knowing every dirty transaction beneath it.
Now a dead man’s voice was telling him otherwise.
Thomas continued.
If something happens to me, Elena knows where the originals are.
Then Evelyn spoke.
And Harper?
A long silence.
Thomas’s voice softened.
She deserves better than this.
The tape clicked off.
Harper closed her eyes.
Not proof.
Still not proof.
But love existed in his voice when he said her name.
Victor looked shaken in a way she had not seen before.
“My father spent his last years believing Thomas was stealing from him.”
Diana looked up.
“Anthony framed him.”
“Looks that way.”
Harper searched the satchel again.
At the bottom was a child’s hospital bracelet.
HARPER E. CALLAWAY.
Attached to it was a folded receipt from a motel in Kenosha dated three weeks after the warehouse fire.
The guest name was Thomas Mercer.
Diana whispered, “He survived.”
Harper’s pulse roared.
Then why had he disappeared?
Why had her mother allowed everyone to believe he was dead?
Victor examined the construction photographs.
One showed Thomas standing beside Charles and Anthony Rossi.
Another showed a fourth man.
Victor’s face hardened.
“Who is he?” Harper asked.
“My father’s accountant. Samuel Greene.”
“Is he alive?”
Victor nodded slowly.
“He retired twelve years ago.”
“Where?”
Victor stared at the photograph.
“He lives forty minutes away.”
They reached Samuel Greene’s modest suburban house shortly before dawn.
The old man opened the door in a robe.
Then he saw Harper.
His face drained of color.
“You have Evelyn’s eyes.”
Harper forgot every prepared question.
“Is Thomas Mercer alive?”
Samuel stared at her.
“Yes.”
The world narrowed to that single word.
“Where?”
Samuel looked past her at Victor.
“You shouldn’t have brought her here.”
Victor stepped closer.
“Why?”
“Because Anthony isn’t the person Thomas has been hiding from.”
Harper felt Victor go still beside her.
Samuel’s eyes returned to her.
“Thomas disappeared because Evelyn begged him to.”
“Why?”
The old accountant swallowed.
“Because Charles Callaway discovered Thomas was Harper’s father.”
Harper’s breath stopped.
May you like
“And Charles told Evelyn that if Thomas ever came near his daughter again, he would kill Harper instead.”
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