Chapter 2 - The Man Who Spoke From the Grave
“Dad?”
Sebastian Vale hadn't spoken that word aloud in eighteen years.
Not since he'd stood beside a closed mahogany casket and watched it disappear beneath the frozen ground.
Now the same familiar voice came through his phone.
“Sebastian. You need to listen carefully.”
Emily stood beside him in the library, her face drained of color.
“Who is it?” she whispered.
Sebastian couldn't answer.
There had been nights when he'd wished he could hear his father's voice again.
This wasn't one of them.
“You're supposed to be dead,” Sebastian said.
A brief silence followed.
Then Charles Vale spoke the words Sebastian had feared hearing his entire adult life.
“There's something you don't know about what happened to your mother.”
Sebastian's fingers tightened around the phone.
His mother, Margaret Vale, had died twenty-two years earlier in a fire at the family's lake house.
Four years later, his father had supposedly died from complications following a heart attack.
Sebastian had buried them both.
Or so he'd believed.
“Where are you?” Sebastian demanded.
“Don't come here with the girl.”
“Emily is thirty-two years old.”
“She'll always be a little girl to Patricia.”
Emily stepped closer.
“Ask him where my mother is.”
Sebastian put the phone on speaker.
“Patricia Carter is standing beside you?”
Charles hesitated.
“She needs medical attention.”
“Then why is she being kept in a house surrounded by armed guards?”
A sharp sound came through the connection.
A chair scraping against the floor.
Patricia's voice rose in the background.
“Charles, you promised me she'd never find out this way!”
Then the call ended.
Sebastian stared at the screen.
For the first time in decades, he felt like a frightened twenty-two-year-old standing outside a burning house.
Emily reached for the library desk to steady herself.
“My mother called me every Sunday,” she whispered. “Even when she was sick. She never missed a Sunday.”
Sebastian looked at her.
“You said she died seven years ago.”
“She was in a nursing facility near Toledo. I got a call saying she'd had a stroke.”
“Did you see her afterward?”
Emily swallowed.
“No.”
“Why?”
“The facility said she'd already been transferred to a funeral home. They told me the damage was too severe for a viewing.”
Sebastian's expression changed.
“Who arranged everything?”
Emily thought for a moment.
“A woman named Helen Mercer. She said she was my mother's medical advocate.”
Sebastian immediately sent the name to Grant.
“Find her.”
He slipped the brass key into his pocket.
Emily followed him toward the door.
“Where are we going?”
“To the lake house.”
“I'm coming.”
“No.”
Emily stopped.
“My mother is in that house.”
“And someone threatened you less than an hour ago.”
“She spent seven years letting me believe she was dead.”
Her voice broke.
“I buried an empty box, didn't I?”
Sebastian looked away.
He couldn't answer because he was asking himself the same question.
He had spent eighteen years visiting a grave that might contain nothing but dirt.
“Emily,” he said carefully, “I need you somewhere safe until I understand what's happening.”
She stepped closer.
“My daughter is nine. She thinks her grandmother is in heaven. How am I supposed to explain this to her?”
Sebastian had no answer.
But he knew one thing.
He wouldn't allow Madeline Sterling anywhere near Sophie.
He called Grant.
“Put two trusted men outside Emily's apartment. Discreetly. No uniforms, no obvious vehicles.”
“Already working on it, boss.”
“And find out whether Charles Vale was ever inside that cemetery.”
Grant went quiet.
“You think the burial was staged?”
“I don't know what to think.”
Sebastian ended the call and turned toward the doorway.
Madeline stood there.
Still wearing the red evening gown she'd chosen for their Christmas charity dinner.
Her diamond engagement ring caught the light.
“Sebastian,” she said softly. “Can we please talk?”
Emily stiffened.
Madeline noticed.
Her expression changed.
“Emily, I owe you an apology.”
“You owe her a lot more than that,” Sebastian said.
Madeline took the words without protesting.
“I know.”
Sebastian studied her face.
“Your family owns my father's lake house.”
“Yes.”
“How long?”
“Twenty-two years.”
The answer struck him harder than he'd expected.
“You knew.”
Madeline lowered her eyes.
“I knew my father bought the property through a trust. I didn't know everything happening inside.”
“Everything?”
She looked at Emily.
“Please. Let me explain privately.”
“No,” Sebastian said. “Whatever you've done to Emily, she deserves to hear it.”
Madeline pressed her lips together.
“My father made a financial arrangement with Charles Vale after the fire. The lake house was part of it.”
“Charles was supposed to be grieving his wife.”
“He was.”
“Then why transfer the property?”
“Because my father was helping him hide something.”
Emily stepped forward.
“What?”
Madeline looked miserable.
“I don't know the whole story.”
Sebastian didn't believe her.
Then Madeline said something that made him pause.
“Emily, when I saw that photograph, I wasn't frightened because you recognized yourself.”
“Then why?”
“Because I'd seen another copy.”
Emily stared.
“Where?”
“In my father's study when I was sixteen.”
Madeline's voice lowered.
“There were two girls in that photograph. Not one.”
Sebastian slowly turned toward her.
“Explain.”
“The picture you found was cropped.”
Emily's hand rose to her mouth.
Madeline continued.
“My father kept the original in a black leather folder. One girl wore yellow. The other wore blue.”
Emily remembered the photograph.
The dock.
The little wooden boat.
The empty space beside her.
There had always been something strange about the way the picture was framed.
A woman's hand rested on her shoulder, but the woman's body had been cut from the image.
“Why did you accuse me of stealing?” Emily asked.
Madeline's eyes filled with tears.
“Because I panicked. When I realized you were Patricia Carter's daughter, I thought you'd come looking for the folder.”
“You hurt me.”
“I know.”
“You threatened to take away my home.”
Madeline couldn't meet her eyes.
Sebastian stepped between them.
“You're going to leave this house tonight.”
Madeline looked at him.
“Sebastian—”
“Our engagement is over until I know what you've been hiding.”
She slowly removed her ring.
But instead of handing it to him, she placed it on the desk.
Then she looked directly at Emily.
“If you go to that lake house, don't let anyone take you into the eastern wing.”
“Why?” Emily whispered.
Madeline hesitated.
“My father used to say the eastern wing was where the family kept its mistakes.”
Sebastian reached for his coat.
“Grant will take you home,” he told Emily.
She shook her head.
“I'm not leaving without an explanation.”
“You'll get one.”
“How?”
Sebastian opened the library door.
“Because I'm going to find the people who've been lying to us.”
Twenty minutes later, he stood in his underground garage.
Grant had arrived with a thick folder.
“Boss, we found Helen Mercer.”
Sebastian opened it.
The photograph showed a woman in her late sixties.
Former nurse.
Private medical consultant.
Administrator of a now-closed eldercare facility.
“Where is she?”
“Gone. Disappeared six years ago.”
Sebastian turned the page.
There was an old photograph from the lake house fire investigation.
Margaret Vale stood near the dock.
Beside her was Patricia Carter.
Each woman held a little girl's hand.
But Sebastian wasn't looking at the children.
He was staring at the necklace around his mother's neck.
A small silver heart.
He knew that necklace.
His mother had placed it in his hand the night before the fire.
She'd told him to keep it safe.
And he'd carried it for twenty-two years.
Sebastian opened his wallet and removed a faded photograph of the pendant.
Grant leaned closer.
“What's wrong?”
Sebastian pointed at the back of the silver heart.
There was a tiny engraved letter.
E.
“Boss?”
Sebastian's voice turned cold.
“My mother didn't give me that necklace to remember her.”
May you like
He looked at the two little girls in the photograph.
“She gave it to me because she knew someone was going to steal a child.”
