Chapter 4 - THREE RED WINDOWS AND ONE BLUE
“They're putting my sister in a car at six tomorrow morning.”
Grace stood in Dominic's lounge, staring at the transfer authorization.
Her hands wouldn't stop shaking.
Abigail had survived a car accident that killed her best friend and left her with serious injuries.
After eleven months of treatment, she had finally managed to walk across a therapy room using a cane.
Now someone was treating her recovery like a bargaining chip.
Dominic reached for his phone.
“I can stop the transfer.”
Grace caught his wrist.
“Please don't send men with guns to a hospital.”
He looked surprised.
“I wasn't planning to.”
“I don't know what men like you plan. That's the problem.”
For a moment, he seemed hurt.
Then he nodded.
“Fair enough.”
He called Patrick.
“Contact the hospital administrator. Have our medical attorney verify Abigail's consent and the authorization. No threats. No favors. Do it properly.”
Patrick left immediately.
Grace sat down for the first time since the confrontation began.
Claire placed a hand on her shoulder.
“I'll cover the twenty thousand I promised, whether you sing another note or not.”
Grace looked up.
“You knew this could happen?”
“Not to Abigail.”
“But you knew Harrison was dangerous.”
Claire's silence was answer enough.
Grace stood.
“You should have told me.”
“Yes,” Claire said. “I should have.”
The older woman's honesty stopped Grace from saying anything else.
Dominic moved toward the window.
“Tomorrow morning, Harrison intends to demolish the freight-office foundation. Tonight, he wants Grace frightened enough to disappear.”
Patrick returned fifteen minutes later.
“The transfer is suspended pending a fraud investigation. Abigail's treatment center confirmed it won't discharge her without her consent.”
Grace closed her eyes.
For the first time all evening, she could breathe.
“Is she safe?”
“She's with her regular night nurse. I've asked the hospital to contact you directly if anyone attempts another transfer.”
Grace nodded.
“Thank you.”
Dominic studied her for a moment.
“You can go home now. You don't owe me anything.”
She thought about the writing on the steel door.
Grace, if you ever see this, forgive me for what I hid.
“My mother left me a message,” she said.
“Yes.”
“And somebody wants to destroy it tomorrow.”
Dominic understood what she was deciding.
“Then we go tonight.”
The old freight terminal stood along a neglected bend of the Cumberland River.
Its windows were dark, and weeds pushed through cracks in the concrete loading platform.
Beyond the chain-link fence, the river moved slowly beneath a cloudy sky.
Grace stepped out of Dominic's SUV.
She wore jeans, borrowed work boots, and a thick black jacket.
Dominic had changed into dark trousers and a plain shirt. His tattooed forearms showed beneath his rolled sleeves.
Patrick brought two security men and a retired terminal maintenance supervisor named Walter Briggs.
Walter was seventy-one and walked with a slight limp.
“I haven't been here since the city closed the place,” he said. “Never thought I'd see it again.”
He studied the old building.
“Three red windows and one blue.”
Grace looked up.
The second-floor windows had been painted years ago.
Three were framed in faded red.
One was framed in blue.
The second verse of Daniel's song was no longer a strange collection of words.
It was a map.
Walter pointed toward the building.
“Blue window belonged to the night dispatch office. That's where the river-gate controls were kept.”
Dominic looked at Patrick.
“Why would a freight office control river gates?”
“Flood protection,” Walter explained. “The old service passage ran below the loading tracks. When the river rose, the gate system kept water from flooding the tunnel.”
He paused.
“Unless somebody opened the wrong valve.”
Claire, who had insisted on coming, looked away.
They entered through a side door Patrick's men had already secured.
Inside, the terminal smelled of damp wood, rust, and old paper.
Grace imagined her mother walking these same hallways seventeen years earlier.
Nora would have been thirty-three.
She would have hurried home afterward to make dinner for Grace and five-year-old Abigail.
Had she known, even then, that the people she worked for were dangerous?
They climbed a metal staircase.
In the old dispatch office, Walter found a row of numbered cabinets.
“The night watchman kept the river-control log here.”
Grace remembered the third verse.
Where the river takes the guilty,
And the midnight waters rise,
Find the name that signed the silence,
Not the name they made you despise.
Turn the watch before the water,
Let the blue light lead you home.
She repeated the words.
Walter looked toward the cabinets.
“Turn the watch,” he murmured.
He opened a drawer filled with broken pencils, rusted keys, and small metal objects.
Beneath an old logbook lay a silver pocket watch.
Dominic picked it up.
His expression changed.
“Daniel's.”
Claire covered her mouth.
Dominic turned the watch over.
On the back were two engraved initials.
D.M.
“I gave this to him when we turned twenty-one,” Dominic said.
Grace looked at him.
“You kept his ring in your memories. You kept his song. And now his watch.”
Dominic nodded.
“He was my brother in every way except blood.”
For a moment, his frightening reputation seemed almost impossible to reconcile with the man holding that small, battered watch.
Then Patrick noticed something.
“The hands stopped at 2:17.”
Walter leaned closer.
“That was the time the flood alarm activated.”
Dominic looked up sharply.
“You remember the exact minute?”
“Three men died down there, Mr. Caruso. I remember more than I wish I did.”
Walter pointed toward a circular metal plate on the dispatch wall.
“Night-watch inspection dial. You turned it after each inspection and stamped the time on the paper log.”
The dial was frozen.
Patrick examined it.
“There's a small access panel behind it.”
Walter retrieved a screwdriver.
After several minutes, the plate came loose.
Behind it was a narrow compartment containing a brass key and a folded piece of paper.
Grace carefully unfolded the paper.
It was a sketch of the building's lower level.
A square marked RECORDS ROOM stood beside the old flood passage.
Across the bottom, in Nora Mitchell's handwriting, were four words.
CLOSE THE BLUE VALVE FIRST.
Walter stared at the sketch.
“Lord help us.”
“What?” Dominic asked.
“The records room sits below the river level. If the old valve is open and somebody forces that steel door, water could enter through the damaged service passage.”
Patrick checked the drawings.
“My men were going to cut the door tomorrow.”
Walter shook his head.
“They could've flooded the whole room.”
Grace felt a chill.
Her mother hadn't written the warning to keep Dominic away.
She had written it to keep him alive long enough to find the truth.
They returned downstairs.
Walter located the blue-painted valve wheel beside a maintenance hatch.
It took both Patrick and another guard to turn it fully closed.
Only then did they approach the sealed room.
The warning remained visible on the door.
Grace touched the faded lettering.
“Mom,” she whispered. “What were you trying to tell me?”
The brass key opened a small mechanical lock beneath the handle.
The door resisted at first.
Then it moved with a low metallic groan.
The room beyond contained dusty file cabinets, a damaged wooden desk, and several metal storage boxes.
There were no hidden riches.
No piles of money.
Only the records of people who had worked there, including those whose deaths had been explained away.
Claire began to cry.
“Daniel said he'd hidden proof.”
Patrick lifted a metal box from a shelf.
Inside lay an old payroll ledger, a folder of photographs, and a compact cassette recorder wrapped in oilcloth.
Dominic picked up the recorder.
The batteries were long dead, but the cassette remained inside.
Patrick carefully labeled and secured the items.
They took photographs of everything before disturbing anything else.
An hour later, in the small security office near the entrance, Patrick connected the cassette to a portable player he'd brought from the vehicle.
The tape hissed.
A man's voice spoke.
“October seventeenth. Freight office. Two-seventeen in the morning.”
Walter turned pale.
Then they heard Salvatore Caruso.
“The lower passage stays closed until morning.”
Another man asked, “What about the people inside?”
Salvatore answered, “That's no longer our concern.”
Dominic's jaw tightened.
Then a younger voice interrupted.
A voice he knew better than his own.
His own voice, seventeen years earlier.
“Keep those doors locked until morning. Nobody opens them without my authorization.”
Grace slowly turned toward him.
Dominic stood motionless.
May you like
The man who had promised to help her uncover her mother's secret had just heard himself ordering the doors locked.
And somewhere beyond those doors, three men had died.
