Chapter 24
Ryan dropped the paper as if it had burned his skin. The parchment fluttered down onto the dusty workbench, settling beside an old brass lantern.
"Not the only child?" Emily’s voice trembled with an edge of pure disbelief. "Ryan, what does that mean? How could there be another child?"
Ryan paced back and forth across the concrete floor, his hands buried in his dark hair, pulling at the roots until his scalp turned red. "It doesn't make sense. Maria was pregnant once. Just once. I was with her when she took the test, I was with her at the clinic in Boston for the first ultrasound. There was only one heartbeat. There was only Lily."
"Then why would she write that?" Emily stood up, stepping between Ryan and the two exhausted girls sitting on the workbench. "Look at this note, Ryan! Maria didn't write this to confuse you. She wrote this because she knew she was going to be killed! Who else was living in that house?"
Lily watched them with huge, solemn eyes, swinging her small legs against the frame of the bench. "The other girl doesn't have a window," she said softly.
The shed went dead silent. The only sound was the howling wind whistling through the seams of the corrugated tin roof.
Emily slowly turned toward Lily, dropping to her knees so she was level with the child’s pale face. "Lily... what did you just say?"
"The other girl," Lily repeated, her voice matter-of-fact, innocent, and chilling. "Under the bricks where the roses used to be. Sometimes when the house was quiet at night, she tapped on the iron pipe. Three taps, then two taps. Like this."
Lily tapped her small knuckles against the iron leg of the workbench: *tap-tap-tap... tap-tap.*
Emily looked up at Ryan, her skin crawling with a deep, sickening terror. "The garden house. The Victorian carriage house behind the main estate in Greenwich."
"That place was condemned eight years ago," Ryan stammered, his eyes wide and glazed with mounting horror. "My father boarded it up after the roof collapsed. No one has set foot inside that structure since before I graduated college."
"Someone has," Emily said, her voice dropping to a harsh whisper. "Evelyn did. Or Marcus did. Ryan, when we bought the property from your mother’s trust after your father died, Evelyn had one absolute condition in the deed: the carriage house was never to be demolished or renovated without her written consent. She told us the historic society had a preservation lien on it!"
"It wasn't a preservation lien," Ryan whispered, the realization hitting him like a physical blow. "It was an exclusion zone."
He lunged for the rusted metal desk in the corner of the shed. Beneath a pile of yellowed logging manifests sat an ancient rotary telephone connected to a heavy, wall-mounted copper junction box. Ryan snatched the receiver, held it to his ear, and let out a shuddering breath when he heard the dull, rhythmic hum of an analog dial tone.
He spun the rotary dial rapidly, his bloody fingers leaving smears across the plastic numbers.
The phone rang three times before an elderly, gravelly voice answered on the other end: "Speak."
"Miller," Ryan breathed. "It’s Ryan Sterling."
A sharp intake of breath hissed through the receiver. "Ryan? Where the hell are you? The state wire is lighting up like a Christmas tree. State police are reporting a massive explosion at your family’s cabin in the Adirondacks. They’re saying Evelyn is dead and you’re the prime suspect in an arson-homicide."
"Evelyn triggered the blast herself, Miller," Ryan said, his voice shaking with furious urgency. "She had private contractors posing as federal tactical units to wipe us out. I have Lily. She’s alive. She’s with me and Emily."
A long silence hung over the line, so heavy that Ryan thought the connection had been severed.
"You have Maria’s girl?" Miller’s voice cracked with raw, sudden emotion. "My God, Ryan... I spent four years looking for her grave. They told me she was buried in a landfill in Newark."
"She was in the walls of the main house the entire time," Ryan said. "Miller, listen to me carefully. Maria left a note before she died. She said Lily isn't the only child. She said there’s another child beneath the foundation of the carriage house in Greenwich."
Miller didn't answer immediately. When he did, his voice was barely a whisper, laced with dread.
"Ryan... get your family out of that shed right now. Do not wait for dawn."
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"Why? What do you know?"
"I didn't stop investigating when they took my badge five years ago," Miller said grimly. "Maria didn't have twins, Ryan. The child under the carriage house isn't yours. She’s Evelyn’s."
