Chapter 3 - The Woman Grant Couldn’t Forget
Grant reached the stairs first.
Evelyn followed.
Vanessa stood inside Grant’s bedroom staring at the wall.
Across the mirror, written in red lipstick, were five words.
SHE KNOWS WHAT YOU DID.
Vanessa turned.
Her face was white.
“Who did this?”
Grant looked at Evelyn.
Not accusingly.
Questioningly.
Evelyn shook her head.
Security locked down the estate.
No one was permitted to leave.
That included Evelyn.
“My mother may be in danger.”
Grant faced the security director.
“Then send two people to her house.”
Vanessa snapped, “We have a wedding in ten days and someone is threatening me.”
“I know.”
“Do you?”
Grant looked at her.
“What does that mean?”
“It means everything becomes about Evelyn.”
The room fell silent.
Vanessa laughed bitterly.
“There. I said it.”
Evelyn stepped back.
Grant’s voice lowered.
“This is not the time.”
“When is the time, Grant?”
Vanessa pointed toward Evelyn.
“When do we discuss the fact that you trust her more than the woman you’re marrying?”
Evelyn left before Grant could answer.
She found Margaret forty minutes later because Grant ignored the lockdown himself and drove her.
Margaret was alive.
The front door had been forced.
Nothing was stolen.
But her old family albums were gone.
Margaret sat at her kitchen table clutching tea she did not drink.
Grant stood near the window.
Evelyn placed the photograph in front of her mother.
“Tell me.”
Margaret closed her eyes.
“I worked for Grace.”
Grant turned.
“When?”
“1997 through 1999.”
“That’s impossible. I would remember you.”
“You were away at college.”
Grant approached the table.
“What happened?”
Margaret looked at Evelyn.
“Your father happened.”
Evelyn frowned.
“My father died when I was seven.”
“No.”
One word.
Everything shifted.
Margaret’s hands shook.
“The man who raised you died when you were seven.”
Evelyn stared at her.
“Who was my father?”
Margaret began to answer.
Then Grant’s phone rang.
Security.
His expression changed while he listened.
“What do you mean?”
He walked away.
Evelyn barely heard him.
“Check again.”
He ended the call.
“What?”
Grant looked at Margaret.
“The handwriting on the messages matches samples from my mother.”
Margaret whispered, “That’s impossible.”
“She’s been dead twelve years.”
“I know.”
Evelyn looked between them.
“Unless she didn’t write them recently.”
Margaret’s eyes lifted.
Grant understood first.
“They were prepared years ago.”
Margaret began crying.
“Grace knew this day might come.”
“What day?” Evelyn demanded.
“The day Grant married into the Hale family.”
Grant froze.
“Hale?”
Margaret nodded.
“Grace knew Vanessa’s father.”
Vanessa’s father, Charles Hale, had died eight years earlier.
Officially from a heart attack.
Margaret reached beneath the table and removed an old brass key taped to the wood.
“Grace gave me this in 1999.”
Grant stared at it.
“She told me never to use it unless a Hale came back into your life.”
“What does it open?”
“I don’t know.”
Grant’s phone vibrated.
A security alert.
The camera feed from the Calloway estate appeared.
Someone was inside Evelyn’s apartment.
A hooded figure crossed the bedroom.
Then stopped directly beneath the camera.
The figure slowly lifted their face.
Margaret gasped.
Grant went completely still.
May you like
Because the woman staring into the camera had been dead for twelve years.
It was Grace Calloway.
