Chapter 5
My mother had not been admitted to the hospital.
Ellis meant the private clinic floor attached to the building, where my mother had received therapy after her stroke. Leo Sutter had entered its records office carrying the box from the pier.
For a moment, I thought he was hiding it there.
Then Nina called the clinic and learned that its old patient files were being moved to off-site storage that evening. Victor’s company had the transport contract.
Sutter had placed the box where Victor’s trucks could collect it without another break-in.
Ellis sent officers to the clinic. I stayed with Delia and Owen at the station because Sarah asked me to. She was trying to reach her landlord and needed someone Owen had met to sit with him.
Owen woke and asked for water. I brought him a paper cup. He showed me that the wooden boat had a tiny scratched letter underneath.
“E,” he said. “For Ewan.”
I turned it in my hand.
“My brother used to carve his name on everything.”
“Mom says he wanted me to know he was real.”
I swallowed before answering.
“He was very real.”
An hour later, Ellis called. Her officers had recovered the box from the clinic’s outgoing storage. It held photocopied freight manifests, photographs of damaged safety equipment, and a small audio recorder. The chain of custody for the box would take work to establish because Sutter had moved it, but the materials gave investigators names and dates to check against independent records.
“I need to hear the recording,” I said.
“You can hear it with me,” Ellis answered. “At the station.”
Delia stayed with Owen and Sarah while Ellis played the file in a nearby room.
At first I heard machinery, footsteps, and Ewan’s voice asking someone to repeat what he had said.
Then Victor answered.
“The inspection can wait until Monday.”
Ewan said the fire alarms in the east shed were disconnected.
Victor told him the cargo had to move before dawn.
“What cargo?” Ewan asked.
There was a scrape, as if the recorder had been pressed against cloth.
“Don’t ask questions you can’t afford,” Victor said.
The recording ended before Ewan answered.
I wanted to hear more. Ellis showed me the file length. There was no more.
“The alarm records will tell us whether the equipment was disabled,” she said. “The manifests may tell us what moved. We need the original records if they still exist.”
“Victor controlled the shipment?”
“We’re investigating that.”
I looked at the date Ewan had written on the recorder. It was the day before the fire.
For six years, I had believed Ewan died because a storm knocked out the pier’s electrical system. An old report said the fire alarms failed with it.
If the alarms were already disconnected, someone had let him walk into a building without a warning system.
I returned to Delia. She knew before I spoke that I had heard Ewan’s voice.
“He sounded angry,” I said.
“He was. He kept saying somebody was going to get hurt.”
I sat beside her.
“He told you about the alarms?”
“He told me enough to make me beg him not to go back.”
I had spoken to Ewan that morning. We argued over a truck route. He could have told me about the alarms then. I could have asked why he was at the pier on his day off.
Instead, I told him to stop interfering with a schedule I had approved.
Delia touched my sleeve.
“You didn’t disconnect them,” she said.
“I signed off on the shipment.”
“Then tell Ellis. Let her find out what that means.”
It was the hardest kindness anyone had offered me.
I called Nina and asked her to obtain every shipping record our office still held. Then I told Ellis about my signature.
She did not promise it would be easy. She asked for the names of the people who had prepared the route. I gave her all of them, including men who still worked for me.
That evening, Celeste called from a number I did not recognize. Ellis had interviewed her and released her while they continued investigating Delia’s assault.
“I heard they found Ewan’s box,” she said.
“How?”
“My father has friends at the clinic.”
I let the silence sit between us.
“You should speak to me before you tell the police anything else,” she said.
“You hurt Delia.”
“She took something from my father.”
“Ewan put it in that locker.”
“I didn’t know what he put there.”
“Then why did you send someone to take it?”
Celeste’s breath caught. She had not realized how much I knew.
“My father said the box could ruin us,” she said at last. “He told me Delia had the number. I went to ask her for it. She tried to leave.”
“With the scarf around her wrist?”
“I panicked.”
It was the first plain word she had given me since the conservatory.
“Tell Ellis that,” I said.
“If I do, he’ll come after me.”
I thought of Owen sleeping against Delia. I thought of my mother straining to move a hand across a blanket.
“You can tell Ellis what he did,” I said. “I can’t make the choice for you.”
She hung up.
I went home to my mother. Tomas had read to her after dinner. She was awake and restless, her gaze fixed on the doorway.
I told her we had found Ewan’s box and heard his voice. Tears slipped down her cheeks.
“Did you know the alarms were disconnected?” I asked.
Yes.
“Did Victor do it?”
May you like
She hesitated.
Then she answered no.
