Chapter 5 - Twenty-Seven Years Missing.
Bellweather was ninety minutes from Chicago when traffic behaved.
That night, Dominic's driver made it in sixty-eight.
Wren sat in the back seat with the wooden box on her lap and Samuel's brass key closed inside her fist.
Rain streaked the windows.
The city lights disappeared behind them until there was nothing outside but black farmland, occasional gas stations, and the narrow white line of the highway.
Dominic sat opposite her in the rear-facing seat.
Elias rode in front.
For twenty minutes, nobody spoke.
Wren used the silence to think.
It did not help.
Every memory of Samuel had become suspicious.
The locked drawer beneath his workbench.
The nights he checked the front door twice.
The way he refused to answer questions about certain customers.
The old newspaper clippings he kept turned facedown beneath the register.
She had treated those things as habits of an elderly man.
Now they looked like fragments of another life.
"Tell me everything," she said.
Dominic looked at her.
"About what?"
"October twelfth, 1999."
His eyes shifted toward the rain-black window.
Wren waited.
Dominic eventually spoke.
"My mother was named Elena Moretti."
His voice had lost the public coldness he used at the gala.
"She married my father when she was twenty-one."
"Was he already involved in crime?"
"He called it business."
Dominic's mouth twisted without humor.
"By the time I was old enough to understand fear, I knew which rooms I wasn't supposed to enter and which questions made adults stop talking."
Wren listened.
"My mother kept records."
"Of your father?"
"Of everyone."
Dominic folded his hands.
"Payments, names, dates, shell companies, police contacts, politicians, contractors."
"Why?"
"Insurance."
Wren understood the word immediately.
"She planned to leave him."
"She planned to take me and disappear."
Dominic's gaze darkened.
"Victor Harrington helped her organize the money."
Wren frowned.
"The same Victor Harrington?"
"The same."
"You said he was your father's accountant."
"He was."
Dominic paused.
"He was also my mother's friend."
"And you think he betrayed her."
"I know someone did."
The windshield wipers beat steadily ahead of them.
"My father knew the route before we left."
Dominic's voice became quieter.
"He knew the car."
"He knew exactly which road we would take out of Chicago."
Wren looked down at the compass.
"What happened after the crash?"
"I remember rain."
Dominic's eyes were somewhere else now.
"I remember my mother yelling at me to crawl out the passenger side."
"The door wouldn't open."
"Then someone smashed the window."
Wren could picture Samuel doing it.
"He dragged me through broken glass."
"He went back for my mother."
Dominic swallowed once.
"The car caught fire before he could reach her."
Wren's chest tightened.
"I'm sorry."
Dominic nodded.
"Samuel took me to his shop because he said the men looking for me would check hospitals first."
"He cleaned the cuts on my hands."
"He gave me soup."
"He let me sleep behind a wall of marine clocks."
Wren imagined nine-year-old Dominic lying in a hidden room while her grandfather listened for cars outside.
"Why didn't Samuel call the police?"
"He did."
Dominic's expression hardened.
"A detective arrived the next morning."
"Samuel took one look at him and sent him away."
"Why?"
"Because the detective was wearing my father's watch."
Wren stared.
"Your father's watch?"
"A gold Patek with a black face."
Dominic's mouth flattened.
"My father gave expensive things to men he expected to remember who owned them."
The car turned off the highway.
Bellweather appeared in the distance, little more than a handful of streetlights and dark roofs under rain.
"On the third night, Samuel drove me to a church outside Rockford," Dominic continued.
"A priest there put me on a train with my aunt."
"I never saw Samuel again."
Wren looked at him.
"You said you searched for him."
"When I was old enough."
"His shop never moved."
Dominic's eyes sharpened.
"On paper, Samuel Holloway disappeared in 2001."
"That's impossible."
"His tax records changed."
"Property records were transferred through a trust."
"His business license was listed under S.H. Instruments, not his name."
Wren frowned.
She remembered the sign.
SAMUEL HOLLOWAY CLOCK & NAVIGATION REPAIR.
"He was hiding from searches."
"Yes."
"From you?"
"Maybe from whoever was watching me search."
That possibility hurt differently.
Wren thought about Samuel's warning.
If Dominic finds this, run.
"Did your father know you were looking for Samuel?"
"My father died when I was twenty-three."
Dominic looked at the road.
"After that, I searched more openly."
"And Victor?"
"Victor left my father's organization years earlier and reinvented himself as a developer."
"Then a philanthropist."
Wren gave a bitter laugh.
"He has a children's foundation."
"Men like Victor enjoy building clean buildings over dirty foundations."
The sentence stayed with her.
They reached Bellweather at 10:07 p.m.
Samuel's shop stood on Main Street between a closed bakery and a hardware store that still displayed hand-painted prices in the window.
Police tape crossed the front door.
A patrol car idled at the curb.
Wren stepped out before the driver could reach her door.
Rain hit her face.
She barely noticed.
The blue awning sagged slightly over the storefront.
SAMUEL HOLLOWAY CLOCK & NAVIGATION REPAIR remained painted across the glass in faded gold.
The sight of it nearly broke her.
For four years, she had avoided selling the place because doing so felt like burying Samuel twice.
Now the shop looked violated.
A young officer met them under the awning.
"Ms. Holloway?"
"Yes."
"We got your alarm company's call."
He glanced at Dominic and immediately became more careful.
"Rear window was forced."
"Anything missing?"
"Hard to tell."
Wren unlocked the front door.
The smell hit her first.
For one suspended moment, Wren was ten years old again.
She could hear Samuel humming badly over the scrape of a file.
She could see sunlight falling across jars filled with screws sorted by size because he believed chaos was tolerable only when labeled.
On summer afternoons, she used to sit beneath the front window eating peach slices while customers described clocks that had belonged to dead parents, missing brothers, and marriages that had somehow survived both war and boredom.
Samuel treated every object as if it carried the weight of the person who brought it in.
He never asked whether the owner could afford a perfect restoration before he listened to the story.
Wren had once asked why he spent three hours repairing a watch worth twenty dollars.
Samuel had looked offended.
"Because the woman who brought it in has worn it for forty years."
"The market is not the only place value lives."
Standing in the damaged shop now, Wren understood why the trashed compass had hurt so deeply.
Bianca had not merely insulted an antique.
She had repeated the oldest mistake Samuel taught Wren to resist.
Judging worth by what other people would pay to be seen owning it.
Wren stepped over a scattered tray of gears and felt grief sharpen into determination.
Oil.
Old wood.
Dust.
Brass polish.
Home.
Then she saw the damage.
Drawers had been pulled open.
Cabinets stood empty.
Clock parts littered the floor.
The old marine chronometers along the back wall had been removed from their shelves.
And behind them, the brick wall was gone.
A narrow opening led into darkness.
Wren stopped breathing.
"There," Dominic said.
His voice was almost nine years old.
He walked toward the opening.
Wren followed.
The hidden room was smaller than she expected.
A cot folded against one wall.
A rusted sink sat beneath a shelf.
An old wool blanket remained neatly stacked in the corner.
Dominic touched it.
His face changed.
"This was mine."
Wren looked around.
"He kept it?"
"Apparently."
There was one metal cabinet against the far wall.
Its door hung open.
Empty.
Elias crouched near the lock.
"Recently forced."
Wren held up the brass key.
"Then this wasn't for the cabinet."
Dominic studied the room.
"Samuel wouldn't build a hidden room and put the important thing in the only obvious cabinet."
Wren almost smiled.
"That sounds like him."
She moved slowly around the walls.
Her grandfather had taught her to look at mechanisms by asking what they were pretending to be.
She touched the sink.
The cot.
The shelf.
Then she stopped at an old brass wall barometer.
It was mounted too low.
Samuel never mounted instruments too low.
Wren lifted it from its hook.
Behind it was a keyhole.
Dominic looked at the brass key in her hand.
Wren inserted it.
It turned with a soft click.
A section of wood paneling beside the shelf released.
Inside was a narrow cavity.
One object remained.
A black ledger wrapped in oilcloth.
Wren reached for it.
Dominic caught her wrist.
"Wait."
She looked at him.
Elias checked the cavity first.
"Clear."
Dominic released her.
Wren removed the ledger.
The oilcloth cracked as she unfolded it.
On the cover, Samuel had written two words.
ELENA MORETTI.
Dominic's face drained of color.
Wren opened the ledger.
The first page contained names and dates.
The second contained account numbers.
The third contained a list of payments.
Halfway down the page, one name appeared again and again.
VICTOR HARRINGTON.
Dominic stared at it.
Then a floorboard creaked in the shop outside.
Elias turned instantly.
The overhead lights went out.
Wren froze.
Samuel's warning flashed through her mind.
Next time the lights go out, you stay dark.
A shadow moved across the doorway.
And someone whispered from the shop.
"Put the ledger down, Wren."
May you like
She knew the voice.
Bianca Sutton had followed them to Bellweather.
