Chapter 6 - The Midnight Corridor
The lie didn't fit.
Mara sat on the edge of the guest bed, the silence of the mansion pressing against her ears. Her grandmother had died in a county hospital bed with forty-two dollars in her checking account and an old television that only caught three channels. If she had taken fifty thousand dollars from the Falco family, the money would have been there to pay off Mara’s tuition. It would have been there to buy the medicine Evelyn needed during her final months.
Mrs. Gable was lying. Or she was covering for someone who had actually taken the money.
Mara pulled the journal out from beneath the mattress, slipping it into the waistband of her trousers before stepping into the dark corridor. The house was completely quiet now, the guards downstairs in the security room watching the perimeter cameras.
She navigated the third-floor hallway by memory, her bare feet making no sound on the long oriental runner. She reached the nursery door, her hand resting on the brass handle. She didn't want to wake Ivy; she wanted to see the small storage closet behind the changing table—the place her grandmother’s notes described as the true ledger repository.
The nursery was dark, the moonlight filtering through the live oaks outside casting long, skeletal shadows across the white rug. Ivy was a quiet mound beneath her blankets.
Mara slid behind the changing table, her fingers searching the wood paneling along the baseboard. Her grandmother’s journal had a final note: Three clicks from the left hinge.
She pressed the third brass rivet. With a soft, hydraulic click, a hidden compartment behind the wall slid open three inches. Inside was a leather binder, covered in dust, its edges stained with dried canal water.
"Looking for this?"
Mara spun around, her heart leaping into her throat.
Roman Vale was standing beside the crib, his silhouette dark against the window light. He hadn't made a sound entering the room. In his right hand, he held a small silver flashlight, its beam dropping onto the leather binder in her hand.
"You’re very good at finding secrets, Ms. Ellison," Roman said, his voice a low, cool vibration that didn't wake the sleeping child. "Your grandmother must have taught you how to look beneath the floorboards."
"My grandmother didn't sell your wife’s life, Mr. Vale," Mara said, her voice shaking but her grip on the binder tightening. "Mrs. Gable told me she took fifty thousand from the Falcos. But my grandmother died poor. If the money disappeared, it went into someone else’s pocket."
Roman walked over to her, his shadow enveloping her completely as he reached out and took the binder from her fingers. He didn't look at the pages; he looked down at her face, his eyes tracing the fierce, stubborn line of her jaw.
"I know Gable is lying," Roman said softly. "She’s been on the Falco payroll since the night Ivy was born. I kept her here because a rat in the open is easier to track than a rat in the wall. But she didn't know about this compartment. Clara built this herself three weeks before she died."
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He opened the binder under the flashlight beam. The first page wasn't a medical report. It was a birth certificate, stamped by the State of Louisiana, with a name that made Mara’s entire world tilt on its axis.
Beneath the certificate was a medical matching report from the Mercy Fertility Clinic. Clara Vale hadn't been able to carry a child without an egg donor. And the donor listed under Case File 882-B was a twenty-three-year-old nursing student named Mara Ellison.
