Chapter 2 - The Light That Had Been Hurting Him for Four Years
“What did you do?” he asked.
“Turned off the light.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“It’s the only answer I’ve got until I inspect it.”
Mercer stepped forward.
“She is an outside contractor. She has no authority to—”
Dominic raised one finger.
Mercer stopped.
Penny noticed that too.
Dominic pointed toward the pieces of the lamp she had dragged through the window.
“Inspect it.”
She crouched.
The floodlight housing was a standard commercial model.
Except for one thing.
Something clicked inside it.
Penny froze.
Click.
Click.
She pried the casing apart.
Beneath the factory wiring sat a small programmable relay that had no business being there.
Someone had glued it behind a false backing plate.
Penny looked at Dominic.
His expression had emptied.
“What?”
“This wasn’t part of the lamp.”
Mercer moved closer.
“What is it?”
“A relay timer.”
“What does it do?”
Penny examined the settings.
Her stomach tightened.
“At one in the morning, it sends the lamp into a rapid strobe.”
Dominic said nothing.
Mercer did.
“Faulty installation.”
Penny looked at him.
“No.”
“You cannot know that.”
“I know nobody accidentally installs a separate programmable relay behind a false panel and sets it to one o’clock every night.”
Silence.
Dominic’s eyes settled on Mercer.
Penny watched the air change between them.
Mercer recovered first.
“You have been through a traumatic episode. We can discuss this tomorrow.”
Dominic kept staring at him.
Then he took the sheet from his bed, tore a strip from the edge, and held it toward Penny.
“For your hand.”
She blinked.
Men like him did not bandage electricians.
Not in houses like this.
Still, she took it.
“Thanks.”
Dominic turned toward the doorway.
“Everyone out.”
Mercer remained.
Dominic’s voice dropped.
“That includes you.”
For the first time, something cold moved behind Mercer’s eyes.
Then he nodded.
“As you wish.”
When the hallway emptied, Dominic sat heavily on the edge of the bed.
Penny wrapped her palm.
He watched.
“You came here tonight for a light.”
“That was the invoice.”
“Twenty-three minutes after entering my house, you broke my bedroom door, assaulted two guards and smashed a three-thousand-dollar security fixture.”
“Technically, one guard fell into the wall.”
Something almost happened to Dominic’s mouth.
Almost a smile.
It disappeared.
“How long have you been an electrician?”
“Fourteen years.”
“Who taught you?”
“My dad.”
She lifted the wrench.
“He carried this thing for thirty-one years.”
Dominic stared at it.
“My father left me nothing useful.”
“Mine left me a wrench, a van with two hundred thousand miles on it and enough debt to make grief feel expensive.”
That time Dominic did smile.
Barely.
Then the smile died when he looked at the lamp.
“Stay.”
Penny frowned.
“Excuse me?”
“Until we know who installed that relay, you stay here.”
“I have appointments tomorrow.”
“Cancel them.”
“You’re not my boss.”
“I’m aware.”
“Then that sounded a lot like an order.”
“It was.”
Penny stood.
“So I’m a prisoner.”
“No.”
“Can I leave?”
Dominic looked at her.
“No.”
She stared back.
“Then I’ve got some unfortunate news about the definition of prisoner.”
His eyes hardened.
“I will pay you.”
“That doesn’t improve the definition.”
Outside the broken door, somebody coughed and then apparently decided never to cough again.
Dominic leaned closer.
“There are people in this house who would kill you if they believed you had discovered something dangerous.”
Penny glanced toward the hall.
“And you’re one of them?”
“If I wanted you dead, you would not be standing here arguing about vocabulary.”
“That isn’t comforting.”
“It wasn’t intended to be.”
He paused.
“But no one touches you. No one questions you without me present. You eat where I eat. You go where you need to go to inspect the electrical system.”
“Even upstairs?”
A strange silence crossed his face.
“Especially upstairs.”
That was how Penny Hodge entered the Moretti house as a contractor and woke the next morning as something between a protected witness and an unwilling guest.
Daylight did not make the mansion less frightening.
It only made the cameras easier to see.
Two men followed her whenever she worked.
The housekeeper, Maria Ellis, kept finding reasons to sweep near wherever Penny happened to be.
The groundskeeper suddenly needed to trim the same hedge for three hours.
Everybody was watching everybody.
And Penny quickly discovered something more unsettling than surveillance.
The people spying on her were reporting to Mercer.
Not Dominic.
The courtyard timer cabinet sat beneath the damaged floodlight mast.
Old steel box.
Rusting hinges.
Fresh brass lock.
Penny knelt in front of it.
“How old is this lock?”
The guard behind her shrugged.
“Don’t know.”
“Who has the key?”
“Mr. Mercer.”
“Anybody else?”
“No.”
That afternoon she asked the cook.
Same answer.
She asked the gardener.
Same answer.
One key.
Caleb Mercer.
She found the estate maintenance logs the following morning.
They were meticulous.
Boiler repairs.
Generator inspections.
Gate motors.
Kitchen circuits.
Security upgrades.
Then she found the floodlight entry.
Four years earlier.
The exact month Dominic’s nighttime episodes had reportedly begun.
One page had been torn from the ledger.
Not damaged.
Removed.
Penny ran a finger along the ragged edge.
The groundskeeper stood across the workbench pretending not to watch her.
“Who files these?”
He suddenly became fascinated with a shovel.
“Security signs everything.”
“Mercer?”
He did not answer.
Penny did not need him to.
That evening, Dominic found her sitting alone on the back steps.
The mansion glowed behind them.
Beyond the lawn, Lake Michigan was black beneath a clear October sky.
“You found something,” he said.
“You always sneak up on people?”
“They usually hear me.”
“I’m usually around machinery.”
He sat beside her.
No guards.
At least none she could see.
Penny looked toward the courtyard.
“Four years ago someone serviced that floodlight.”
Dominic said nothing.
“The work order is missing.”
Still nothing.
“The cabinet has one key.”
Now he looked at her.
“Mercer.”
“Yes.”
Dominic’s jaw shifted.
Penny studied him.
“You’ve trusted him a long time.”
“Twenty-one years.”
“That doesn’t make him innocent.”
“No.”
“It makes the alternative worse.”
Dominic turned his eyes toward the dark lake.
Penny recognized the expression.
She had seen it on homeowners after telling them the smell behind the wall was not a dead mouse but melted wiring.
People rarely feared the problem.
They feared realizing how long the problem had been there.
“He was there when my father died,” Dominic said.
Penny waited.
“He kept the organization together. Kept me alive through two wars. When the seizures began, it was Mercer who convinced everyone to respect my privacy.”
“By threatening them?”
Dominic’s voice hardened.
“This world has different methods.”
“So I’ve noticed.”
For a while neither spoke.
Then Penny tapped her father’s wrench against her boot.
“My dad used to say circuits don’t lie.”
Dominic looked at her.
“People do?”
“All the time.”
Footsteps sounded around the corner.
Mercer appeared carrying a folder.
Two armed men followed.
He stopped when he saw Penny beside Dominic.
“Interesting.”
Dominic rose.
“What is it?”
Mercer held out the folder.
“Her.”
Penny felt something sink inside her.
Mercer opened it.
“Penny Hodge. Independent contractor. Financial problems. Three late business loans. One civil judgment. Her father left her company insolvent.”
Penny stood.
“My father didn’t leave me insolvent. Cancer did.”
Mercer ignored her.
“More importantly, she performed subcontracting work eighteen months ago for a warehouse controlled by the Rourke crew.”
Dominic’s expression changed.
Penny looked from one man to the other.
“Who?”
Mercer smiled.
“Our oldest enemies.”
“That warehouse hired my company through a general contractor.”
“Convenient.”
“I replaced three panels and left.”
“You arrived tonight and within an hour destroyed our security equipment.”
“Equipment somebody used to make him seize.”
“According to you.”
Penny opened her mouth.
Dominic spoke first.
“No.”
Mercer turned.
“No?”
“You will not question her.”
“Dominic, everything about this woman—”
“I said no.”
Mercer studied him for several seconds.
Then inclined his head.
“Not yet.”
He walked away.
Penny watched him disappear into the house.
“That man hates me.”
Dominic stared after him.
“No.”
“What would you call it?”
“He’s afraid of you.”
Penny looked at Dominic.
“Why?”
May you like
His eyes moved toward the dead floodlight.
“Because you broke something that had been working perfectly for four years.
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