Chapter 6
Twenty minutes later, we were back inside Sofia's music room.
The early morning sky glowed pale gray beyond the windows.
I placed the digital recorder on the piano.
Dominic stood beside the photographs.
His sister smiled from every frame.
At the beach.
At Christmas.
Sitting beneath the garden's flowering trees.
Playing the piano.
She was everywhere.
And yet for ten years, he'd refused to hear the music she'd left behind.
I pressed the sixteenth recording.
Sofia's voice filled the room.
“Sixteen times I almost told you.”
The piano melody began.
Dominic closed his eyes.
When the music ended, we listened carefully to the final seconds.
A faint rustle.
A distant male voice.
Then a sharp click.
I replayed it.
Again.
And again.
“That's Mercer,” Dominic whispered.
“You recognize his voice?”
“I think so.”
I remembered the anonymous four-second message.
“Make sure she drives herself.”
I played that clip from my phone.
The voices sounded similar.
But similar wasn't proof.
“We need someone qualified to compare them,” I said.
Dominic nodded.
“I've already arranged it.”
Then something occurred to me.
“Why did Sofia number the songs?”
He looked at the recorder.
“She always did strange things with music.”
“But sixteen recordings, each beginning with its number?”
“Maybe she recorded them in order.”
“Maybe.”
I hesitated.
“Or maybe she wanted you to know none of them was missing.”
Dominic frowned.
I pointed toward the display.
“Seventeen files. Sixteen songs. One message.”
His eyes sharpened.
“And the music book?”
I nodded.
“The empty space inside the cover. Someone removed whatever was hidden there.”
Dominic lifted the book from the piano bench.
He ran his fingers along the torn lining.
Then he stopped.
“Rachel.”
“What?”
“There's something underneath.”
He carefully separated the remaining loose fabric.
A narrow folded paper slid out.
Not a photograph.
Not a letter.
A handwritten list.
Three dates.
Three amounts.
And beneath them, a name.
Daniel Mercer.
Dominic stared at it.
“These correspond to transfers Sofia questioned.”
He turned the paper over.
On the back, Sofia had written:
“THE ANSWER ISN'T ONLY WHO TOOK THE MONEY. IT'S WHO MADE SURE I COULDN'T TELL DOM.”
I felt cold.
Dominic read the sentence again.
Then he whispered, “She knew.”
***
At 6:18 a.m., Marcus arrived with an update.
His team had identified the source of the anonymous messages.
Not the person.
The route.
The messages had been sent through an internet-based service that concealed the sender's ordinary phone number.
But one of the accounts used to access that service had been logged from the estate's former maintenance network.
A network that should have been disconnected years earlier.
“We recovered the device that reactivated the old security code,” Marcus explained.
Dominic's expression hardened.
“Where?”
“Behind the west-wing service cabinet.”
“Fingerprints?”
“It's being preserved for examination.”
“Who installed it?”
“We don't know yet.”
I looked toward the piano.
The remote-controlled note.
The hidden recorder.
The anonymous warnings.
Someone had carefully arranged everything to make Dominic reopen the investigation.
And someone else appeared determined to prevent him from reaching the truth.
“Maybe Mercer sent the messages,” I said.
Marcus nodded.
“It's possible.”
“Why would he expose evidence against himself?”
Dominic looked at the handwritten list.
“Because he may want us to believe someone else is responsible.”
Or, I thought, because he was no longer in control of the secrets he'd spent ten years hiding.
***
By late morning, the estate no longer resembled the silent mansion where I'd begun working six days earlier.
Investigators arrived.
Evidence was photographed, collected, and documented.
Evelyn gave a formal statement.
Marcus surrendered his security records and correspondence with the man he'd known as Thomas Reed.
Dominic contacted an attorney and arranged for the financial documents to be examined independently.
For the first time, the truth was leaving the walls of the Vale estate.
It was no longer something the family could bury in a locked room.
I stood near the staircase as two investigators carried sealed evidence bags toward the front entrance.
Dominic approached me.
“You should get some rest.”
“So should you.”
He looked exhausted.
Dark shadows lay beneath his eyes.
His black shirt was wrinkled.
The man who had intimidated me simply by standing in a doorway now looked as if ten years of grief had finally caught up with him.
“Rachel,” he said quietly, “I need to apologize.”
“For what?”
“Bringing you into this.”
“You didn't.”
His eyebrows rose.
“I played the music,” I reminded him.
A faint smile touched his mouth.
“That you did.”
“And I asked questions.”
“Yes.”
“So don't apologize because I chose to stay.”
He studied me.
“Most people don't speak to me like that.”
“Most people haven't watched you argue with a piano.”
His smile grew.
For a moment, he almost looked peaceful.
Then his phone rang.
Marcus.
Dominic answered.
Listened.
And the smile disappeared.
“What did they find?” I asked when he ended the call.
May you like
He looked at me.
“They located Daniel Mercer.”
