Chapter 15
Static filled the concrete room. Then, out of the hiss, a man's voice β older, rougher than I remembered, but unmistakably my father's.
I had not heard that voice in twenty years. Not since I was twelve, not since the night he walked out and my mother sat me down at the kitchen table and told me he had been involved in something dangerous. I had tried for years to remember exactly how he sounded, and I had failed, and now here he was, coming out of a cassette recorder in a concrete room under my house, and my knees nearly gave out.
"If this recording is playing," Robert Cole said, "Dana opened Eleanor's safe."
Dana went very still. One of the security men shifted his weight and glanced at her.
"She believes the safe contains the original property ledger," my father said. "It does not."
Dana's hand tightened on the cassette recorder until her knuckles whitened.
"She believes the corridor can be filled from Henry Marsh's house," my father said. "It cannot."
Somewhere beneath us, a metallic bang sounded, deep and hollow, like a great door slamming shut in the earth. The pumping vibration that had been traveling through the concrete floor β the one I had barely noticed until it stopped β went silent all at once.
Grace grabbed my arm. "The pump," she whispered. "It's stopping. Thomas, the concrete truck β they're filling the corridor from Henry's house. Your father just stopped it."
I thought of the pumping truck behind Henry Marsh's vacant house, the one the outline of their plan required. They were going to seal the corridor from both ends with us inside it. They were going to bury the evidence, bury Paula, bury my father, bury me.
My father's recorded voice continued, steady and unhurried, like a man who had rehearsed this speech for years in the dark.
"The old corridor contains three pressure gates," he said. "The first closes when concrete reaches Pauline Marsh's branch. The second closes beneath Grace Nolan's foundation. The third must be released manually from the original municipal control room."
Dana looked toward the northern end of the room, past the shelves of files, toward a dark passage I had not noticed before. Her face had gone white. She understood what this meant before I did β that the corridor had defenses she had never found, that the man she had kept prisoner for seventeen years had been preparing for this night longer than she had been watching him.
"That room," my father said, "is where Eastbrook has been keeping me."
I looked at the photograph again β my father standing beside Dana Holloway, eleven days ago. It had not been taken during a meeting between partners. It had been proof of life. Dana had forced him to stand beside her, and the photograph had been sent into my mother's safe through the corridor, so that if I ever opened it, I would know he was alive and where to find him.
"I have spent seventeen years pretending to help them locate every copy of the evidence," my father said. "I believed staying close allowed me to protect Thomas and Eleanor."
His voice broke, just slightly, on my mother's name.
"I was wrong about Eleanor."
The room was silent except for the static. Grace was crying quietly beside me, her hand pressed to her mouth. Even the security men had stopped moving. Somewhere in the dark beyond the shelves, water dripped, steady as a clock.
"I may be wrong about Thomas too," my father said. "But I am done being wrong in silence."
The recording ended with four words.
"Thomas, follow the pipes."
I aimed my phone light at the ceiling. A row of rusted water pipes ran the length of the room, and one of them had been marked with faded blue paint, a stripe worn almost invisible by time and damp. I followed it with the light. The blue pipe continued into the northern passage, past the shelves, into the dark where Dana had been looking, toward the control room where my father had spent seventeen years.
Dana stepped in front of me. "You are not going anywhere."
Behind her, the metal door at the far end of the room began to rattle. Someone was pounding on it from the other side, hard, demanding to be let in, and Dana's head snapped toward the sound.
My father was in the control room. He had been there for seventeen years. And he had just told me how to find him. I was already moving.