Chapter 12 - THE WOMAN IN BLACKWOOD HOUSE
Police surrounded the property.
Nobody was found.
No forced entry.
No unknown vehicle.
No unidentified employee.
The access originated from the old nursery wing.
Emily’s former bedroom.
Inside the wall behind a bookshelf, technicians found a hidden transmitter.
It had been recording family conversations for years.
Daniel broke a chair when he learned that.
The device used Meridian architecture.
The installation date was nine years earlier.
Emily had been two.
Someone had watched her almost her entire life.
Torres traced the signal to a relay.
Then another.
Finally it led to a nursing facility in Connecticut.
Registered resident:
Eleanor Voss.
Age eighty-nine.
Daniel, Lydia, Torres, and federal agents arrived together.
Eleanor Voss was alive.
She sat beside a window wearing a pale blue sweater.
Tiny.
White-haired.
Almost blind.
Daniel stared at her.
“My grandmother died when I was eleven.”
Eleanor smiled.
“No.”
Her voice was thin.
“You attended a funeral.”
Lydia gripped the chair.
“You killed Caroline.”
Eleanor looked toward her granddaughter.
“Caroline was sentimental.”
Daniel stepped forward.
“She was your daughter.”
“She was a problem.”
Torres moved between them.
Eleanor showed no fear.
“You think arresting an old woman matters?”
“What is Meridian?” Torres asked.
“A tool.”
“For blackmail?”
“For stability.”
“You murdered people.”
“I preserved institutions.”
Emily watched from the doorway despite being told not to enter.
Eleanor saw her.
Her expression changed.
Not warmth.
Recognition.
“There you are.”
Daniel immediately blocked Emily.
Eleanor smiled.
“Charles always did have a flair for irony.”
“What do you want with her?” Daniel demanded.
“Nothing.”
“Liar.”
“Emily already did what Meridian needed.”
Daniel frowned.
“She opened the vault.”
“Yes.”
Eleanor smiled.
“And restored the archive.”
Victor had been wrong.
Charles’s biometric lock had not trapped Meridian.
It had preserved it.
When Emily opened the vault, dormant servers connected to hidden systems across the country.
Meridian was awake again.
Torres ordered technicians to shut it down remotely.
Eleanor laughed.
“You can destroy every machine you find.”
She looked toward Emily.
“You will never know where the copies are.”
Daniel leaned close.
“I don’t care.”
“You should.”
“Why?”
“Because Grace cared.”
Emily stepped around her father.
“What did my mother do?”
Eleanor’s smile disappeared.
“Grace stole something from me.”
“The eleven million?”
“Money is for people who lack imagination.”
“What?”
“A list.”
“Of what?”
“Everyone Meridian owned.”
Judges.
Executives.
Politicians.
Police officers.
Journalists.
People whose secrets had been collected for decades.
Grace stole the only master index linking identities to files.
Without it, Meridian had enormous amounts of information but no reliable map.
“Where is it?” Torres asked.
Eleanor looked at Emily.
“Inside the violin.”
Emily shook her head.
“The violin broke.”
“Not that violin.”
Emily stopped.
Eleanor smiled again.
“Grace was smarter than all of you.”
There had been two violins.
Samuel Price confirmed it.
Grace owned a cheap student instrument and a rare nineteenth-century violin donated by Charles.
After Grace died, the rare violin disappeared.
Foundation records claimed it had been sold at auction.
No auction house had any record.
Lydia controlled foundation storage.
Daniel turned on her.
“Where is it?”
“I don’t know.”
“You signed the disposal.”
“I signed hundreds of forms after Grace died.”
“Find it.”
They searched warehouses.
Foundation offices.
Insurance documents.
Then Emily remembered a photograph from her mother’s funeral.
Aunt Lydia standing beside the church.
Behind her, Raymond carried a violin case.
Not the broken one Emily owned.
Another case.
Raymond had taken the second violin.
Daniel tracked Raymond’s old emergency account.
A payment had been made that morning at a gas station in upstate New York.
Torres issued an alert.
Emily looked at the map.
The location was only forty miles from Thomas Mercer’s house.
They called Thomas.
No answer.
Police arrived at his cabin twenty-five minutes later.
The door was open.
Thomas was gone.
On his kitchen table lay the rare violin case.
Empty.
May you like
And beside it was a note written in Raymond’s handwriting.
GRACE TRUSTED THE WRONG MERCER.
