Chapter 10
The Floorboards We didn’t call the police.
Not yet. “Voss won’t be able to arrest him based on a recovered memory from ten years ago,” Claire said.
We were sitting around the heavy oak dining table. The papers Vance had dropped were spread out between us. Legal jargon.
Bank stamps.
Signatures that looked exactly like mine.
“If we go to the police now, Vance will disappear,” Claire continued. “He’ll destroy whatever he’s looking for, and we’ll never prove he was on that bridge.” “But what is he looking for?” Evelyn asked, staring at the forged lien. I closed my eyes. I forced myself to think like Mark. To remember the nine months he sat in the spare room of our apartment. The blue light of the computer screen. The constant clicking.
The obsession with Fox Lake. “You know what it’s worth?” he had asked me. “It’s dead money.” But he hadn’t just wanted to sell it. He had visited it. Two months before he gave me the necklace. He told me he was going up to the cabin to "check the roof for winter." He had been gone for three days. “He hid it when he came up here alone,” I said, opening my eyes. “Hid what?” Claire asked. “Leverage,” I guessed. “Insurance. Mark didn’t trust anyone. Not even his partners. If Vance helped him try to kill you, Mark would have kept proof. Something to ensure Vance never turned on him.” “And Vance knows it’s here,” Evelyn realized. “Which means we have to find it before he comes back.” The cabin was large. Three bedrooms. A cellar. An attic. We had renovated the bathrooms, painted the walls, and sanded the main floors. If it was hidden in plain sight, we would have found it. “Where did he spend his time when he came here?” Claire asked. I walked into the living room. Stood in the center of the braided rug. Looked up at the ceiling. Then down at the floor. “He hated the cold,” I murmured. “He hated dirt. He wouldn’t have dug a hole outside. He wouldn’t have gone into the attic with the spiders.” I walked toward the back of the house. Toward the old utility room off the kitchen.
It was a narrow space. Smelled like bleach and old copper pipes. It held the water heater. The fuse box. A stack of firewood. I knelt on the cold linoleum floor. “Hand me a flashlight,” I said. Evelyn passed me a heavy metal Maglite from the kitchen drawer. I turned it on. Swept the beam across the baseboards. Behind the water heater, the baseboard looked different. The paint was slightly whiter than the rest of the room. Newer. I reached out and touched it. It was loose. “Get a crowbar,” I told Claire. My heart was beating so fast it felt like a trapped bird against my ribs. Claire came back with a red steel pry bar from the toolkit. I jammed the flat edge under the trim. Pulled back. The wood groaned, then snapped away.
Revealing a dark gap between the wall and the floorboards. I shined the light inside. Dust. Cobwebs. And a dull gray metal box. It was a fireproof lockbox. Heavy. Thick. I had to wedge both arms into the gap and drag it out by its handle. It scraped against the floor, a terrible, grating sound. We carried it to the dining table. It had a digital keypad. “We don’t know the code,” Evelyn said, her shoulders slumping. “Yes, I do,” I said. Because men like Mark are arrogant. They think they are smarter than everyone else. But they are rarely original. I typed in the date of our wedding. Red light. I typed in his birthday.
Red light. Then, I looked at Claire. I typed in the date of the car crash on the bridge. The day he thought he became a free, rich man. Click. The light turned green. The heavy latch popped open. We all leaned in. Inside the box, there was no money. No gold. There were flash drives. At least ten of them. Neatly labeled with white tape and black ink.
I picked one up. The label read: Claire - Bridge Audio. I picked up another. Vance - Offshore Transfers. Another. Sarah - Life Insurance. A cold wave of horror washed over the room. “It wasn’t just me,” Claire whispered, covering her mouth. “It wasn’t just you, Sophie.” “It was a business,” I said, my voice hollow. Mark and Vance. They found women with assets. Women with property. Women with life insurance. They married them.
Gaslit them. Isolated them. And then, they removed them. Mark was the charm. The husband. Vance was the legal architect. The cleanup. And this box was Mark’s insurance policy against his partner. “This is it,” Evelyn said, her eyes blazing with a sudden, fierce light.
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“This is the proof. This puts Vance away forever.” “We have to call Detective Voss,” I said. I reached for my phone on the table. I pressed the screen. Nothing happened. It was black. “My battery is dead,” I said. “Use mine,” Claire said.
She pulled her phone from her pocket. She tapped the screen. “No service,” she said. She frowned. Walked to the window. “That’s impossible. We always have a signal here.” Suddenly, the lights overhead flickered. Once. Twice. Then they died completely. The hum of the refrigerator stopped. The heater shut off. The cabin plunged into total, suffocating darkness. Outside, the wind howled through the pine trees. And over the sound of the wind, we heard something else. The heavy crunch of footsteps on the gravel. “He’s back,” Evelyn whispered. He had cut the power. He had jammed the cell signal. We were trapped in the dark. With the one thing Arthur Vance was willing to kill for.
