Chapter 3 - THE WOMAN DAVID BURIED
David stared at Marta as if the words had been spoken in another language.
His mother, Claire Mercer, had been dead for eleven years.
He had stood beside her hospital bed when the monitors went silent.
He had chosen the white roses for her funeral.
He had carried her coffin with his father and four family friends.
"My mother is dead."
Marta shook her head.
"I did not say Claire Mercer."
David's confusion turned sharp.
Marta looked at Harry's empty key slot in the brass box.
"I mean Harry's mother."
Jane whispered the name first.
"Evelyn."
David almost laughed because the alternative was too impossible.
"Evelyn Mercer died twenty-two years ago."
"That is what your father told everyone."
Marta said.
"It is not true."
The room seemed to shrink.
Evelyn had been Arthur Mercer's second wife for less than four years.
David remembered her only in fragments.
Perfume.
Red lipstick.
A silver bracelet that jingled when she walked.
Then one winter morning, his father said Evelyn had died overseas after a private medical emergency.
Harry had been sixteen.
He had returned from boarding school pale and silent.
No funeral was held in America.
Arthur claimed Evelyn's family wanted privacy.
David had never questioned it.
Why would a twenty-seven-year-old man question his grieving father?
Marta explained that she began working at Mercer House five years earlier.
For the first four years, she saw nothing unusual.
Then Harry started holding private meetings in the old east wing.
He told staff the rooms were being used for security storage.
Three months ago, Marta carried linens into the wrong room and saw a woman sitting by the window.
The woman was in her late fifties, elegant, silver streaks in her dark hair.
She wore the same emerald ring shown in an old portrait of Evelyn Mercer hanging in the upstairs gallery.
"She told me to leave."
Marta whispered.
"Harry found me outside the room."
"Why didn't you tell me?"
David demanded.
Marta flinched.
"Because my son works for Mercer Security."
David's anger stopped.
Marta looked down.
"Harry showed me photographs of him leaving his apartment."
Jane's face tightened with understanding.
Control through fear.
The same method Harry had used on Sophie.
The same method he had used on Jane.
David's phone remained useless in the jammed mansion.
He turned to Cole.
"Can you reach the security room through the service passage?"
Cole nodded.
"Maybe."
"Kill the jammer."
Mason stepped forward.
"I'll go with him."
David studied both men.
He had known Cole for eight years.
Mason had joined six months ago on Harry's recommendation.
That detail now felt like a knife left on a table.
"Cole goes."
David said.
"Mason stays here."
Mason's expression tightened for only a fraction of a second.
David noticed.
So did Jane.
Cole disappeared through the hidden door.
David turned to Sophie.
"Sweetheart, I need you to remember the woman you heard."
Sophie nodded.
"Did Harry call her anything?"
She thought carefully.
"He said Mother once."
Marta covered her mouth.
David felt the last piece of denial break inside him.
Evelyn was alive.
And if she was alive, then Arthur had lied to the entire family for decades.
Jane reached for David's hand.
"We need to get Sophie out."
"We will."
"No."
Jane's voice became urgent.
"You don't understand."
She pulled the blanket aside and showed him a small dark mark drawn on the inside of her wrist.
It looked like the Roman numeral III.
"What is that?"
"Harry marked me after the third interrogation."
David's face changed.
"He kept asking about the vault, but that was not all."
Jane's voice lowered.
"He asked whether Sophie had ever seen Arthur's blue book."
David frowned.
"Sophie was not born when my father died."
"I told him that."
Jane said.
"He said the book had been hidden for a child who did not exist yet."
David turned toward Sophie.
She had gone very still.
"Sophie?"
The little girl looked at her toy castle.
"Grandpa gave me a blue book."
David stopped breathing for a moment.
"You never met Grandpa Arthur."
Sophie shook her head.
"Not him."
"Then who?"
"The old man in the garden."
Jane stared at David.
David felt a slow, sick certainty.
"What old man?"
Sophie explained that six months earlier, while playing near the hedge maze, she saw an elderly groundskeeper she had never met.
He gave her a thin blue notebook and told her it belonged to her grandfather.
He told her to hide it where people only looked for toys.
Sophie had put it inside a hollow wooden horse in the nursery.
Then, a week later, the old man disappeared.
David ran from the study.
Jane called after him, but he was already moving.
They reached the nursery at the opposite end of the second floor.
The wooden rocking horse stood beside the window.
David lifted it.
The hollow panel beneath its belly had been pried open.
Empty.
Sophie began to cry.
"It was there."
David crouched beside her.
"I believe you."
Jane searched the floor.
A small scrap of blue paper lay beneath the curtain.
She picked it up.
There was handwriting on it.
Arthur's handwriting.
David recognized it immediately.
Only four words remained on the torn fragment.
EVELYN KNOWS ABOUT DAVID.
David stared at the sentence.
"About me?"
Jane turned the scrap over.
On the back was a faded number.
3-17-88.
David's birthday was March 17, 1988.
A cold knock came from the nursery window.
Mason stood outside on the narrow balcony.
That was impossible.
The balcony doors had been locked from the inside.
David approached cautiously.
Mason held both hands where David could see them.
Then he mouthed two words through the glass.
DO NOT OPEN.
A shadow appeared behind Mason.
Someone struck him from behind.
He dropped out of sight.
Sophie screamed.
Jane grabbed her.
David rushed to the window.
The balcony was empty.
Then every television in the mansion turned on at once.
A woman's face filled the nursery screen.
Older now.
Silver-streaked hair.
Emerald ring.
A calm smile.
Evelyn Mercer looked directly into the camera.
"Hello, David."
May you like
She said.
"You have your father's eyes."
