Chapter 32 - THE EMPTY CRADLE
Nicholas broke into a sprint, his boots skidding on the cold concrete. He dropped to his knees beside the old man, his hands hovering over the ruined throat.
The blood was still warm, pumping in slow, dying pulses into the grey dust. Arthur’s eyes were wide, staring at the exposed pipes above him, filled with a look of profound, helpless apology. His lips were parted, but only air and red froth whistled through the wound.
"Arthur," Nicholas whispered. His voice cracked—the first crack in fifteen years. "Arthur."
The butler’s fingers twitched, scratching weakly at Nicholas’s trouser leg. He raised one trembling, blood-drenched hand, pointing not toward the wine cellar at the end of the hall, but toward the dark vent of the old laundry shaft five feet above the floor.
Then Arthur’s hand fell limp against the concrete. His eyes went flat.
"He didn't make it to the wine cellar," Isabella said, her voice dropping to a near-inaudible murmur as she reached the circle of light. She didn't look at Arthur's face; she looked at the clean, straight edge of the wound. "A five-inch straight razor. Victor always carried one in his waistcoat pocket. He learned it in Naples before he ever touched a gun."
"Where is she?" Nicholas rose slowly. His rifle was smeared with Arthur’s blood where he had rested his forearm. His slate-gray eyes had lost every trace of human restraint; they were wide, black, and dead. "WHERE IS SHE?"
"Uncle... Nicholas?"
The voice came from above.
Nicholas’s head snapped up toward the sheet-metal duct of the laundry chute.
Ten feet up, wedged into the narrow turn where the metal pipe curved toward the first-floor linen closet, two small brown eyes peered down through the darkness. Lucy was clinging to the rusted internal rivets with both hands, her plush bear held tightly between her small teeth by its ear.
"Lucy," Nicholas said, his voice dropping into a razor-thin calm. "Stay there. Do not move an inch."
"A man with silver hair... he took the lady," Lucy whimpered through the bear's felt ear, her voice echoing strangely down the metal tube. "He had a shiny knife, Uncle Nicholas. He told Arthur to go to sleep."
"Where did he take Maria?"
"To the tunnel," the child whispered. "The dark tunnel where the water runs."
Nicholas turned toward the iron gate at the far end of the sub-basement. The gate that led to the storm drainage system—the three-mile underground brick culvert that emptied into the Hudson River.
May you like
The heavy padlock on the gate was gone. It had not been cut; it had been unlocked with the master key that had hung in Arthur Bell’s pantry for forty years.
***
