Chapter 20 - The Second Key
Arthur stood up and answered the receiver, holding it to his ear while the cool breeze ruffled the pages of the foundation ledger.
His face suddenly went completely pale, his hand gripping the brass receiver so hard his knuckles turned ghostly white.
"Arthur?" I asked, my heart skipping a beat as a cold dread gripped my stomach.
"What is it?
Who is on the line?"
Arthur slowly lowered the receiver, his breath catching in his throat, his eyes wide with an expression I had never seen on him before—pure, unadulterated terror.
"It’s the medical examiner from County General Hospital," Arthur stammered, his voice trembling violently.
"Arthur, talk to me!
Julian is in rehab, and Victoria has fled the state.
What could possibly happen now?"
"It’s not about Julian, Nora," Arthur whispered, his voice cracking beneath the weight of an impossible revelation.
"The examiner was performing the routine exhumation requested by Gabriel’s forensic team for Malcolm Wright's casket in the old cemetery."
"And what did they find?" I asked, rising to my feet, the silver key turning ice-cold against my skin.
"Malcolm Wright's casket was empty, Nora.
It was weighted with sandbags and concrete blocks."
Before I could even process the horror of those words, Arthur’s cell phone buzzed with an incoming text message from an unknown international number.
Arthur looked down at the illuminated screen, his hands shaking so violently he almost dropped the phone onto the flagstones.
The screen displayed a high-resolution photograph of an elderly man with silver hair and light-colored eyes, sitting at a cafe table overlooking the harbor in Marseilles, France.
Resting around the old man's neck was an exact duplicate of my silver key—bearing not three, but four distinct notches along its spine.
Beneath the image was a single typed sentence:
May you like
"Eleanor only had half the map, Nora.
Tell my son Gabriel that his father is coming home to collect what Charles truly buried beneath the lake."
