Chapter 7 - CONFESSIONS BY THE GARAGE
Midnight arrived with torrential rain and rolling thunder that shook the leaded glass windows of the Corsini estate.
True to Julian’s warning, I didn't sleep. I sat on the edge of my narrow bed in the apartment above the garage, wrapped in a woolen blanket, staring out the window toward the grand dark silhouette of the main house.
A single yellow light burned in Julian’s second-floor study.
Around 1:15 AM, the security alarms didn't sound—because whoever was breaking in wasn't forcing doors or picking locks. They had a key.
A sleek black town car crept silently up the gravel driveway, turning off its headlights fifty yards before reaching the main entrance. A single figure stepped out into the pouring rain, draped in a dark trench coat, and slipped through the side service door using a physical brass key that had been obsolete since the 1990s.
My heart hammered against my ribs. I grabbed my heavy flashlight, pulled on my boots over my pajamas, and slipped out the side exit of the garage apartment, hugging the brick wall of the courtyard to stay out of sight.
I didn't go back inside the main house through the front. I knew the service corridor beneath the kitchens—a narrow, brick-lined tunnel that the old Corsini servants used to move between the cellars and the carriage house.
Creeping down the damp stone steps of the tunnel, I reached the wrought-iron service gate that opened directly beneath the grand staircase of the drawing room.
Through the ornate bars of the gate, I saw light flickering from above.
“You’re late, Martin,” a smooth, cold voice echoed down from the hall.
It wasn't Martin’s voice. It belonged to a stranger—older, raspy, carrying the unmistakable cadence of coastal Maine.
I froze, pressing my back against the damp brick wall of the tunnel, holding my breath so hard my chest ached.
“The bridge traffic was backed up due to the storm, Victor,” Martin’s voice replied from the shadows upstairs.
My eyes widened in the dark. Martin? Martin was part of it?
“Did you bring it?” the stranger named Victor asked.
“It’s right here,” Martin said. Footsteps shifted across the polished hardwood overhead. A drawer slid open, followed by the clink of metal against wood. “Julian is upstairs in his study reviewing the old Gloucester accounts. He thinks the ghost of his father is haunting him.”
“Julian is a fool just like his old man,” Victor scoffed, his boots pacing back and forth near the base of the grand staircase, just a few feet above my head. “He thinks keeping these little trinkets protects him. He doesn't realize that every time I leave one behind, I’m building a noose.”
“Careful, Victor,” Martin warned quietly. “Julian isn't his father. If he finds out you’re the one who rigged the furnace in Gloucester back in '98—if he finds out you burned that little girl’s room to cover up the shipping embezzlement—he won't just kill you. He’ll take everything your family owns down to the studs.”
My hands flew to my mouth to stifle the scream that clawed its way up my throat.
Gloucester. 1998. The furnace.
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It wasn't an accident. It wasn't an electrical fault.
Victor—whoever he was—had murdered little Lucia Corsini to cover up corporate theft, and my father, Arthur Quinn, had figured it out twenty-three years ago, only to be silenced and disgraced by the Corsini patriarch to protect the family name!
