Chapter 6 - THE BLUE DRAWER
Vale House looked like a museum after closing: marble floors, enormous paintings, and rooms too beautiful to feel lived in.
Nathaniel brought Emma through a side entrance before dawn. He had asked Eleanor's longtime aide, Rosa Alvarez, to meet them, but her number was disconnected.
Owen Rusk waited outside the upstairs office. "This is a security matter. Miss Carter should stay downstairs."
"Miss Carter found the security matter," Nathaniel said. "Open the door."
The blue drawer was empty except for a bent paper clip and a rectangle of cleaner wood where something had rested for years.
Emma fitted Eleanor's brass key into a small lock inside the drawer. A hidden compartment slid free.
It held a train ticket, an old photograph of Eleanor with Frank Carter, and a folded half page covered in names. Forty-seven numbered lines. Only the first twelve remained; the rest had been torn away.
"My father knows your mother?" Emma asked.
Nathaniel studied the photograph. It showed Eleanor at a hospital fundraiser fifteen years earlier, laughing beside a younger Frank.
"She built the patient fund with hospital staff," he said. "I didn't know he was one of them."
Rusk reached toward the paper. "Let me secure that."
Emma pulled it out of his reach. "Not yet."
One name near the bottom was underlined: MATEO PEREZ, AGE 8. Beside it was a date six weeks before Frank's crash and the words REQUEST DENIED / DONATION POSTED.
Nathaniel frowned. "Those two entries shouldn't exist together."
Rusk's phone lit up. Emma saw the caller before he turned it over.
VICTORIA LANGFORD.
Then a woman spoke from the dark doorway behind them.
May you like
"Because somebody wanted them to," she said.
It was Rosa Alvarez, carrying a box of everything she'd been told to leave behind.
