Chapter 5 - The Debt I Didn't Know I Owed
"We don't go alone," Nora said when I read the card. "That's how they pick their next victim."
We took the photograph to her hospital room. She stared at the peeling paint behind Jamie and covered her mouth.
"I know that place. The old sorting mill near the orchard. They took me there first."
"Who?"
"Mercer. Pike. A man who kept his face turned away."
She drew a shallow breath. "And Dad. He told me if I signed the land papers, nobody else would get hurt. I told him dead men don't get to threaten their daughters."
Now the man who'd left us grieving was apparently alive.
Celia finally called me from a pay phone outside a grocery store. She cried when I said Jamie's name.
"He took my son because I wouldn't let him bury Lucía," she said.
"You arranged the funeral."
"I thought she'd wake before they closed the lid. I kept waiting for someone to stop it."
"You could have stopped it."
Silence. Then, "You're right."
For once she didn't defend herself. She told me Daniel was using a different name, Miles Grant, and living in a house behind the abandoned sorting mill. Mercer moved money. Pike handled whatever needed to disappear.
"I need you to hear this," she said. "Your mother didn't die in the fire by accident."
I gripped the phone.
"She found his second bank account. That night she was going to take you two away. Daniel locked her in the garage. I saw him turn the key."
May you like
A car door slammed on her end of the call. Celia gasped.
"Rafael, he's here."
