The Maid Who Kept a Key
Chapter 05 - The Maid Who Kept a Key
Emma Lane had been hired six months earlier through a Mercer employment agency.
Her application listed no family, no permanent address, and three years in foster care. Julian’s team used that history immediately, telling police she probably stole jewelry and fled.
Grace knew the strategy. Discredit the witness before anyone asked why she was afraid.
Emma had once mentioned a sister working at a diner near the state line. Noah located the diner, but the sister had not seen her in weeks. A waitress remembered Emma mailing a package every Friday to a post-office box.
Inside the box, investigators found copies of mansion schedules, security maintenance logs, and handwritten notes about late-night visitors.
Emma had been documenting the Mercers.
One note contained a simple instruction:
If I disappear, ask Mrs. Grace about the music room key.
Grace remembered the key hidden inside the back of the grand piano. Thomas had shown it to her as a child when Mercer House still hosted architecture exhibitions. After her mother’s death, Evelyn sealed the music room and claimed water damage.
Grace, Noah, and federal agents returned with a search warrant.
The room smelled of dust and cedar. Sheets covered the furniture. The grand piano stood beneath a portrait of Evelyn as a young woman, already looking disappointed in everyone.
Inside the instrument, Grace found a brass key marked B-2.
It opened a narrow door behind the sheet-music cabinet.
A staircase descended beneath the mansion.
The basement room contained no treasure, only filing cabinets and an obsolete communications console. Emma sat handcuffed to a pipe beside it, frightened but alive. Cole had locked her there after discovering her call, then fled before agents arrived.
Grace knelt beside her.
“Did they hurt you?”
Emma shook her head. “They wanted to know what I mailed.”
“Why were you collecting records?”
Emma looked toward Noah. “My mother died in one of the Mercer storm shelters. The roof collapsed. The inspection certificate was fake.”
Grace understood.
The missing disaster houses were not only numbers. Some had been built with unsafe materials, while others had never been built at all.
In the nearest cabinet, agents found original blueprints signed by Claire Holloway. They matched the structural system Mercer Development had claimed as its own for twenty-five years.
Another file contained the deed to Mercer House.
Claire Holloway had not sold it.
The transfer carried a forged signature witnessed by Evelyn Mercer.
Before anyone could process the discovery, the communications console activated by itself. A message appeared on the old green screen.
BRING THE DIAMOND TO THE NORTH CONSERVATORY.
COME ALONE, GRACE.
May you like
Beneath it was a photograph of Noah entering the basement.
Someone inside the house was still watching.
