Chapter 3: The Letter in the Tin
The tape peeled away with a wet, sticky tear, leaving a dark residue on my thumb.
I popped the lid of the band-aid tin.
Inside lay a small, tarnished silver key attached to a blue plastic hotel keychain, a folded piece of lined notebook paper, and a single, faded photograph.
I picked up the photograph first.
My vision swam. A hot, suffocating lump rose in my throat, choking off my air.
It was a Polaroid. Dated on the white margin in faded red ink: OCTOBER 14, 1986. Three weeks before they vanished.
In the picture, my wife Clara was sitting in the driver's seat of our station wagon. But she wasn't smiling. Her face was bruised—a dark, purple contusion swelling over her left cheekbone. Beside her, in the passenger seat, seven-year-old Toby was crying, his little hands clutching his plastic dinosaur. In the backseat, nine-year-old Lily was looking directly at the camera, her eyes wide with a terror no child should ever know.
And standing in the reflection of the car’s side mirror, holding a heavy iron tire iron, was a woman with a rock-solid silver bob.
Gwen.
My hands shook so violently the photograph slipped from my fingers, fluttering onto the hardwood floor.
"No..." I breathed, the word torn from my chest like a jagged piece of glass. "No, no, no..."
I grabbed the folded notebook paper. It was torn from a child's wide-ruled school pad. The handwriting was frantic, slanting wildly across the blue lines, written in blue ballpoint pen that had bled into the paper over four decades.
It was Clara's handwriting.
Andrew,
If you are reading this, it means I failed. It means she caught us, or I am already dead.
Please, my sweet man, listen to me. Read every word. Do not go to the police. Do not tell Gwen you found this. The police commissioner in Greenwich is on her payroll—his brother owns the real estate firm that bought her father's debt.
Gwen isn't my sister, Andrew. She never was.
She is my father's illegitimate daughter from his first marriage in London. She found me six months ago. She has the original trust documents. She knows that my father left the entire estate—the land, the offshore accounts, the foundation—to me, on the condition that I married a man outside the city, someone who had no ties to his business.
You, Andrew. He chose you because you were honest. Because you were a mechanic who didn't care about his money.
Gwen gave me an ultimatum today. She told me if I don't sign the power of attorney papers over to her by Friday, she will make sure Toby and Lily never see their tenth birthdays. She showed me what she did to the car brakes.
I am taking the children tonight. We are not going to her house in Seattle. I am driving to the safe house in Vermont—the cabin my father built under the name 'Arthur Vance.' The silver key in this tin opens the floor safe in the master bedroom.
If we don't make it... if you find our car in the river... know that I didn't drive off that bridge, Andrew. She forced us off the road.
Look beneath the third floorboard in your study. The ledger is there. The proof of who she really is is in that floorboard.
Don't let her win, Andrew. Protect our children's memory.
I love you. I have always loved you. Clara.
The paper fell from my grip.
The air in the room seemed to vanish, replaced by a cold, vacuum-like silence that pressed against my eardrums. Forty years. Forty years of living in this house alone. Forty years of blaming myself for letting them drive away in the rain because I was "too busy working on an engine overhaul at the shop."
Forty years of opening my door to the monster who had forced my wife and children off an icy bridge into sixty feet of freezing water.
"Andrew?"
The voice didn't come from the hallway this time.
It came from right behind me.
I whirled around, my back slamming against Lily's closet door.
Marcus was standing in the doorway of the bedroom. He wasn't wearing his work gloves anymore. In his right hand, he held a heavy, iron crowbar he’d brought up from the moving truck.
And standing right behind him, her arms folded neatly over her cashmere sweater, was Gwen.
"I told you he was taking too long, Marcus," Gwen said, her voice flat, devoid of any warmth, any grief, any humanity.
Marcus looked at the tin on the bed, then at the letter on the floor. His face was pale, sweating profusely, but his grip on the crowbar didn't loosen.
"I'm sorry, Uncle Andrew," Marcus mumbled, refusing to meet my eyes. "She... she promised me thirty percent of the land sale. I have three kids in college. I couldn't afford to let you keep this house."
My breath hitched in my chest. A violent, white-hot explosion of pain ripped through my heart, forcing me down onto one knee.
May you like
"You..." I gasped, clutching my chest, staring at my own nephew. "You... knew?"
"He’s known for three years, Andrew," Gwen said softly, stepping into the room and kicking Clara's letter toward Marcus with the toe of her designer shoe. "Who do you think hired the doctor who declared you unfit to live alone?"
