Chapter 8 - THE PHOTOGRAPH FROM SEVENTEEN YEARS AGO
Technicians recovered three more seconds.
Three seconds changed everything.
“The only person who can find it is Ethan.”
I laughed when they told me.
Not because anything was funny.
Because it was impossible.
“I was a baby.”
Grandpa agreed.
“Thomas wouldn't give evidence to an infant.”
“Then why say my name?”
Nobody knew.
For two days, federal investigators searched through my childhood history.
Birth records.
Old homes.
Photographs.
Gifts.
Documents.
Then I remembered something my father had supposedly left me.
A children's book.
Grandpa gave it to me when I was five.
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.
An old illustrated edition.
On the first page were three handwritten words:
FOR ETHAN — DAD.
I'd looked at that inscription hundreds of times.
Never questioned it.
Grandpa retrieved the book from a box.
Agents examined it.
Nothing.
No hidden compartment.
No microfilm.
No coded message.
Then Laura Beck noticed the illustration opposite the inscription.
A riverboat.
Three windows.
One window colored red.
Two colored black.
Page 317.
The train locker key had been 317.
We turned there.
A sentence had been lightly underlined.
“Two days afterward…”
Page two.
Day.
Afterward.
2-D-A.
An address?
Grandpa suddenly remembered Thomas loved simple substitution codes.
They spent hours working through markings in the book.
Eventually the clues produced a location.
Lake Briar Cemetery.
Plot 42.
There was no grave at Plot 42.
Only a bench.
Underneath it, investigators found a weatherproof metal tube.
Inside was another photograph.
Thomas Reed holding me as a newborn.
My mother standing beside him.
Grandpa behind them.
And one additional man.
Michael Kane.
Robert.
My stepfather had been present when I was born.
Mom began shaking.
“I don't remember him.”
Grandpa did.
“He was using another name.”
Michael had infiltrated Thomas's circle years earlier.
He knew about me from the beginning.
On the back of the photograph was a message.
THE FACE YOU TRUST MOST WILL OPEN THE DOOR.
No ledger.
Again.
But hidden behind the photograph was a bank-deposit slip from seventeen years ago.
Safe deposit box.
First Atlantic Bank.
Box 114.
The bank had merged twice since then.
Records eventually showed Box 114 had been closed seven years earlier.
By Samuel Beck.
Laura stared at the paperwork.
“My father had it.”
Maybe.
Or maybe Samuel had moved it somewhere safer.
Then came another discovery.
A surveillance camera near Grandpa's street had captured somebody approaching his home at 2:13 a.m.
The figure wore a hood.
They walked directly toward the back entrance.
The alarm went off forty seconds later.
By the time police arrived, the person was gone.
Nothing appeared missing.
Until Grandpa checked the wooden box.
The Thomas Reed notebook was gone.
May you like
Somebody had entered the house while we slept.
And they had known exactly what to take.
