Chapter 6: The Letter From a Dead Man
The police arrived within the hour.
Two officers first, then a detective named Marsh who had the unhurried manner of someone who had heard many things and was not easily surprised.
He was not young.
He listened without interrupting, which I appreciated.
Evelyn told him everything.
She sat in the drawing room chair with a blanket around her shoulders — Anna had brought it without being asked — and she spoke for nearly forty minutes.
Her voice was steady.
She did not cry.
She described the morning of the wedding, the papers in the study, the confrontation with Bianca, the locked panel, the darkness, the days she had marked on the wall of the space below with a fragment of broken tile she had found in the corner.
Marsh wrote everything down.
Bianca had been asked to wait in the sitting room across the hall.
One of the officers was with her.
Through the wall, I could hear nothing.
No protest.
No raised voice.
Just silence, which told me she had already decided to say as little as possible.
When Evelyn finished, Marsh looked at the documents Graham had laid out.
"The psychiatric evaluation," he said.
"Dr.
Renner."
"His licence was revoked four years ago," Graham said.
"Fraudulent assessments.
I can provide the case references."
Marsh nodded slowly.
"We're familiar with Renner." He looked at the property transfer.
"And the signature on this document — you believe it was forged?"
"I have thirty years of your father's signatures on file," Graham said to me.
"The comparison will be straightforward."
Marsh set his pen down.
"Miss Evelyn.
The space beneath the floor.
You said food and water came through the gap at intervals."
"Yes."
"Do you have any idea who provided them?"
Evelyn was quiet for a moment.
"I have a name I keep coming back to.
But I don't know for certain."
"Mrs.
Calloway," I said.
Marsh looked at me.
"She was our housekeeper for twenty years.
She left abruptly about eight months after the wedding.
Bianca said she had caught her stealing." I paused.
"I never believed it.
She wasn't that kind of woman."
"Do you have a current address?"
"No.
But Graham might."
Graham was already opening his case.
While he searched, Evelyn picked up the envelope from her lap.
She had been holding it since Graham gave it to her, turning it over occasionally, running her thumb along the edge.
Now she looked at me.
"Will you stay while I read it?"
"Of course."
She opened it carefully, as if the paper itself were fragile.
Inside was a single page, handwritten, the letters slightly uneven in the way my father's writing had become in his final year — not from weakness of mind, but from the tremor in his right hand that he had refused to acknowledge.
She read it silently first.
I watched her face.
Halfway through, her breath caught.
She read to the end.
Then she folded it once, held it against her chest for a moment, and looked up at the ceiling.
"He knew I was there," she said.
The room was very quiet.
"He found out about six months after the wedding.
Mrs.
Calloway told him." She looked at me.
"He was already ill by then.
He couldn't confront Bianca directly — he said he was afraid of what she would do if she knew he had found out.
Afraid she would move me.
Or worse." Her voice was even, but her hands were not.
"So he did what he could.
He kept me alive through Mrs.
Calloway.
He wrote the second will.
He left the note."
"He couldn't get you out," I said.
"He was dying, Daniel.
And Bianca controlled the house by then." She unfolded the letter again and looked at the last line.
"He says he's sorry.
He says he should have been stronger.
He says—" She stopped.
"What?"
She turned the letter so I could see the final sentence.
*Tell Daniel I am proud of the man he became, and that I knew he would find her.*
I looked at those words for a long time.
Marsh cleared his throat gently.
"I'm sorry to interrupt.
We'll need the letter as part of the evidence record."
Evelyn nodded.
She folded it back into the envelope and held it out to him.
Then she turned to me.
"He believed in you," she said.
"Even when you didn't know there was anything to find."
Across the hall, I heard Bianca's voice for the first time since the police had arrived.
She was asking to make a phone call.
May you like
Marsh stood up.
"I think," he said, "we're ready to speak with your sister."
