Chapter 17 - BACK TO ASHLAND AVENUE
The first time Brielle returned to Ashland Avenue after her mother's funeral, she lasted eleven seconds on the sidewalk.
The second time, she made it to the front steps before she vomited into a hedge.
The third time, she was twenty-one and angry enough to reach the second-floor landing.
She still could not touch the door to apartment 3C.
Now, six years later, she stood across the street while blue police lights flashed at the end of the block and wondered whether fear could recognize its old address.
The building had been condemned months earlier.
Plywood covered most of the windows.
Graffiti climbed the brick beside the fire escape.
A faded notice warned that entry was prohibited by city order.
Brielle almost laughed.
The city had never been very effective at keeping dangerous people out of that building.
Dante stood beside her in the darkness.
Mara was on her other side.
Luca waited behind them with two federal agents Karen Holt had personally chosen.
Rosa was at the hospital after the parking-garage attack.
Her injuries were minor.
Her guilt was not.
Vane was in federal custody, assuming the system he had corrupted did not produce another miraculous shoelace.
Vittorio was somewhere inside or nearby.
Sofia was with him.
That fact made every other concern smaller.
Dante checked his phone again.
No new message.
"He told us to bring the master key."
Brielle looked at the dark third-floor window.
"We still don't know what that is."
Mara rubbed her thumb across the brass key marked 3179.
"Maybe we do."
Brielle looked at her.
"This opens a station locker."
"It also matches our code."
"Which Mom used for the print shop hatch."
Mara nodded.
"She turned our stupid childhood signal into passwords."
"It wasn't stupid."
"I know."
Dante looked between them.
"Three, seventeen, nine."
"Could be an index."
Brielle thought of the codes inside the photograph frame.
B17.
C4.
A9.
The music box.
The ledger.
Elena had hidden information inside ordinary things because ordinary things survived searches better than safes.
"The master key may be something we remember."
Mara looked at the building.
"Something Vittorio can't extract from paper."
Luca approached.
"Our thermal camera sees five people inside."
Dante turned.
"Locations?"
"Two on the first floor."
"One on three."
"Two in the basement."
"Which one is Sofia?"
"Can't tell."
Dante's jaw tightened.
One federal agent, Lisa Moreno, pointed toward the alley.
"Rear stairwell is open."
"We can enter two ways."
Dante shook his head.
"Vittorio expects a tactical entry."
Brielle looked at him.
"Then give him a waitress."
Dante's expression immediately darkened.
"No."
"I'm the person he asked for."
"No."
"He wants the key from me."
"Still no."
Brielle stepped closer.
"Your daughter is inside the place where my sister disappeared."
"I am not standing across the street while men with guns decide what courage looks like."
Dante's eyes flashed.
"This is not about courage."
"Good."
"Because I am terrified."
The honesty stopped him.
Brielle continued.
"I am terrified of that hallway."
"I am terrified I'll walk upstairs and become sixteen again."
"I am terrified Mara will vanish if I look away."
"And I am terrified Sofia is learning right now that adults can turn a child into leverage."
She pointed at the building.
"So don't tell me to wait because you're scared too."
Dante looked at her for a long moment.
Then he exhaled.
"You go in the front."
"Thank you."
"That wasn't the entire sentence."
"Of course not."
"You wear a vest."
"Fine."
"You keep the microphone on."
"Fine."
"You do not improvise."
Brielle stared at him.
Dante sighed.
"I heard how stupid that sounded while saying it."
Luca smiled.
"Growth."
Dante ignored him.
Mara touched Brielle's sleeve.
"I'm coming with you."
"No."
Mara raised an eyebrow.
"Interesting."
"Vittorio called for both of us, which means he wants us together."
"So we don't give him both entrances."
Mara considered that.
"You take front."
"I take rear."
"Exactly."
They touched knuckles like they had as children.
Three taps against skin.
A promise without seventeen seconds of waiting.
Brielle crossed the street alone.
The building entrance had no door anymore.
Only a plywood panel pushed aside enough for one person to pass.
Inside, the lobby smelled like wet plaster, old cigarettes, and mold.
Her body recognized the smell before her mind did.
Her hands went cold.
Her breathing became shallow.
The staircase waited to the left.
Brielle took one step.
Then another.
She counted them.
Nine stairs to the first landing.
Eleven more to the second.
She had forgotten that detail.
Her body had not.
"Brielle."
Dante's voice came softly through the earpiece.
"I'm here."
"I know."
"Keep talking."
She almost told him she did not need comfort.
Then she realized she did.
"The wallpaper is gone."
"What color was it?"
"Green."
"Ugly green."
"Mara drew a horse on it in crayon once."
Mara's voice joined the channel from the rear stairwell.
"It was a dog."
Brielle laughed despite the fear.
"It had four legs and no tail."
"Art is subjective."
Their voices kept her in the present.
She reached the second floor.
A man stepped from apartment 2A.
Gun.
Brielle froze.
He raised it.
A suppressed shot sounded from behind him.
The man collapsed.
Mara stood in the stairwell.
"Dog."
Brielle stared at her.
"Horse."
Mara disappeared again.
Brielle climbed toward the third floor.
Apartment 3C stood at the end of the hall.
The door had been replaced since 2016.
The number was the same.
3C.
Brielle's legs stopped.
She hated them for it.
Then she remembered the street two days earlier.
A gun aimed at her heart.
Sofia behind her.
Her feet had moved then.
They could move now.
She touched the handle.
The door opened.
The apartment was empty.
Not abandoned.
Empty.
Someone had cleaned it.
A table sat in the kitchen exactly where Elena's table once stood.
Two chairs faced each other.
On the table was a glass bottle of orange soda.
Brielle stopped breathing.
"He recreated it."
Dante's voice sharpened.
"Recreated what?"
"That night."
A speaker clicked on somewhere above her.
Vittorio's voice filled the apartment.
"Welcome home, Brielle."
She looked around.
"Where is Sofia?"
"Safe for the moment."
"Let me hear her."
A second speaker activated.
Sofia's voice came through.
"Daddy?"
Dante went silent in Brielle's ear.
The child's voice trembled.
"Brielle?"
"I'm here, sweetheart."
"I'm in a basement."
"I know."
"There's a blue door."
"Good job telling me."
"Are you coming?"
Brielle swallowed.
"Yes."
Vittorio cut the connection.
"The key, Brielle."
"I don't know what it is."
"Your mother did not trust adults."
"A wise decision."
"She trusted memory."
"Children remember songs."
Brielle looked toward the table.
The orange soda sat beside an old music box.
Not Elena's original.
A replica.
"The song."
Vittorio laughed softly.
"There you are."
Brielle approached the box.
It played the melody Mara loved as a child.
A simple lullaby Elena called Little Bird, though Brielle never knew whether that was its real title.
Three opening notes.
A pause.
Then a longer phrase.
Then nine repeating notes near the end.
Brielle's pulse quickened.
Three.
Seventeen.
Nine.
Not numbers chosen randomly.
Positions in the melody.
"Mom built the code from the song."
Mara's breathing sounded in the earpiece.
"Bri."
"Three, seventeen, nine are notes."
Vittorio spoke over the speaker.
"Play them."
Brielle saw a small electronic keyboard beside the music box.
Three keys had faint scratches.
"And if I do?"
"The basement door opens."
"And Sofia?"
"You get a chance to save her."
Dante's voice cut in.
"Don't trust him."
"I don't."
Brielle looked at the keyboard.
She could not read music.
Mara could.
Mara had taken lessons at Bluebird before everything fell apart.
"Mara, I need you."
Silence.
Then Mara appeared in the doorway.
Brielle almost shouted at her for exposing herself.
Mara looked at the music box.
"Mom used to make me count the notes."
"Can you find three, seventeen, nine?"
Mara approached the keyboard.
"Yes."
She played the third note from the melody.
Then the seventeenth.
Then the ninth.
Nothing happened.
Vittorio laughed through the speaker.
"You always were impatient, Marie."
Mara's jaw tightened.
Brielle remembered the tapping code.
Three taps.
Seventeen seconds.
Nine taps.
"Wait."
She looked at Mara.
"Play three."
Mara played the first sequence.
Brielle counted seventeen seconds aloud.
Then Mara played the nine-note closing pattern.
A mechanical lock clicked somewhere beneath the floor.
The kitchen cabinet beside the sink moved outward.
Behind it was a narrow staircase descending into darkness.
Brielle stared.
"That wasn't there."
"It was."
Mara whispered.
"We just never knew."
Vittorio's voice returned.
"Your mother found the old bootlegger tunnel."
"She used it to hide the master archive."
"Then she died before telling me the sequence."
Brielle understood.
"That's why you kept Mara alive."
"Partly."
Mara's face went hard.
"You thought I would remember the song."
"Eventually."
"You tortured a child for a melody."
"I educated my daughter about consequence."
Brielle looked at Mara.
Mara looked ready to kill the speaker.
"Don't give him what he wants."
Brielle whispered.
They descended.
The tunnel was narrower than Brielle expected.
Brick walls sweated moisture.
Electrical cables had been added recently.
At the bottom stood a blue steel door.
Sofia had described it.
Dante's voice came through the earpiece.
"I'm entering from the east basement."
"Wait."
"Not happening."
"You complain when I do that."
"I have learned from you."
A small keypad beside the blue door lit when Brielle approached.
Three blank fields appeared.
Mara entered the note values.
The door opened.
Inside was not a basement room.
It was an archive.
Rows of metal cabinets extended beneath the building into what must have been the basement of the neighboring property.
Old paper files filled shelves.
Hard drives sat in numbered cases.
Photographs covered one wall.
Hundreds of faces.
Children.
Adults.
Families.
Brielle felt physically ill.
Mara stared at the nearest cabinet.
"This is the master."
A label read BELLWEATHER - ORIGINAL IDENTITY CROSSWALK.
Dante entered through a second doorway with Luca behind him.
His eyes swept the room.
"Sofia."
A faint tapping came from behind the far wall.
Three taps.
Pause.
Nine taps.
Brielle ran.
"Sofia."
She found another door.
Locked.
Dante reached her.
"Move."
He fired into the lock.
The door opened inward.
Sofia sat on the floor with her hands tied in front of her.
Brielle reached her first.
The child threw herself against Brielle's chest.
"You came."
"Of course I came."
Dante knelt and wrapped both of them in his arms.
For a moment, nothing else existed.
Then Sofia whispered.
"The white-haired man said Daddy has to open the red box."
Dante looked up.
"What red box?"
Sofia pointed toward the archive.
A red metal case sat on a central table.
Dante approached it.
His name was written across the top.
DANTE MORETTI.
Mara stared.
"Why would your name be in Bellweather?"
Dante looked at Rosa's handwriting beneath the label.
A date followed.
1988.
The year Dante was born.
Brielle's stomach dropped.
"Open it."
Dante lifted the lid.
Inside was a birth certificate.
The child's original name was not Dante Moretti.
It was DANIEL VALE.
Dante went completely still.
A photograph lay beneath it.
Rosa held an infant in a hospital blanket.
Beside her stood Elena Dawson, younger by decades.
On the back, someone had written one sentence.
May you like
THE FIRST CHILD WE SAVED BY STEALING HIM FIRST.
