Chapter 7 - The House I Paid For
The first time I saw Richard bring another woman into my house, I was watching through a camera he did not know still existed.
It was forty-eight hours after he pushed me from the helicopter.
The official search for my body had been scaled back because weather conditions were deteriorating.
News anchors were beginning to use the word presumed.
Presumed dead.
Presumed lost.
Presumed tragedy.
Richard apparently heard a different word.
Available.
At nine fourteen that evening, the hidden camera above the library fireplace showed him walking through my front door with Lauren Beckett.
She was wearing black.
Not funeral black.
Elegant black.
The kind of dress chosen to look respectful in photographs while still making sure everyone noticed the woman inside it.
Richard poured two glasses of my father's bourbon.
Lauren kicked off her shoes.
Then she sat on the white sofa I had chosen six months earlier and tucked her feet beneath her as though she had lived there for years.
I stared at the screen.
"How long?"
Evelyn looked up from the dining table.
"How long what?"
"How long have they been sleeping together?"
She came beside me.
On the camera, Richard handed Lauren a drink.
Lauren smiled and touched his wrist.
There was no awkwardness in the gesture.
No hesitation.
No newness.
Whatever they were, they had been it for a while.
"Long enough."
Evelyn said.
That hurt more than I expected.
I had accepted that Richard wanted my money.
I had accepted that he tried to kill me.
Those facts were so enormous that ordinary betrayal should have felt small beside them.
It did not.
There was something uniquely cruel about seeing another woman relax in the house where I had chosen nursery paint with my husband three weeks earlier.
Lauren looked toward the hallway.
"Did you clear her things?"
My stomach tightened.
Richard took a drink.
"Most of them."
"Most?"
"There are boxes in the bedroom."
Lauren's smile faded.
"I do not want to sleep in a room full of her clothes."
Richard looked at her for several seconds.
"Then do not."
She softened immediately.
"I'm sorry."
"You should be."
The coldness in his voice made me remember how quickly his expression changed in the helicopter.
Lauren reached for him anyway.
"Everything is moving too fast."
Richard laughed once.
"That was the point."
I leaned closer to the screen.
Lauren lowered her voice.
"Victor is nervous."
"Victor is always nervous when money is involved."
"He thinks Evelyn changed more than the will."
Richard's face hardened.
"She did."
"How do you know?"
"Because I asked Daniel what happens if Natalie's death is suspicious."
"And?"
"He looked scared."
Lauren shook her head.
"That is not proof."
"No."
Richard swirled his drink.
"But it tells me where to look."
He stood and walked toward the library.
The camera angle changed automatically.
My heart began pounding.
He stopped beneath the portrait of my father.
For a moment he simply stared at it.
Then he reached behind the frame.
I stood so quickly my chair fell backward.
"No."
Evelyn grabbed my arm.
"What?"
Behind that portrait was a recessed compartment.
It had been built into the wall before I inherited the house.
Only my father and I knew it existed.
Or at least I thought only my father and I knew.
Inside was a small encrypted drive containing personal copies of board minutes, insurance records, and my father's original trust correspondence.
Nothing from Black Harbor.
But enough to help Richard understand how my family's estate structures worked.
On the screen, Richard ran his hand along the frame.
Then stopped.
He had not found the release.
Yet.
I looked at Evelyn.
"I need that drive."
"No."
"He is going to find it."
"Then we remotely disable it."
"It is not networked."
"Then we let him have it."
"It has my father's private trust files."
"Natalie."
"It also has the original board minutes from the month before he died."
That changed her expression.
We had searched copies of those minutes inside Hayes Technologies.
They were incomplete.
Two executive-session pages were missing from the corporate archive.
If my father's personal copy included them, the drive might show what he discussed with Victor before his death.
"You still cannot go into that house."
Evelyn said.
I looked back at the screen.
Richard had returned to the sofa.
Lauren was holding something now.
My jewelry box.
She opened it and removed my mother's emerald bracelet.
My mother had worn that bracelet the night my father proposed to her.
After she died, my father gave it to me on my twenty-first birthday.
Lauren slid it around her wrist.
"Too much?"
Richard looked at it.
"No."
"It was hers."
"Everything in this house was hers."
Lauren smiled.
"Not anymore."
Something inside me settled.
Not exploded.
Not broke.
Settled.
I turned to Evelyn.
"I am getting the drive."
Three hours later, Richard and Lauren left for a private dinner with Victor.
Their security detail followed them.
The housekeeper, Rosa Delgado, remained inside.
Rosa had worked for my family since I was seventeen.
Richard believed she was loyal to the house.
He had never understood that Rosa's loyalty was to people.
Nora drove me through the service entrance wearing one of Rosa's spare uniforms beneath a long coat.
I kept my face turned away from the gate camera even though Maya Chen, our cybersecurity director, had already looped twelve seconds of empty driveway footage into the private system.
Maya did not know I was alive.
She only knew Evelyn had asked her to perform an emergency privacy audit under authority of my trust.
The fewer people who knew, the safer they were.
Rosa opened the kitchen door before I knocked.
She looked at me.
Then she covered her mouth with both hands.
"Miss Natalie."
I stepped inside.
She grabbed me so carefully it hurt more than a hard embrace would have.
"They said you were gone."
"I know."
"Mr. Richard said you fell."
"He pushed me."
Rosa froze.
Then her face changed.
She did not look shocked.
She looked furious.
"I knew that man was lying."
"How?"
"Because he came home yesterday and the first thing he asked me was whether Mrs. Shaw had called."
Rosa lowered her voice.
"Not whether the Coast Guard called."
"Not whether anyone found you."
"He wanted to know about the lawyer."
I took her hands.
"Rosa, you cannot tell anyone you saw me."
"I will not."
"Not even your family."
"I understand."
She glanced toward the hallway.
"But there is something you need to see."
She led me upstairs.
The nursery door was open.
I stopped in the hallway.
The crib was gone.
The rocking chair was gone.
The shelves Richard and I had assembled together were empty.
Boxes covered the floor.
My baby's clothes had been stuffed inside garbage bags.
For a second I could not move.
Rosa stood beside me.
"He ordered everything removed this morning."
"Why?"
"Miss Lauren said the room made her uncomfortable."
I stared at the garbage bags.
I had washed and folded those tiny clothes two weeks earlier.
Richard had sat on the floor beside me pretending he could not understand why newborn socks were so small.
He had laughed when I held one against his thumb.
That memory was unbearable now.
"Where is the crib?"
"Garage."
"Leave it there."
My voice became steady.
"Do not touch anything else."
I went to the library.
The portrait released when I pressed a hidden spring beneath the left corner.
The recessed compartment opened.
The drive was still there.
I slipped it into my pocket.
Then I saw something else.
A folded sheet of paper that had not been there before.
Someone had placed it inside the compartment.
I opened it.
The note was handwritten.
IF YOU ARE READING THIS, HE KNOWS YOU SURVIVED.
My blood went cold.
There was no signature.
I turned the paper over.
On the back was a time.
11:40 P.M.
I checked my watch.
11:36.
Four minutes.
I ran into the hallway.
"Rosa."
The front door opened downstairs.
A man's voice echoed through the foyer.
"Rosa?"
Richard.
He was home early.
Nora was outside beyond the service gate.
I was upstairs in the house of the man who believed he had murdered me.
And someone had left me a warning inside a compartment Richard was not supposed to know existed.
Rosa appeared at the end of the hall.
Her eyes widened.
"Go."
She whispered.
I moved toward the back stairs.
Then I heard Lauren below.
"Richard, why are the kitchen lights on?"
The security panel beeped.
A second later every exterior door locked automatically.
Richard's voice came through the house intercom.
May you like
"Nobody leaves."
