Chapter 2 - The Red Chalk
The estate was built like a fortress because Anthony’s father, Domenico Caruso, had been an paranoid man who believed the Pacific Northwest was full of rivals waiting for his blood.
The exterior walls were two feet of reinforced concrete faced with granite; the window panes were triple-laminated polycarbonate; and the cellar held three diesel generators that could keep the house lit and heated for twenty days if the main grid went dark.
By 1:15 a.m., the mansion was locked down.
The heavy iron gates at the bottom of the two-hundred-yard driveway were chained with heavy industrial links, and four guards in dark blue slickers stood under the spruce trees with silenced carbines held across their chests. Inside, the lights were cut down to twenty-percent efficiency—a low, amber twilight that left the high corners of the rooms in deep shadow.
In the nursery suite on the second floor, Emily Brooks sat on the edge of a mahogany four-poster bed.
She had been given a clean silk nightgown by the housekeeper—a stern Italian woman named Mrs. Vane who looked at Emily as if she were a carrier of the plague—but Emily had refused to take off her grey uniform. She sat with her knees together, her apron folded across her lap, her eyes fixed on the small archway that led into Sophie’s bedroom.
Through the doorway, she could hear the tiny, rhythmic breathing of the child.
Sophie was sleeping. After the paint had been cleaned from her face with a warm washcloth, she had laid down without a sound, her small hands curled around a single blue chalk stub. She hadn't let go of it even when Mrs. Vane tried to slip it from her fingers while changing the sheets.
The door to the corridor opened silently.
Anthony Caruso stepped inside. He had removed his heavy coat. He wore a dark charcoal vest over a crisp white shirt, the sleeves rolled up to his forearms, revealing dark hair and a thick leather strap holding a heavy black holster against his ribs.
Emily’s eyes dropped to the steel frame of the weapon tucked near his heart.
"She’s asleep," Emily whispered.
Anthony walked to the edge of the archway. He didn't enter the child's room; he stood in the doorway, his broad frame blocking the light from the hall. For three minutes, he simply watched his daughter’s chest rise and fall. His expression was impossible to read—it was the face of a man who had spent twenty years standing in courtroom hallways and dockside offices without allowing a single muscle to twitch.
Then he turned to Emily.
"Come here," he said.
Emily stood up, her knees stiff. She followed him out into the private sitting room of the suite.
Anthony picked up a wooden tray sitting on the sideboard. On it lay three sheets of white drawing paper that had been gathered from the floor of the gallery.
He laid them out on the small marble table between two silk armchairs.
"Look at these," he said.
Emily leaned down.
The first was the drawing they had made together—the umbrella, the bird, and the thick, heavy coils of the blue snake with the white eyes and the three crosses over its head.
The second sheet was an older drawing—one she hadn't seen. It was executed in soft red pastel, the lines jagged and faint, as if drawn by a hand that was trembling or hiding under a blanket.
It showed the same snake, but this time it wasn't coiling around a bird.
It was coiled around a door.
And behind the door, represented by three simple pencil strokes, were two figures: a large one standing up, and a small one lying down on a bed.
The third sheet was a map.
It was crude—the work of a seven-year-old—but it was unmistakably the layout of the estate's second floor. The long corridor, the staircase, the circular gallery, and the three suites. A red line started from the far end of the hallway—the east wing where the linen closets and staff stairs were located—and trailed along the floorboards until it reached Sophie's room.
And at the end of the line, right at the foot of Sophie’s bed, was a small, smeared red fingerprint.
Emily felt a cold drop of sweat slide down her spine between her shoulder blades.
"Where did you find these?" she whispered.
"Behind the radiator in her bedroom," Anthony said. His voice was low, carrying a dry, raspy grit. "She hid them behind the copper pipes. The red chalk isn't from the box you brought up from the basement, Miss Brooks."
Emily looked at the drawer where she had found the pastels. "I... I took the green box. The blue box. There wasn't any red in that chest."
"No," Anthony said, his blue-grey eyes locking onto hers with a precision that made her feel as though she were being weighed on an iron scale. "The red chalk is Conté crayon. Hardened oil base. It’s used by architects and stone-masons. We haven't had an architect in this house since we rebuilt the east wing four years ago."
Emily looked down at the red fingerprint on the third paper.
"Someone gave it to her," she said.
"Yes," Anthony said.
"Someone inside the house."
"Yes."
Emily took a slow breath, trying to calm the sudden, sharp fluttering in her chest. She looked at Anthony—really looked at him.
She had heard the rumors among the staff during her seventeen days here. They said Anthony Caruso was a murderer who had bought his way out of three federal indictments. They said he had driven his brother out of the country, that he kept five hundred million dollars in cash buried under the gravel beds of his shipping terminals, and that his wife had died because he refused to let her leave the estate to see a surgeon in New York.
They said he was a monster who had turned his own child into an orphan before her mother was even cold.
But as he stood over those three sheets of paper, his fingers resting on the edge of the marble table, Emily didn't see a monster.
She saw a man who was drowning in forty feet of clear water, looking up at the ice above his head and realizing he didn't have the strength to break through it alone.
"Why hasn't she spoken?" Emily asked softly.
Anthony’s jaw tightened. "The doctors call it selective mutism. A traumatic response to her mother's death."
"It’s not selective mutism," Emily said.
Anthony looked up, his eyes sharp. "What?"
"Selective mutism is when a child chooses not to speak in certain environments because they're afraid of being judged or seen," Emily said, her background in child development from her Oregon days surfacing despite her fear. "She isn't afraid of being seen. She sat next to me on that rug for forty minutes without looking away once."
"Then what is it?"
"She’s hiding," Emily said, pointing at the red snake wrapped around the door. "She isn't quiet because she’s sad, Mr. Caruso. She’s quiet because she thinks if she makes a sound, whatever drew this is going to hear her."
Anthony didn't move for ten seconds.
The house around them was completely still, save for the dull, distant thud of the winter sea against the rocks below the cliff.
Then, slowly, Anthony reached into his pocket and pulled out a small gold key.
He laid it on the table beside the drawings.
"This opens the private staircase behind the nursery," he said. "It leads down to the garage bay where my personal car is kept. No one on the staff has a key to that door except me and Mateo."
Emily looked at the key, then at him. "Why are you showing me this?"
"Because at three p.m. today, before I returned from the docks, my head of security received a phone call from an unlisted number in Vancouver," Anthony said. "The caller didn't speak. They played a eight-second recording of a child humming."
Emily’s eyes widened. "Sophie?"
"No," Anthony said, his face darkening until he looked twenty years older. "It was Claire. My wife. A recording made six four days before she died."
He leaned down until his eyes were level with Emily’s.
"Someone is playing a game with this house, Miss Brooks. They think that because I spent three years hiding behind my desk while my daughter lost her voice, I’ve forgotten how to defend my property."
He grabbed the gold key and pressed it into Emily’s hand, his broad fingers wrapping around hers with an iron grip that was warm and rough with old scars.
"You stay in this room," he commanded. "If the lights go out—if you hear a single door open on this floor that isn't my voice—you take Sophie down that staircase. You get into the silver sedan in Bay 3. The keys are under the floor mat. You drive through the side gate. You don't stop for the guards, you don't stop for the police, and you don't stop for me."
Emily looked down at her hand, held fast in his. "Where would I go?"
"You go to the docks," Anthony said, his voice dropping into a register that was almost a whisper. "Terminal 91. Gate 4. You ask for a man named Frank Vance. You tell him Anthony Caruso sent his daughter home."
"And you?" Emily asked, her voice trembling despite her effort to hold it steady. "What are you going to do?"
May you like
Anthony let go of her hand and stepped back into the shadows of the hallway.
"I’m going to find the man who gave my daughter that red chalk," he said.
