Chapter 4 - Grandpa’s Christmas Recording
By breakfast, Hawthorne House no longer felt like a home.
It felt like evidence.
Police tape crossed the basement. Technicians photographed the service corridor. Child welfare workers remained with Mason and Sophie. Vanessa had been taken downtown for questioning after refusing to explain the hidden room.
Jonathan sat at the kitchen island staring at a cup of coffee he had not touched.
Mason entered wearing yesterday’s sweater.
“You heard it too.”
Jonathan nodded.
“That sounded like Grandpa.”
“It was him.”
“Mason, my father died three years ago.”
“I know when Grandpa is talking.”
Jonathan remembered his father, Charles Reed, as a stern man with expensive suits, immaculate manners, and a talent for making every disagreement sound like a moral failure.
Emily had disliked him.
Jonathan had assumed it was ordinary in-law friction.
Now he remembered a Christmas dinner five years earlier.
Emily had said, “Your father frightens me.”
Jonathan had laughed.
“He frightens everybody.”
“That isn’t funny.”
He wished he had listened.
Detective Cole entered carrying a laptop.
“The recording metadata is strange.”
“How strange?”
“The file was created eight months ago.”
Jonathan stared at her.
“That’s impossible.”
“Not necessarily. Someone could have played an older recording of your father near Emily.”
“Why?”
“To frighten her. To manipulate her. Or to make anyone who later heard it believe something impossible.”
Mason sat down.
“So somebody wanted us to think Grandpa came back from the dead?”
Cole nodded. “Maybe.”
Sophie wandered in clutching a stuffed polar bear.
“Grandpa didn’t die.”
Every adult turned.
Jonathan felt cold.
“What did you say?”
Sophie climbed onto the chair beside Mason.
“I saw him.”
“When?”
“At Christmas.”
“Last Christmas?”
She nodded.
Jonathan crouched.
“Where?”
“Outside.”
“Outside where?”
“The window by the angel.”
Mason whispered, “East hall.”
Sophie nodded.
“He waved.”
Jonathan looked at Cole.
“Could she be remembering someone else?”
“Absolutely.”
Sophie frowned.
“He had Grandpa’s ring.”
Jonathan stopped breathing.
Charles had worn a heavy gold ring engraved with the Reed family crest every day for forty years.
After his supposed death, the ring had never been recovered.
His body had been identified after a private plane crash off the Maine coast.
Identified, Jonathan suddenly remembered, through dental records.
The funeral had used a closed casket.
Christmas preparations continued because nobody knew what else to do.
Mara Ellison, the family’s sixty-eight-year-old housekeeper, quietly made pancakes for the children. She had worked at Hawthorne House since Jonathan was a teenager.
Sophie pushed a pancake toward Mason.
“You eat.”
“I’m not hungry.”
“You always say that.”
Mara looked sharply at him.
“How often do you skip meals?”
Mason shrugged.
Vanessa had called it discipline.
Mara’s face changed.
“She told the staff you were eating at school.”
“Sometimes.”
“Mason.”
He looked down.
“She said if I complained, Sophie would lose dinner too.”
Mara turned away and gripped the counter.
Jonathan’s eyes filled.
“I didn’t know.”
Mason looked at him.
“I know.”
Those two words hurt worse than anger.
That afternoon Detective Cole discovered that Charles Reed’s death certificate had been amended twice.
The dentist who confirmed the records retired immediately afterward.
The plane had belonged to a holding company.
That holding company had been sold six months later.
The buyer?
A trust administered by Vanessa’s older brother, Victor Hale.
Jonathan stared at the paperwork.
“My wife’s family bought the company connected to my father’s death?”
“Afterward,” Cole said. “But yes.”
Mason stood near the Christmas tree listening.
“What happens now?”
“We find Victor,” Cole said.
They did not have to.
At six that evening, a black sedan stopped beyond the estate gate.
A man stepped out holding a red gift box.
Victor Hale.
He waited while police approached.
“I came voluntarily,” he said.
Detective Cole took the box.
“What is this?”
“Something Jonathan should have received three years ago.”
Inside was Charles Reed’s gold ring.
Jonathan nearly dropped it.
Victor looked toward the mansion.
“You’re asking the wrong question.”
“What question should I ask?”
Victor smiled without warmth.
“Not whether Charles survived the crash.”
He looked up at the east-hall window.
“Ask who was on the plane instead.”
May you like
Behind the glass, Sophie screamed.
A tall gray-haired man was standing in the hallway behind her.
