Chapter 5 - LOCKER 118 AT UNION STATION
"Yesterday?" I stared at the sharp, fresh numbers scratched into the inside of the silver watch case: U.S. — 118. "Clara, who scratched this into your daddy's watch?"
Clara looked up at me with wide, solemn eyes.
"The man with the gray mustache who came to the lakeside dock on Monday," Clara said. "Before Grandpa Walt went to the hospital, the man gave Grandpa a big brown envelope to hide in the boathouse. Then when the blonde lady came to the boathouse yesterday with a crowbar, Grandpa told me to run through the woods and give the envelope to the man at the train station."
My gaze snapped back to Rebecca.
That was why she had the brass Lake Geneva marina key in her purse.
She hadn't found out about the Lake Geneva cottage from my phone call tonight—she had found the address in Daniel's briefcase on Monday, driven up to Wisconsin while Daniel thought she was at a spa in Oakbrook, and broken into the boathouse looking for Walt's shift log.
"Who was the man with the gray mustache, Hannah?" I asked, turning to Clara's aunt.
Hannah shook her head, looking genuinely frightened. "I don't know, Mrs. Harrison. I was working a double shift at the clinic in Elkhorn on Monday. By the time I got back to the cottage, my dad was having chest pains and Clara was hiding under the porch with the watch."
Across the table, Daniel's brother Robert suddenly stepped back, his shoe hitting the base of the floral centerpiece.
I looked at Robert.
Six months ago, Robert had shaved off the thick gray mustache he had worn for twenty years—except wait: if Clara saw a man with a gray mustache on Monday, it couldn't have been Robert.
Unless someone wanted Clara to remember a gray mustache.
"Hold on," my son Mark said, pulling out his phone and zooming in on the scratch inside the watch casing. "Mom, look at the way the number eight is made. Two little loops stacked on top of each other like a snowman. Who writes eights like that on every single blueprint in the basement office?"
Every pair of eyes in the Harrison family turned toward Robert.
Robert's wife, Diane, grabbed his arm. "Robbie? You told me you were in Joliet on Monday pricing rebar!"
Robert didn't look at his wife.
He looked at Daniel, and for the first time in thirty years, the quiet, submissive younger brother stood straight up, his eyes burning with a cold, long-buried resentment.
"You really thought I spent eleven years in that windowless basement doing your math out of brotherly love, Daniel?" Robert said, his voice steady and surprisingly loud.
Daniel took a half step back. "Robert... what did you put in Locker 118?"
"The real reason Michael drove my pickup truck to Rockford that night," Robert said.
"Wait," I said, stepping between the brothers as a cold knot tightened in my stomach. "Rebecca just admitted she cut the brake lines on that truck so her father could win the county paving bid."
"Rebecca drained the brake line on the front left caliper," Robert said, looking at Rebecca almost pityingly. "A twenty-six-year-old file clerk with a pair of hardware-store pliers. When I walked into the Rockford shed at nine o'clock that night to load the transit levels, I smelled the brake fluid on the concrete floor."
The room went so quiet I could hear the ice melting in the water pitchers.
"You knew the brakes were cut before Michael got in the truck?" Margaret whispered, her hands trembling violently against her chest. "Robbie... you let your baby brother drive onto the highway in a blizzard with no brakes?"
"I didn't let him drive onto the highway, Ma!" Robert shouted, his voice cracking with eleven years of pressure. "Michael was already gone when I got to the shed! He left a note on the workbench saying he was taking my truck to the state inspector's house in Freeport!"
"Why was Michael going to the state inspector?" I asked, though a terrible suspicion was already rising in my throat.
Robert looked straight at Daniel.
"Ask your husband, Patricia," Robert said bitterly. "Ask him why Harrison Construction survived the 2015 audit when every other mid-sized builder in Illinois went bankrupt. Daniel didn't use forty-thousand-pound steel girders on the Rockford hospital wing—he used salvaged, uncertified Chinese steel that cost half the price and pocketed the million-dollar difference!"
A horrified murmur broke out among the Milwaukee investors sitting at table three; two of them immediately stood up, pulling out their phones.
"Michael found the falsified mill certificates in Daniel's desk," Robert continued, his chest heaving. "He called me that afternoon crying. He said if the hospital wing ever collapsed in a tornado, hundreds of people would die, and our father's name was on that building. So Daniel met Michael at the bridge approach on Highway 20 to take the certificates back."
My blood turned to ice.
I looked at the man I had been married to for thirty years—the man whose shirts I had ironed, whose mother I had nursed, whose dinner I had kept warm in the oven a thousand nights.
"You were at the bridge?" I whispered.
Daniel's face was gray, his lips pressed into a thin, bloodless line. "I tried to flag him down! I flashed my high beams when he came around the curve, and when he hit the brakes on the ice, the pedal went to the floor and he went through the guardrail! I didn't know Rebecca had touched the truck!"
"And did you call 911?" Mark demanded, his voice breaking as tears filled his eyes. "Dad, tell me you called 911!"
Daniel looked down at the white tablecloth.
He didn't answer.
He hadn't called 911.
Because if the sheriff's divers had pulled Michael out of the cab that night, they would have found the falsified steel certificates in his waterproof briefcase.
"Wait," I said, my mind racing back to the scratch inside the railroad watch. "If Michael's briefcase went into the river eleven years ago, what did Walt Miller hide in the Lake Geneva boathouse—and what did Robert put in Locker 118 at Union Station yesterday?"
Robert reached into his trouser pocket, pulled out a small gray metal locker key stamped with the number 118, and set it on the table in front of me—not Daniel.
"Because the briefcase wasn't all Walt pulled out of the river shallows that night, Patricia," Robert said quietly. "Three years ago, when Daniel started draining your retirement accounts and transferring the company's clean assets into an LLC controlled by Rebecca's father, I realized Rebecca and her dad were setting Daniel up to take the fall for the hospital steel while they walked away with every dime you and I ever earned."
Rebecca's eyes widened. "You bastard—"
"You're the only honest partner left on the Harrison corporate charter, Patricia," Robert told me. "And what's sitting inside Locker 118 right now is the reason neither Daniel nor Rebecca's father can ever touch your forty percent—unless they get there before you do."
I picked up the gray key.
Before my fingers even closed around it, I realized Rebecca's father, Arthur Collins, had been invited to tonight's anniversary dinner—and his chair at table four was completely empty.
"Mark, Lucas," I said sharply, turning toward the doors. "How long does it take to get from here to Union Station?"
"Eight minutes if we take Lower Wacker," Mark said, already pulling his keys from his pocket.
Then Clara reached out and grabbed my hand, her small fingers ice-cold.
May you like
"Aunt Patricia," she whispered, looking down at the locker key in my palm. "That's not the key the man with the mustache had on Monday. The man at our boathouse was missing the top part of his left thumb."
I froze, staring down at Robert's left hand resting on the table—both of his thumbs were completely whole.
