Chapter 6 - THE SPARE KEY IN THE APRON
“Open this door, Arthur!” I roared, throwing my full weight against the heavy oak frame.
The brass deadbolt held fast. We had built the cellar office door out of two-inch solid white oak to secure the restaurant’s cash drops and sixty-thousand-dollar vintage wine inventory.
Inside the office, Claire screamed as Arthur dragged her backward toward the steel gate of the freight elevator, brandishing the iron crowbar to keep her from fighting him. If he got her up to the loading dock by the swollen river in the dark, Claire Whitmore would become another tragic “accident”—and Arthur would be across the state line with two million dollars in stolen earnest money before the Columbus police even arrived.
“Soph, run upstairs right now and tell the hostess to call 911!” I told my daughter, looking frantically around the cellar corridor for anything heavy enough to break the wired security glass in the door.
Before Sophie could reach the third step, the swinging steel door at the top of the service stairs burst open.
Down rushed Mateo, our head chef at Bellweather House—a fifty-five-year-old former Marine from Toledo who had worked for Rebecca and me since the day we opened our first six-table bistro in 2008. Right behind him were two of his line cooks and Paul, the security guard Claire had tried to use against me ten minutes earlier.
“Maya came running into the kitchen and said you were down here with Vance, Boss,” Mateo said, taking in the locked office door and Claire’s muffled screams inside in half a second.
“He’s taking her up the freight elevator to the loading dock,” I said grimly, pointing through the wired glass as the metal elevator gate clanged shut at the back of the office. “And he’s got a crowbar.”
“The loading dock bay doors are padlocked from the inside for the rainstorm,” Paul said quickly, stepping forward. “If he goes up there, he has to cross the dry-storage mezzanine behind the walk-in freezers to reach the alley exit.”
“Wait,” Mateo said, reaching beneath his white chef’s coat and pulling a heavy brass keyring from the front pocket of his grease-stained apron. He held up a battered brass master key stamped with the letters R.M.
“What is that?” I asked, my heart skipping a beat.
“Mrs. Mercer gave me her personal master key the afternoon she died,” Mateo said quietly, shoving the key into the exterior keyhole of the cellar office deadbolt. “She walked through the kitchen at eleven-thirty that morning, hugged me, and told me: ‘Mateo, keep this in your apron. Never give it to Arthur, and if Tom ever comes looking for what’s in the cellar, open every door for him.’”
He twisted the brass key hard. The heavy deadbolt clicked back.
“Paul, stay here in the cellar with Sophie and Maya,” I ordered, kneeling for one brief second to look my daughter in the eye. “Soph, stay with Chef Mateo’s crew and Mr. Paul. I’ll be right back, I promise.”
“Be careful, Dad,” Sophie whispered, wrapping her arms tightly around my neck for a fierce second before letting go.
Mateo and I didn’t take the freight elevator; we sprinted up the concrete service stairs two steps at a time, bursting out onto the dim, steel-grated mezzanine above the kitchen dry-storage bay.
Rain was lashing violently against the high corrugated tin roof overhead. Down at the far end of the catwalk, beside the humming industrial compressors of the walk-in freezers, the freight elevator doors slid open.
Arthur stumbled out, still gripping Claire’s blazer collar with one hand while holding the iron crowbar in the other. Claire had lost one high heel; she was sobbing hysterically, her makeup running in black streaks down her face.
“Stop right there, Arthur!” I shouted, my voice echoing off the concrete loading bay walls as Mateo moved quickly down the secondary catwalk to block the emergency stairs leading to the alley door.
Arthur spun around, his chest heaving under his ruined three-thousand-dollar suit. Seeing Mateo blocking the exit stairs and me blocking the catwalk, he backed against the steel railing ten feet above the concrete loading dock floor.
“Stay back, Tom!” Arthur yelled, raising the iron crowbar over his shoulder as he shoved Claire roughly toward the railing. “I swear to God, if you take another step, I’ll throw her over the rail! Let me out the alley door to my car, or she goes headfirst onto the concrete!”
“Arthur, please!” Claire shrieked, clinging desperately to the top pipe of the steel railing with both hands as her stockinged foot slipped on the metal grating. “I won’t say a word to the police! I’ll tell them I forged the notary stamp myself! Please don’t!”
“You already told him about the car, you idiot!” Arthur snarled, his eyes wild and bloodshot under the fluorescent cage lights. He looked at me, his voice cracking with pathetic, twisted self-pity. “Why did Rebecca always think she was better than me, Tom?! Dad left the family dry-cleaning business to both of us, and she cashed out her half to build this with a nobody carpenter in muddy boots! While I had to beg her for a paycheck in her own company!”
“She made you Chief Operating Officer at three hundred thousand dollars a year, Arthur,” I said, taking a slow, measured step forward along the steel grating while keeping my eyes locked on the crowbar in his hand. “She paid off your first mortgage when your divorce nearly bankrupted you. She loved you. And you cut her brake lines while our seven-year-old daughter was supposed to be in the backseat of that car.”
Mateo froze on the opposite catwalk, his fists clenching at his sides. “Wait... Sophie was supposed to be in the car that day?”
“It was a Friday during summer break,” I said, my voice dropping to a low tremor as the memory that had haunted my nightmares for fourteen months rose to the surface. “Sophie stayed home with me at the last minute because she had an earache. Arthur didn’t even check the backseat before he let Rebecca drive onto I-70.”
Arthur’s mouth opened slightly, a look of genuine horror flashing across his face. “Wait—no, Rebecca told me Sophie was at day camp in Dublin! I didn’t think Sophie was—”
May you like
In that split second of distraction, Claire wrenched her arm free from his grip and threw herself flat onto the catwalk grating toward Mateo.
Arthur swung the iron crowbar blindly to catch her, lost his footing on the slick steel mesh, and crashed hard against the top bar of the mezzanine railing—where the rusty bolts gave a loud, metallic shriek and snapped clean out of the concrete column.
