Chapter 4 - Whispers of the West Tower
Three days passed in a suffocating monotony of silence and shadows.
Evelyn quickly learned the rhythm of Hawthorne Manor. At dawn, the distant tolling of a grandfather clock echoed through the stone halls. At noon, Anna delivered meals with downcast eyes, refusing to utter more than two words. By nightfall, the howling wind off the Atlantic rattled the windowpanes, creating an eerie, haunting symphony that made sleep almost impossible.
During the daytime hours when she was permitted to walk the enclosed courtyard garden—a bleak patch of dying boxwoods surrounded by high stone walls topped with wrought-iron spikes—Evelyn observed the staff. They moved like ghosts, efficient, silent, and deeply traumatized by something she couldn't yet name.
She noticed that none of the servants ever went near the heavy iron-reinforced double doors at the far end of the second-floor gallery. That was the entrance to the west tower—the forbidden zone where Nathaniel Hawthorne supposedly spent his days secluded with his medical equipment and legal documents.
Curiosity, combined with a suffocating desperation to find some leverage, finally overrode her caution on the fourth night.
The grandfather clock in the hall struck midnight. The deep, resonant chimes reverberated through the empty corridors like strokes of doom. Evelyn slipped out of bed, her bare feet making no sound against the thick Persian rugs. She wore a dark silk robe over her nightgown, blending seamlessly into the shadows of the hallway.
Her heart hammered wildly against her ribs as she crept down the corridor toward the west wing. Every creak of the old wooden floorboards sounded like a gunshot in the dead of night.
As she approached the iron-reinforced double doors, she noticed something strange: a thin sliver of warm, golden light bled out from beneath the crack at the bottom.
I thought he was bedridden, she thought, her breath catching in her throat. I thought he was a dying old man waiting for his final hour.
Stepping closer, she pressed her ear against the cold heavy wood of the door. At first, there was only silence. Then, a sound reached her—not the rattling, wheezing cough she had heard in the chapel, but something entirely different.
It was the steady, rhythmic clicking of a mechanical keyboard.
Evelyn’s breath hitched. A dying ninety-year-old man didn't type with the rapid, aggressive speed of a high-frequency trader or a software engineer.
Suddenly, a deep, resonant voice spoke from inside the room—a voice that lacked every trace of the fragile, trembling rasp he had projected at the altar. It was strong, controlled, and dripping with cold, calculated authority.
“Mr. Vale, if the restructuring of the Dover accounts isn't completed by market open tomorrow, I want every single asset frozen. I don't care about their excuses. Bleed them dry.”
Evelyn froze, her hand hovering inches from the brass handle.
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That wasn't the voice of a dying invalid. That was the voice of a predator who owned half the financial institutions on the eastern seaboard.
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