Page 110 of In the Dark of the Past

I looked at River. She was already looking at me.

“We go now,” she said. It wasn’t a question.

“We go now,” I agreed.

Chapter Thirty-Three

River

The maintenance access was exactly where Jordyn had said it would be. It was a rusted metal door set flush into the hillside behind the main building, half-hidden by too many years of unchecked brush. It was the kind of door that wanted you to believe it had been forgotten. The padlock was old, but the hasp it hung on was new, clearly replaced sometime in the last few years. Which told me everything I needed to know about how forgotten it actually was.

Atlas had it open in forty seconds with a tension wrench and the expression of a man who considered lock-picking a leisure skill.

“After you,” he said.

Finn went first. I went second. Atlas pulled the door closed behind us.

The smell hit immediately. It wasn’t the rot and damp of the main building, but something dryer. Controlled. The neutrality of a climate-managed space, the same quality as the evidence room at the station, but older, more deliberate. Someone had spent money maintaining the air in this place while the building above it fell apart.

That told me something, too.

“Stairs,” Finn said quietly, his flashlight beam finding them. Concrete, clean, descending at a slight angle. Not a basement. A sublevel. Deeper than the flood line, which explained why the water that had eaten the upper building hadn’t touched this.

We went down.

The corridor at the bottom was narrow and lit by a single strip of emergency lighting along the baseboard—battery-maintained, the kind that ran for years without attention. The walls were poured concrete and unmarked. Three doors. All steel, all locked, all bearing the same keypad model as the door upstairs in the main building.

Finn looked at me. I looked at the keypads.

“Same system,” I said. “Same administrator.”

“Same code?”

“Maybe. While Grant likes dates and 2010 worked before, that’s public-facing, something he’d use for a door people might need access to. Down here, I think he’d use something older. Something that means more to him personally.”

Atlas folded his arms. “You’re profiling a lock.”

“I’m profiling the person who set the lock.” I thought about Grant and what I knew about him. The community theater donor plaques, the library wing named after his father, the way he spoke about Maple Ridge’s history at every ribbon-cutting like he’d authored it himself. “He sees himself as a steward. This is something inherited. Something passed down.”

I tried the first door. Typed: 1987.

“1987 is the year Grant’s father transferred the original Benevolence Fund charter to the town,” I said when Finn looked at me. “It’s in the county historical records. He references it in every major speech.”

The light stayed red.

Shit.

I tried: 0714.

“July fourteenth is his father’s birthday,” I said. “It’s on the memorial plaque in the civic center lobby.”

Green light.

Yes!

A soft, pressurized click, followed by the sound of a seal releasing.

Atlas exhaled. “I’m getting your psych degree framed.”