Page 90 of In the Dark of the Past

I slid my finger under the edge and opened it.

Inside was a folded letter. Three pages long, front and back, her handwriting small to fit everything she needed to say.

And a smaller folded slip was tucked inside the first fold.

I opened that one first. Block letters. Quick and urgent, the hand of someone writing fast. Not my mother’s usual script. She was clearly under some stress.

THE WATCHERS ARE SEVEN.

BUT THEY AREN’T THE ONES YOU SHOULD FEAR.

LOOK DEEPER. FOLLOW THE MONEY.

AND TRUST NO ONE IN THE DEPARTMENT.

My pulse tripped.

I set the slip down on the floor beside me and opened the letter.

Her voice in her handwriting, still and permanent on the page.

My brave girl —

If you’re reading this, then I’m gone. I’ve been afraid of this for a long time, but I need you to know the truth before it’s buried any deeper than they’ve already buried it.

I need you to know the truth about your father.

The light in the room had shifted. I hadn’t noticed moving to sit on the floor, but I was there now, my back against the foot of the bed, the letter in both hands.

He didn’t do the things they said he did. He didn’t take bribes, falsify evidence, or look the other way on the cases they put his name on. He’s a good man and a good officer, and they destroyed him because he was asking questions they didn’t want answered.

The Benevolence Fund had been running for years before he noticed the discrepancies. He brought them to me first. You know how he was, always needing to talk things through before he filed anything. I told him to document everything and go through official channels. I thought official channels were safe.

I was wrong.

They fabricated the evidence against him. I saw enough of the process to know it was fabrication. Someone inside the department worked backward from the conclusion they needed and built a paper trail to support it. By the time I understood what was happening, it was too late to stop it without putting us both in the same position he was in.

I tried anyway. Even from here.

I gathered what I could from Stonybrooke. Files, financial records, names. I hid them whenever I was able. I was documenting the Fund’s allocation trail when they noticed.

They came to me the week after your father was put on administrative leave.

I stopped.

Read that sentence again.

After his leave. He was still in this house, in this town, carrying the shame of a case built against him, and she had been trying to prove him innocent, and they had taken her before she could.

He had spent those years thinking she was simply gone. Ill. Lost to him in a different way than the job had been lost. He had died in a garage at the end of a life he believed had been a lie full of loss, and the whole time she’d been in that building carrying the proof that it hadn’t been. Until she, herself, died, before he did.

He never knew.

My hands were shaking so badly I had to set the letter down for a moment. I pressed my palms flat on the floor and breathed the way I taught my clients to breathe—slow, deliberate, through the nose—until the shaking went from violent to manageable.

Then I picked the letter back up.

They told me I had a choice. Compliance or death. They were very polite about it. That was the part that frightened me most—how polite they were.