The studio door was closed but unlocked. I slipped inside, moving through the darkness toward the back wall. I put my hand flat against the fresh paint. Cold. Solid.
Hollow.
I knocked softly. The sound came back muted, absorbed by whatever void lay beyond. I pressed my ear to the wall and held my breath.
For thirty seconds, nothing. Then, so faint I might have imagined it—breathing. Quick and shallow. Someone trying desperately not to be heard.
“Felicia,” I whispered.
The breathing stopped instantly. Silence rushed in, thick and suffocating.
“Felicia,” I whispered again. “If you can hear me…”
Creak.
Footsteps from upstairs. Cassandra’s bedroom door opening.
I stepped back from the wall, heart hammering against my ribs like a trapped bird. I moved quickly toward the door. Behind me, from behind the wall, the breathing had started again. Faster this time. Almost like crying.
I slipped out and headed for the stairs, forcing myself to walk, not run. That night, lying in bed, I stared at the ceiling until the drywall patterns burned into my retinas.
Tomorrow. Tomorrow I would figure out who to call. How to get help. But one thought consumed me, overriding the fear. My daughter had been twenty feet away. For eight years, she had been right here.
And I was going to get her out.
Stephen’s call came Thursday afternoon, just as I was stuffing clothes into my overnight bag for my scheduled flight to Seattle.
“Chris.”
His voice was tight, strained in a way I had never heard before. Not in twenty years of friendship.
“We need to talk. Now.”
I stopped mid-fold, a shirt hanging from my hands. “What’s wrong?”
“It’s about the trust fund you set up for Felicia. There’s something you need to see.”
My stomach dropped. “What kind of something?”
“Not over the phone. How fast can you get here?”
I glanced at my watch. Two-thirty. My flight boarded at six. “Twenty minutes.”
“I’ll be waiting.”
Stephen’s firm occupied the twelfth floor of the IDS Tower in downtown Minneapolis—all glass, steel, and quiet authority. I had been here countless times: after Margaret died, when I updated my will, when we created Felicia’s trust fund after her sixteenth birthday. Today, the elevator felt unbearably slow.
Stephen met me at reception himself, which immediately set my nerves on edge. His assistant usually handled that. He looked older than I remembered—more gray at his temples, deeper lines etched into his face.
“Thanks for coming,” he said, shaking my hand. His grip was firm, but his palm was damp. “Come in.”
Once inside his office, he closed the door and pulled the blinds. “Whatever I’m about to show you stays between us until we understand it,” he said. “Sit.”
I did. He opened a thick folder and spread documents across the desk. Bank statements, transaction logs, spreadsheets dense with numbers.
“You remember the trust Margaret set up for Felicia,” he said. “Five hundred thousand dollars from her insurance and savings. Felicia was supposed to gain access at twenty-one.”
“But when she disappeared, I made Cassandra temporary trustee,” I finished. “She was responsible. I thought…” My voice faltered. “I thought it was safe.”
“Legally, you did everything right,” Stephen said carefully. “But Cassandra has been withdrawing money. A lot of it.”
He slid a spreadsheet toward me, rows highlighted in aggressive yellow and red. “This covers eight years. Starting March 2016, two weeks after Felicia vanished.”
The numbers blurred as I read.
March 28th, 2016: -$50,000.
April 15th, 2016: -$50,000.
May 3rd, 2016: -$50,000.
“One hundred fifty thousand in three months,” Stephen said quietly. “Labeled ‘Debt Repayment: Derek Hamilton’.”
The name rang a faint bell. “Her boyfriend. They dated for a while in college.”
“She transferred him one hundred fifty thousand dollars of Felicia’s money,” Stephen said. “And that’s only the beginning.”
Another document followed. Smaller withdrawals, spaced out, relentless. Two thousand here. Five thousand there.
“It adds up,” he said, tracing the totals with a manicured finger. “Roughly three hundred fifty thousand dollars over eight years.”
My hands clenched the arms of the leather chair. “For what?”
Stephen pulled out receipts and invoices. “According to Cassandra’s filings, multiple purposes. One hundred thousand to a company called J. Morrison Construction, based in Iowa. Listed as ‘Home Renovation’.”
My breath caught. “Renovation? We haven’t renovated anything.”
“I checked,” Stephen said. “No permits. No inspections. Nothing filed at your address in over ten years.”
The room swayed slightly. I grabbed the edge of the desk to anchor myself.
“Another eighty thousand labeled ‘Operational Expenses’—food supplies, equipment. Seventy thousand to start her gallery, which checks out. And about a hundred thousand spread across savings and investment accounts under her name.”
“She told me the gallery was funded by loans,” I said.
“She lied.”
The words settled heavily between us. My eyes returned to the spreadsheet. J. Morrison Construction. Iowa. $100,000.
“Who is J. Morrison?”
“I don’t know yet,” Stephen said. “But one hundred thousand in cash for a renovation that never happened?” He leaned back, taking off his glasses. “Chris, we need to consider something. We need to consider that Cassandra knows exactly what happened to Felicia.”
I said the words, bitter as bile. “That she’s been lying to me for eight years.”
Stephen didn’t argue.
I told him everything then. About Gary hearing crying. About the water glass without a ring. About the extra grocery receipts. About the fresh paint on the basement wall that sounded hollow when I knocked. He listened silently, his expression darkening with every detail.
When I finished, he exhaled slowly. “I need to ask you something carefully. Do you think Cassandra could have… hurt Felicia?”
“No,” I said instantly. Then, softer, “I don’t know. If she had access to this money…”
“If she hired an out-of-state contractor, bought years of extra supplies…” He stopped.
My throat burned. “Here’s what we do,” Stephen said, shifting into strategy mode. “I’m hiring a forensic accountant. We trace every transaction. We find Derek Hamilton. And we find J. Morrison.”
“How long?”
“A week, maybe less.”
“A week?” I stood up. “Felicia could be—”
“Chris.” Stephen gripped my shoulder. “Do not confront Cassandra. Not yet. If Felicia is alive and you alert Cassandra, she could panic. She could move her. Or worse.”
“So I go home,” I said, my voice shaking. “I act normal. Can you do that?”
I pictured Cassandra across the dinner table, smiling, lying. “I can.”
He handed me copies of the statements. “Hide these.”
I sat in my car afterward, engine off, staring at the documents. Five hundred thousand dollars. Margaret’s legacy for Felicia. Gone. Spent piece by piece.
J. Morrison Construction, Iowa. One hundred thousand dollars.
What had Cassandra built with that money? And where was my daughter while it was being built?
I started the engine. Seattle could wait. Tomorrow, I was finding J. Morrison. And I was going to find out what he built in my house.
Friday morning arrived with a gray, oppressive sky. At 8:15, a knock rattled the front door.
I had just dragged myself back from the airport, eyes burning from lack of sleep and the adrenaline crash of the last forty-eight hours. But when I opened the door and saw Dorothy Green, the exhaustion vanished.
She was pale, her skin like parchment, and the look in her eyes—terror, raw and unmasked—told me that sleep would have to wait.
“Mr. Hayes.” Her voice shook, a dry rattle in her throat. “I need to show you something. I should have come forward years ago, but I… I was afraid.”
I stepped aside immediately. “Come in, Dorothy.”
Dorothy had lived next door for fifteen years. She had been Margaret’s friend, the kind of neighbor who brought tuna casseroles after the funeral and watered our plants when we were away.
Now seventy-two, a widow plagued by a fierce insomnia that kept her pacing her floors while the rest of the neighborhood slept, she looked smaller than I remembered. She perched on the edge of the sofa, clutching a heavy canvas bag to her chest, her eyes darting toward the front door as if she expected it to burst open.
“I’m a light sleeper, Mr. Hayes. Have been since Robert passed,” she began, her fingers knitting together. “And over the years… I’ve noticed things.”
“What kind of things?” I asked, sitting opposite her, leaning forward.
“I see lights in your basement,” she whispered. “Late at night, when the rest of the house is dark. And I see Cassandra going down there. Carrying dishes. Carrying bags.”
She paused, swallowing hard. “It started eight years ago. Right after Felicia disappeared.”
Dorothy reached into her bag and pulled out three spiral notebooks. They were thick, the covers faded, the wire bindings bent from years of handling.
“I started keeping track in 2017. The pattern never changed.”
I opened the first notebook. The pages were filled with shaky but legible handwriting, each entry dated and timestamped with obsessive precision.