Chapter 6 - THE WOMAN WHO CAME BACK FROM THE DEAD“LILY, DO NOT GO DOWNSTAIRS!”
Daniel shouted so loudly that Thomas flinched beside him. But the phone was already dead. Outside the hidden cellar, darkness swallowed the old Mercer mansion while detectives rushed toward the gunshot upstairs. Daniel tried calling Michael again. Nothing. Then Lily’s terrified words replayed inside his skull.
“She says she’s my mother.”
That was impossible.
Lily’s mother, Catherine Grant Mercer, had died four years earlier after falling from a mountain trail. Michael had identified her belongings. Police had closed the investigation. There had been a funeral, a grave, and four years of grief that nearly destroyed Michael.
Yet Lily knew her mother’s face.
She could not have mistaken her.
“Tell me Catherine is dead,” Daniel demanded.
Thomas stared at him with haunted eyes.
Instead of answering, he slowly lowered himself into an old wooden chair.
“That depends,” Thomas whispered, “on who you believe was buried.”
Daniel felt the room tilt beneath him.
Thomas explained that Henry Mercer had discovered something shortly before Catherine’s supposed death. She had found Robert Grant’s hidden ledger—the same ledger containing names connected to offshore accounts, bribery, blackmail, and disappearances.
Catherine had planned to expose everything.
Someone stopped her.
But Henry had secretly intervened before the conspirators could finish the job.
“Your father didn’t kill Catherine,” Thomas said. “He made the world believe she was dead.”
Daniel stared at him.
“Why?”
“To keep her alive.”
Suddenly, footsteps thundered above them.
A detective shouted from the staircase.
“WE FOUND BLOOD!”
Daniel ran upstairs.
A wounded officer lay beside the front entrance, clutching his shoulder. Vanessa’s abandoned wedding veil was spread across the floor nearby like a white flag.
But Vanessa herself was gone.
On the wall, written in red lipstick, were five words:
YOU ARE STILL TOO LATE.
Daniel’s phone vibrated.
A photograph appeared from an unknown number.
Michael was sitting in the back seat of a black SUV.
His hands were tied.
His face was bleeding.
Beside him sat a woman Daniel recognized immediately.
Catherine.
Lily’s supposedly dead mother.
Beneath the photograph was a message:
BRING THOMAS REED TO THE OLD RAILWAY DEPOT.
COME ALONE.
OR MICHAEL LEARNS WHY HIS WIFE REALLY DISAPPEARED.
Daniel turned toward Thomas.
But Thomas was no longer standing behind him.
May you like
The cellar door was open.
And the man who had been dead for fifteen years had vanished again.
