The Road to Marlowe
Chapter 07 - The Road to Marlowe
Lucas ignored Camille’s order to come alone. He kept her on the phone while Hannah traced the signal, but Camille ended the call after twelve seconds.
Sophie had vanished from Rosa’s sister’s apartment during the engagement party. The babysitter remembered a delivery woman carrying a box marked with the Whitmore crest. Building cameras showed the woman leading Sophie outside, promising that her mother had been injured.
Rosa collapsed when she saw the footage.
“This is my fault,” she said. “I taught her to trust people from that house.”
Lucas knelt beside her. “This is Camille’s fault.”
The phone trace pointed toward Marlowe, where the suspicious hotel renovation had taken place. Lucas, Hannah, and state police drove north through heavy rain. Rosa insisted on coming.
At the abandoned hotel, they found the front doors chained but a service entrance open. Inside, dust covered the lobby and plastic sheets hung from unfinished walls. The project had consumed forty million dollars without ever opening.
A child’s blue ribbon lay on the floor.
Rosa recognized it from Sophie’s hair.
They followed small chalk arrows through the corridor. Sophie had marked the walls the way Rosa taught her to do if she ever became lost. The arrows led to the basement accounting room.
Sophie was locked inside, frightened but unharmed.
Camille was not there.
On a table beside the child sat boxes of financial records and Eleanor’s missing will amendment. Camille had brought them to be burned, but Sophie had knocked over a can of cleaning solvent and triggered a fire alarm before she could finish.
“She said I ruined everything,” Sophie told Hannah. “Then the man came and they ran.”
The man was Owen Vale.
Police found tire tracks leading toward the private airfield outside town. Camille and Owen were attempting to leave the country.
Before Hannah departed, Sophie tugged Lucas’s sleeve.
“The shiny lady said Grandma Eleanor was awake.”
Lucas called the hospital.
Eleanor had regained consciousness twenty minutes earlier. Her first request was to see Lucas. Her second was that no one tell Camille.
At the airfield, police stopped Owen’s vehicle near the runway. He surrendered immediately and claimed Camille had forced him to cooperate. Camille escaped on foot into a maintenance hangar.
Hannah entered with officers.
Camille stood beside a small aircraft, clutching the evidence drive and a lighter.
“You chose a servant’s child over me,” she told Lucas when he arrived.
“No,” he said. “I chose the truth.”
Camille raised the lighter.
May you like
From behind Lucas, Eleanor’s voice came through his phone on speaker.
“Then let us finally tell all of it.”
