Chapter 8 - Agency
The back door of my father's house was unlocked—a careless mistake left behind in their haste to leave. I slipped inside into the comforting, familiar darkness of the kitchen. The house smelled faintly of stale coffee and my father’s pipe tobacco, a ghost of the home I had grown up in before Gladys transformed it into a shrine of polished wood and bitter resentment.
I didn't turn on a single light. I moved by memory, my hand gliding smoothly along the corridor wall until my fingers brushed the metal door of the fuse box near the laundry room. I popped the latch. Inside, hanging quietly from a small brass hook, was the old, silver-plated key with the notched end.
My heart hammered against my ribs, not from fear, but from the sharp, focused adrenaline of an investigator closing in on the truth.
I crept down the short hallway toward the pantry. The faux wood paneling on the back wall looked seamless to anyone else, but I knew the exact pressure point—three inches to the left of the bottom shelf, right where a knot in the pine grain had been sanded down. I pressed my thumb hard against the wood.
With a soft, pneumatic click, the panel swung open, revealing the heavy iron face of a wall safe built directly into the concrete foundation.
I inserted the silver key, turned it twice to the right, and spun the heavy dial to my father’s old shipyard badge number: 44-12-8.
The heavy steel door swung open with a slow, oiled creak.
Inside sat a thick, leather-bound ledger book, its pages filled with my father’s neat, meticulous handwriting. Next to it rested a sealed manila envelope labeled simply: Truth.
I reached in and pulled them both out. My fingers flipped open the ledger to the first page. It wasn't just a record of financial transactions. It was a handwritten journal detailing every single meeting my father had been forced into by Atlantic Logistics, complete with names, dates, and the specific signatures of corporate executives—and right alongside them, the authorizing signature of Lieutenant Commander Thomas Hayes.
It wasn't just bribery. It was systemic extortion. Hayes had used my father’s failing health and medical debts three years ago to force him into laundering logistics contracts through a front company, holding my father's military pension and clean record over his head like a guillotine.
Suddenly, a floorboard creaked in the front hallway.
It wasn't a soft creak. It was the heavy, deliberate tread of heavy-soled shoes.
Panic flared in my chest for a fraction of a second, but I stamped it down. I shoved the ledger and the envelope deep into the inside pockets of my heavy wool coat, pulled the safe door shut, and snapped the faux paneling back into place just as a flashlight beam sliced across the outer kitchen doorway.
"I know someone's in here," a low, gravelly voice echoed from the hallway. It wasn't Hayes. It was someone local—one of the town council members I had seen at the hall earlier that evening, his voice rough and unmistakably threatening.
May you like
I didn't hesitate. I slipped through the backdoor into the cool night air, pulling the screen door shut behind me without a single sound, and vanished into the shadows of the backyard hedge.
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