Chapter 36 - The Lock on the Saw Room
The cold fluorescent lights of the holding room buzzed like an angry hornet.
"You're lying," I said, but my own voice sounded far away, muffled by the sudden rush of blood in my ears.
"Check the emergency dispatch logs from July 23, 2012," Julian said, his eyes locking onto mine without blinking. "The 911 call didn't come from your house. It came from a payphone three miles away on Route 68. The caller claimed there was a disturbance at the lumber yard, but they gave the wrong entrance gate. The paramedics lost twenty minutes trying to get through the locked north chain-link fence while your father was suffocating on the floor of the kiln office."
Pendelton slammed his brief shut. "We're done here. Julian, not another word. Special Agent Miller, this interview is concluded!"
I stood up slowly. My knees were shaking, but my hands were completely steady.
I didn't say another word to Julian Sterling. I walked out of the interrogation room, past the security turnstiles, and out into the biting Rhode Island wind.
Miller caught up to me at the cruiser in the visitor lot. "Hannah! Wait! Did you hear what he just said on the record? If Sterling is telling the truth, we aren't just looking at fraud and forgery anymore. We're looking at depraved-heart murder or reckless manslaughter."
"Get the dispatch records, David," I said, staring straight ahead through the frosted windshield. "Worcester County Sheriff’s Department. Route 68 payphone logs, July 23, 2012, between 8:00 PM and midnight."
"I’m already on it," Miller said, pulling out his phone. "Where are you going?"
"Back to the mill," I said. "There’s a second safe."
My father had built the saw room with his own hands. When I was ten years old, he had shown me where he kept the duplicate emergency keys to the hydraulic breakers. *'Never trust a single lock, Hannah,'* he had told me while showing me the false baseboard beneath the planer bench. *'If the power fails or the doors jam, there’s always a manual release.'*
If Eleanor had locked that heavy steel security door from the outside, my father wouldn't have just sat on the floor waiting for death. He was a craftsman. He knew every bolt in that building.
Two hours later, the winter sun was dropping behind the ridge of Mount Wachusett, casting long, bloody-red shadows across the frozen mill yard.
I pushed open the heavy wooden door of the main saw barn. The scent of aged pine, machine oil, and damp sawdust hit me instantly, bringing with it a wave of grief so intense I had to brace myself against the doorframe.
I walked down the central aisle between the dead industrial saws, my flashlight beam cutting through the gloom. At the far end stood the master saw room—a reinforced steel-and-cinderblock enclosure built to keep dust away from the sensitive hydraulic controls.
The heavy steel exterior latch was secured with an old brass Yale padlock.
I examined the lock under my flashlight. The brass casing was scratched with deep, frantic gouges, as if someone had tried to wedge a pry-bar beneath the shackle from the inside.
I dropped to my knees beside the planer bench, pulled away the rotted cedar baseboard, and reached into the darkness behind the studs.
My fingers brushed against cold metal.
It wasn't a key.
It was an audio cassette tape, wrapped in grease-proof butcher paper and sealed with electrical tape. Scrawled across the paper in my father’s unmistakable, arthritic hand was a single date and a timestamp:
*July 22, 2012 — 11:45 PM. Security intercom recording.*
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My father hadn't just suspected Eleanor. He had wired the mill’s intercom to the backup security recorder in the breaker box.
***
