Chapter 4 - The Camera in the Attic.
At St. Anne’s Medical Center, doctors treated Claire for dehydration, exhaustion, and the effects of a sedative.
They assured Ethan that she would recover, but detectives allowed him only a few minutes beside her bed.
Claire held his hand and studied the ink smudge beneath his thumb.
It came from the vintage silver camcorder he kept in an attic box and repaired whenever he was frightened.
Months earlier, Claire had taught him to record dates, names, and unusual events because memory could be challenged but a recording could not.
“Where Ethan always hides the truth” meant the camcorder.
Detective Lena Ortiz understood immediately.
She was a calm woman with a navy blazer, watchful eyes, and no patience for Daniel’s polished explanations.
She placed an officer outside Claire’s room and drove Ethan and Margaret to the Cole house.
The front door stood open when they arrived.
Nothing looked disturbed downstairs.
Upstairs, however, the attic ladder hung from the ceiling.
Someone had already searched the room.
Boxes lay overturned, old photographs covered the floor, and the camcorder’s storage case was empty.
Ethan’s chest tightened.
“They found it.”
Ortiz examined the dust beneath the small attic window.
One set of shoe prints ended at the wall, but another trail led toward a wooden train set Ethan had built with his mother.
The locomotive’s battery compartment was missing.
Ethan remembered Claire asking him to make a second hiding place that even Daniel would dismiss as childish.
He removed the last freight car and opened its false bottom.
A tiny memory card rested beneath a strip of blue tape.
Margaret began to cry from relief.
Ortiz placed the card inside an evidence envelope before anyone could touch it.
“We view this at the station,” she said.
The house alarm suddenly announced movement near the back door.
A shadow crossed the kitchen.
Ortiz drew her service weapon and ordered Ethan and Margaret into the bathroom.
Heavy footsteps climbed the stairs.
Someone stopped outside the locked door and spoke in a familiar voice.
“Ethan, it’s Uncle Raymond.”
Raymond Mercer was Daniel’s older brother and the family company’s chief financial officer.
He had sat in the second row at the funeral and vanished before police arrived.
Margaret reached for her phone, but there was no signal.
Raymond tried the handle gently.
“Your mother asked me to bring you somewhere safe.”
Ethan looked at Ortiz.
She silently shook her head.
Raymond began forcing the door.
Ortiz moved to the side and waited.
The frame cracked, and Raymond pushed his shoulder through.
She pulled him inside, disarmed him of a stun device, and secured his wrists.
Raymond laughed even as he was arrested.
“That card won’t save her.”
Ortiz searched his coat and found a hospital access badge bearing another man’s photograph.
Ethan understood before anyone spoke.
Someone planned to enter St. Anne’s under a false identity.
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Claire was still in danger.
THE WOMAN BENEATH THE WHITE LID
