Chapter 2 - The Housekeeper’s SecretThirty minutes later, the grand library of the Caldwell mansion was dead silent except for the rhythmic ticking of the antique grandfather clock in the corner.
I sat behind my massive mahogany desk, the same desk from which I controlled thirty commercial properties across Illinois and Indiana. Rebecca sat nervously on the edge of a leather armchair across from me, her hands tightly clenched in her lap. Sammy had been given a coloring book and a box of crayons in the adjacent sunroom, though I could see his small silhouette occasionally peeking through the glass French doors.
"Start talking, Rebecca," I said, my voice deadpan, my eyes locked onto hers. "And make it good. Because if I find out you're an investigative journalist, a blackmailer, or a plant from one of my corporate competitors, I won't just fire you. I'll make sure you never work another day in this city."
Rebecca swallowed hard, wiping a tear from her cheek with the back of her thumb. She looked smaller now, stripped of the quiet dignity she usually wore while managing my household.
"I’m not a reporter, Mr. Caldwell," she whispered, her voice shaking. "I swear on my son’s life. I didn't even know who Ethan Caldwell was when I saw your job posting online three months ago. I just needed a roof over our heads and a safe place for Sammy to grow up."
"Then explain how your son spoke of Caleb Vance," I snapped, leaning forward in my wheelchair, my temper flaring. "Explain how a child who wasn't even born when Caleb died knows about a fire on Lake Shore Drive in November 2006!"
"I don't know!" Rebecca cried out softly, her voice breaking. "I swear to you, Mr. Caldwell, I've never mentioned Caleb Vance to him. I didn't even know that name until you said it just now!"
"People don't just dream up cold-case arson victims, Rebecca!"
"Sammy isn't just dreaming!" Rebecca burst out, her defenses finally shattering as she looked toward the sunroom to make sure her son couldn't hear. "He’s... he’s always been different, Mr. Caldwell. Ever since he was two years old. He sees things. He hears things that aren't there. He talks to people in empty rooms. The doctors called it an overactive imagination, child psychosis, night terrors... but it's not. He knows things he shouldn't know. He has since before he could walk."
I stared at her, my analytical mind instantly rejecting the supernatural explanation. "You're telling me your son is a clairvoyant?"
"I'm telling you he hears the dead," Rebecca whispered, leaning forward, her eyes wide with a mixture of terror and exhaustion. "Two years ago, when my father passed away in a hospital bed in Peoria, Sammy walked into the room three hours later and repeated a secret my father had only ever told me when I was ten years old—something about a silver locket buried under the back porch. We went back and dug it up, Mr. Caldwell. It was right there."
A cold sweat broke out across the back of my neck. I wanted to laugh. I wanted to call security, throw them both out onto the street, and pretend this entire morning was a hallucination brought on by the heavy painkillers I had been taking for my spine injury.
But I couldn't un-hear Caleb's name. I couldn't un-hear a six-year-old child describing a coat left behind in a burning car twenty years ago—a detail I had never told a single soul, not even the police, because I had been too terrified of what it implied about my cowardice.
"If your son hears the dead," I said slowly, every word tasting like ash in my mouth, "did he ask what else Caleb had to say?"
Rebecca shook her head, tears streaming freely down her cheeks now. "He didn't say anything else about Caleb. But before he walked out to your chair this morning... Sammy woke up screaming. He said the man with the sad eyes wouldn't leave his bedroom door. He said Caleb was standing there pointing at you, saying that the accident that broke your legs wasn't an accident at all."
The grandfather clock in the corner seemed to tick louder.
The accident wasn't an accident.
My car crash six months ago—the one that crushed my lumbar vertebrae, severed my spinal cord, and left me permanently trapped in this carbon-fiber chair—had happened on a deserted stretch of I-90 late at night. The official police report called it a single-vehicle collision caused by black ice and excessive speed.
May you like
I had been driving my custom Porsche Panamera. I had been sober. I had known that stretch of road like the back of my hand.
And suddenly, the dark, suffocating realization settled over me: if Caleb Vance had been haunting my footsteps for twenty years, waiting for the right moment to balance the scales... then someone, or something, had pushed me off that icy interstate.
Related Stories
