Chapter 3 - The Library Archives and the Medical FilesFor the next forty-eight hours, I played a terrifying game of cat and mouse inside the labyrinthine halls of Rourke House. To the rest of the domestic staff—including Miss Delaney, the rigid head housekeeper who watched my every move—I was just the quiet girl scrubbing baseboards and laundering bedsheets. But under the surface, I was hunting for evidence.
The breakthrough came late Wednesday night.
While the estate was buried in silence, I used a set of master skeleton keys I had quietly liberated from Miss Delaney’s pantry to slip into Maxwell’s private study on the second floor. The room smelled of old leather, cigar smoke, and polished mahogany.
I headed straight for the heavy oak filing cabinets tucked behind a rolling bookcase.
It took me twenty minutes of frantic searching through corporate deeds, shipping manifests, and tax audits before I found what I was looking for: a locked steel briefcase bearing a medical insignia. Using a hairpin I’d straightened out with a pair of pliers, I popped the mechanical lock in three clicks.
Inside were Dr. Hayes’s confidential neurological evaluations of Maxwell Rourke.
I flipped open the manila folder. The early reports from right after the port accident showed normal trauma recovery—swelling reducing, nerve pathways intact, prognosis for full mobility within six months.
Then came the turning point.
Two years ago, Dr. Hayes’s notes abruptly shifted tone. ‘Patient exhibits increasing motor fatigue. Administering enhanced compound B-7 to manage spasticity.’
Compound B-7. I knew that name from my nursing days—an obscure, synthetic neurotoxin derived from Amazonian dart frogs, capable of blocking neuromuscular transmission without leaving detectable traces in routine autopsies unless specifically tested for heavy-metal and alkaloid binding.
It was a slow, agonizing chemical imprisonment.
“Looking for bedtime reading, Martha?”
A voice cut through the darkness of the study so sharply I dropped the file folder, scattering papers across the Persian rug.
I spun around.
Julian Vance stood in the doorway, leaning casually against the doorframe. He wore a dark silk bathrobe over his pajamas, a silver fountain pen held loosely between his fingers. His lips were curved into that familiar, oily smile, but his eyes were cold and dead as winter ice.
“Mr. Vance,” I stammered, my heart leaping into my throat. I quickly bent down to scoop up the papers. “I… I was looking for the extra linen inventory logs. Miss Delaney told me they were kept in this cabinet.”
Julian pushed off the doorframe and walked slowly toward me, his leather slippers making no sound on the thick carpet. He stopped just two feet away, looking down at the medical file in my hand before raising his gaze to my face.
“Miss Delaney keeps linen logs in the basement pantry, Martha. Not in my private corporate archives,” Julian said softly, his voice dripping with false pleasantry. “And certainly not inside locked medical portfolios belonging to Mr. Rourke.”
I gripped the edge of the desk behind me, my mind racing for an escape route. “I made a mistake. I’ll leave right now—”
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“I’m afraid you know too much for a simple housekeeping error,” Julian interrupted, his smile vanishing in an instant. He reached into the pocket of his silk robe, and the dull, menacing glint of a suppressed automatic pistol caught the amber glow of the desk lamp. “It’s a tragedy how clumsy maids can be in large, drafty estates like this. Slips on the stairs are so terribly common.”
Before Julian could raise the weapon, the study door behind him burst wide open with a deafening crash.
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