Chapter 4: A Rented Room on Maple Street
The lock on the front door of apartment 4B clicked into place with a dry, heavy sound that seemed to echo off the peeling wallpaper of the hallway. I dropped my canvas tote bag onto the small laminate kitchen table, the contents shifting with a dull thud against the wood. Inside were the three cassette tapes I had managed to salvage from the car trunk five years ago, wrapped in an old wool sweater, alongside a legal pad with thirty pages of cramped, handwritten dates, bank routing numbers, and names of shell corporations controlled by Victoria and her inner circle.
Outside, the rain had picked up, drumming a steady, relentless beat against the single-pane window that looked out onto Maple Street. It was a far cry from the glittering glass facades of downtown or the polished marble floors of the Grand Meridian. Here, the air smelled of damp carpet and radiator steam, and the streetlights flickered through a haze of exhaust fumes from passing delivery trucks.
I walked over to the small sink, turned the handle until a rusty hiss gave way to a thin stream of cold water, and splashed my face. When I looked up into the cracked bathroom mirror, the woman staring back at me didn't look like a ghost anymore. She looked tired, bruised by exhaustion, but real. My fingers instinctively reached for the collar of my shirt, brushing against the cold metal of the diamond ring pendant hanging on its gold chain. It was the only tangible proof I had left of a life before the accident—a life where I sang on stage instead of hiding behind a mop bucket.
My phone, a burner prepaid model I had bought at a gas station off Interstate 94 three weeks ago, buzzed against the table. I walked back into the living room, picking it up with fingers that felt slightly stiff.
The screen displayed an unknown number with a local area code. I let it ring once, twice, listening to the small electronic chirp cut through the drone of the traffic outside. On the third ring, I pressed accept and brought the phone to my ear.
"Clara," Alexander’s voice came through the speaker, low and stripped of the polished, public cadence he used for boardrooms and charity galas. "The security footage from the east wing has been wiped. Not by me. By corporate compliance. They're trying to classify the whole incident as a private staff dispute."
"Let them try," I said, leaning my hip against the edge of the kitchen table and looking down at the legal pad. "Corporate compliance doesn't change the fact that Victoria spent four hundred thousand dollars of foundation money on a phantom Cayman account five years ago, right around the time my signature showed up on a quitclaim deed I never signed."
There was a long pause on the other end of the line. I could hear the faint sound of a car engine idling, perhaps parked down the street from my building, though I knew he wouldn't dare come up here tonight. Not yet. The risk to his own standing was too high, and the web of lawyers watching his every move was too tangled.
"Where did you get those numbers?" Alexander asked, his voice dropping an octave.
"From the safe in your study, Alex," I said softly, my eyes fixed on the rain sliding down the glass. "The one you thought only you and your father had the combination to. Victoria had a duplicate key made the week before the wedding. I found it in her coat pocket when she dropped it on our anniversary. You were too busy accepting a humanitarian award to notice."
"Clara, listen to me," he said, urgency finally breaking through his controlled exterior. "If you take those files to a public prosecutor without a proper security buffer, Victoria’s people will intercept them before they hit the docket. They still control the district judge's office through the PAC funding."
"Then we don't go to a district judge," I replied, reaching down to pick up a red pen from the table. "We go to Marcus Vance. My uncle. He’s retired from the federal circuit court in Chicago, and he’s spent the last five years wondering why his niece’s body was never actually identified by anyone in our family."
Alexander went silent. I could hear him breathing on the other end, a slow, heavy sound that matched the rhythm of the storm outside.
"I'll send a car," he said after a moment. "A clean one. Not mine."
May you like
"No, Alex," I said, my thumb tracing the edge of the gold chain around my neck. "I’ve spent five years running in someone else's cars. Tomorrow morning, I'm taking the bus. Meet me at the diner on 5th and Adams at eight o'clock. If you're late, I leave without you."
I hung up before he could answer, cutting the connection with a sharp tap of my thumb. The room went quiet again, save for the rain. I pulled out a clean sheet of paper, uncapped my pen, and began drafting the formal affidavit for my uncle—starting with the exact date Victoria handed me a cup of tea that tasted faintly of bitter almonds, just hours before the brakes on my car failed on the winding road down to the lake.
