Chapter 4 - THE FILE UNDER THE FLOOR
Police found Claire’s car abandoned beside Route 9.
The driver’s door was open.
Her purse was inside.
Her phone was smashed ten feet away.
Claire was gone.
Marcus denied knowing her.
Of course he did.
When a reporter asked whether he was connected to her disappearance, Marcus looked straight into the camera.
“I’m focused on my wife and unborn child.”
I watched from my hospital bed.
Dana muted the television.
“He’s building the narrative.”
“What narrative?”
“The loving husband.”
Marcus appeared again on screen.
“My wife has been under tremendous emotional stress.”
There it was.
Dana pointed at the television.
“That.”
“He’s going to use my mental health.”
“He’s going to try.”
The hospital discharged me the next morning.
I did not return to Marcus’s house.
I went home with my father.
Back to the same white colonial house I had stormed out of seven years earlier.
My bedroom was almost unchanged.
The blue walls.
The bookshelf.
The dent in the closet door from when I threw a shoe at it at sixteen.
I sat on the edge of the bed.
My father stood in the doorway.
“I kept thinking you’d come back.”
“I know.”
“I should have come for you.”
“I wouldn’t have gone.”
“I know that too.”
For the first time, neither of us tried to win.
That evening, Dana arrived.
She had news.
Claire had owned a storage unit.
Police had found the rental agreement in her glove compartment.
We drove there together.
Inside were twelve cardboard boxes.
Most contained ordinary office files.
Invoices.
Meeting notes.
Personnel records.
Then Dana opened a black file case.
Inside was a ledger.
Payments.
Dates.
Initials.
Marcus’s signature appeared on several authorization sheets.
One name appeared repeatedly.
W.P.
Warren Pike.
Another name made my father go completely still.
R.C.
“What?”
I asked.
My father didn’t answer.
Dana looked at him.
“You know those initials?”
“Yes.”
“Who?”
“Robert Crane.”
“Who is he?”
“Chief clerk for Franklin County civil administration.”
My pulse jumped.
The man responsible for assigning judges.
Dana’s eyes narrowed.
“The same office that assigned you to Nora’s case?”
“Yes.”
Silence.
Then my father said something that changed the entire shape of the case.
“I wasn’t supposed to receive Nora’s divorce petition.”
Dana stared at him.
“Why not?”
“Family cases are assigned through an automated rotation.”
“And?”
“I wasn’t on rotation this week.”
My skin went cold.
“So someone assigned you manually.”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
My father looked at me.
“Maybe Marcus wanted me on the case.”
I shook my head.
“That makes no sense.”
“It does if he knew who I was.”
I stood too quickly.
“You said he didn’t know.”
“I said he acted like he didn’t.”
Dana paced.
“If Marcus knew Elias was Nora’s father, then getting him assigned creates a conflict.”
“And a delay,” my father said.
“Exactly.”
A delay gave Marcus time.
Time to manipulate evidence.
Time to get a psychiatric evaluation.
Time to move money.
Time to disappear Claire.
Dana flipped through the ledger.
Then she stopped.
There was a handwritten note beside one payment.
BENNETT ASSIGNMENT CONFIRMED.
My father sat down.
Marcus hadn’t been surprised to see him.
The surprise had been an act.
May you like
He had put my father in that courtroom on purpose.
And whatever Marcus planned next depended on what Elias did.
