Harrison let out a dry, bitter laugh. “I didn't attack her. I cornered her. And I didn't lose my mind. I found my ledger.”
I sat on the edge of the heavy desk, the pieces of the last three days slowly beginning to shift in my head. “What are you talking about?”
“Your sister and her husband are bankrupt, Marcus,” Harrison said, his voice gaining strength as the water soothed his throat. “Vivian got involved in offshore gambling syndicates three years ago. She owes millions to people who don't send collection notices. Daniel tried to cover it up with bad real estate investments. When that failed, they started bleeding the family trust dry. They’ve been siphoning the estate’s liquidity into shell companies for six months.”
The missing ledger pages. The urgency to get me to sign the executor waivers.
“I caught them,” Harrison continued, his hands gripping the armrests of the chair. “Two months ago, I noticed the discrepancies. I hired a private forensic accountant. When I got the proof, I confronted Daniel in this very room. I told him I was going to the police in the morning.”
I felt a cold sickness spreading through my stomach. “So they drugged you.”
“Daniel slipped something into my scotch. When I woke up, I was chained to this chair,” Harrison said, gesturing to the cramped, dark walls of the compartment. “They couldn't kill me. If I died, the estate would trigger an automatic probate audit, and their theft would be exposed instantly. They needed me alive, but incapacitated, so Daniel could claim power of attorney over a mentally unfit man. They were starving me out, waiting for the drugs to break my will so I would sign the final transfer documents.”
I closed my eyes. The guilt I had been carrying for being an absent son suddenly twisted into a sharp, agonizing shame. I had walked around this house for three days, mourning a man who was suffering just inches away behind a layer of plaster and paint.
“The tapping,” I whispered, opening my eyes. “Leo heard you tapping.”
Harrison nodded slowly. “When the sedatives wore off, I kicked my heels against the floorboards. It was an SOS rhythm I learned in the Navy. I prayed someone would hear it.”
I had told my son it was just the pipes. I had almost let my father die because I didn't want to cause a scene.
“Before Daniel locked the door,” I said, trying to piece together the rest of the puzzle, “you were rambling. You kept talking about wolves. And blank pages.”
Harrison pushed himself up from the chair. He was unsteady on his feet, but he refused my help, stepping out of the dark alcove and into the library. “It wasn't a ramble, Marc. I saw Daniel looking at you. I knew he was going to hurt you. I was trying to tell you where the leverage was.”
He walked slowly toward the towering mahogany bookshelves on the far wall.
“Daniel’s primary shell company,” Harrison said, tracing his fingers along the leather spines of the books. “The one he used to wash the stolen funds. It’s registered in Delaware under the name Timberwolf Holdings. The wolves.”
He stopped in front of the third shelf, his eyes scanning the titles.
“And the blank pages?” I asked, stepping up behind him.
Harrison reached out and pulled a massive, leather-bound volume of an old English dictionary from the shelf. He handed it to me. It was surprisingly light.
I opened the cover. The inside of the book had been completely hollowed out, the pages glued together and cut into a neat square compartment. Resting inside the hidden space was a small, black USB drive.
“Every bank transfer. Every forged signature. Every piece of evidence the accountant found,” Harrison said, his voice hard. “Daniel tore the house apart looking for it. He didn't know I hid it in plain sight.”
I closed my hand around the drive. This was the reason Daniel hadn't just shot me in the head and dumped my body. He still needed to know where the evidence was, and he assumed my father might have told me.
“We have to get out of this room,” I said, slipping the drive into my pocket. “Daniel has Leo.”
“The doors are solid oak,” Harrison noted grimly. “And the grilles on the windows are anchored into the stone.”
I looked around the room, desperation sharpening my focus. My eyes landed on the massive stone fireplace on the north wall. The Thorne estate had been built with eccentric architectural details. I remembered playing hide-and-seek with Vivian when we were children.
“The ash cleanout,” I said, pointing to the hearth.
Behind the decorative iron grate of the fireplace was a cast-iron door used by the servants to sweep ash down into the basement. But this specific chimney was shared with the adjoining study. The cleanout shaft connected both fireplaces. It was a tight, filthy squeeze, but it was a way around the locked doors.
I grabbed the heavy brass fire poker from the stand and jammed it under the latch of the cast-iron door. With a sharp wrench that sent a spike of agony through my ribs, the rusted latch snapped. The small iron door swung open, revealing a pitch-black, soot-covered tunnel barely wide enough for a man’s shoulders.
“I’ll go through and unlock the library doors from the hall,” I told my father.