Chapter 7 - The Woman Behind the Glass
Claire counted changes in the light because the room had no clock. At dawn the lake turned silver. Around midday it became a flat sheet of blue-gray steel. By evening the water darkened and the silhouettes of bare trees merged with the shore. She could hear a distant freight train twice a day. She marked its passing on the back of a paper medicine cup with a pen she had stolen from the desk outside her room.
The room was warmer than the smoke-filled corridor where she'd lost her ring, but that did not make it a refuge. Its door locked from the hall. Her phone had been taken, her shoes replaced with slippers, and every answer about when she could leave ended with the same sentence: the doctor would decide.
No doctor ever came.
A young attendant named Leah delivered meals and checked a clipboard. Leah couldn't have been more than twenty-two. She looked uncomfortable whenever Claire asked to make a call, but she refused to answer questions about the building.
On the third morning, Claire said, “Do you know my name?”
“Cara Bell.”
“That's the name they told you.”
Leah folded the blanket at the foot of the bed. “I shouldn't talk about this.”
“I'm Claire Blackwood. My husband is looking for me, and my sister thinks I may be dead. You don't have to believe me. Just call Detective Juliette Park.”
Leah's hand paused against the blanket. “They told us the police were involved already.”
“Then they shouldn't mind you checking.”
The attendant left without answering. But at lunch she returned with a small bottle of water and whispered, “There's a guest register at the reception desk. A man signed in last night under the name Reed.”
“Malcolm Reed?”
Leah nodded once. “He argued with Mr. Sloane. He said they couldn't keep moving you.”
Claire felt a sudden, fierce clarity. If the men holding her were arguing, they were afraid of something. Afraid of a search, perhaps. Afraid of one another. Fear created mistakes.
She remembered how Kira had smuggled her a phone at Oak Ridge. She remembered the two taps and the brief sound of Ethan trying to answer. Her feelings about Ethan remained painfully divided. He had betrayed their marriage, avoided her warnings, and saved Vanessa while Claire found herself in a passage no one should have been able to lock. Yet if he was asking questions now, people might be forced to show what they had hidden.
She did not mistake that possibility for forgiveness.
In the afternoon, Victor Sloane visited. He wore a camel coat and carried a folder with her name printed on its label. He sat in a chair beside the window as though visiting a neighbor recovering from surgery.
“Mrs. Blackwood,” he said. “I am sorry this has been so unpleasant.”
“Then open the door.”
“You have information capable of harming innocent investors.”
“Did you arrange the fire?”
He smiled at the directness of the question. “It's best not to imagine yourself at the center of every event.”
“People could have died.”
“People make regrettable choices every day.”
Claire watched his hands. They were clean, manicured, held carefully above his trousers. She noticed his right thumb trembled whenever he mentioned the accounts. “The foundation money is gone,” she said. “But the transfers aren't. Bank records don't disappear because you burn a ballroom.”
For the first time Victor stopped smiling.
“You have a husband with considerable influence,” he said. “Perhaps use that influence to stop this before more people get hurt.”
“Ethan doesn't get to decide what I say.”
“He always has.”
That hurt because it touched something true. Claire forced herself to meet Victor's eyes. “He doesn't anymore.”
After he left, Leah returned carrying fresh towels. She deliberately dropped a folded visitor badge onto the bed. On the back, written in shaky pencil, were the words STORAGE HALL, 5 P.M. SERVICE DOOR. Claire looked up. Leah gave her the smallest nod.
They had little time to plan. A maintenance cart usually sat in the corridor during evening cleaning, and a supply door opened into the service passage beside the kitchen. Leah would leave the door unlatched. Claire would wear a spare maintenance jacket, keep her head down, and walk as though she had permission to be there. It was a fragile plan, dependent on ordinary people failing to notice another ordinary person.
At five ten Claire stepped into the corridor. The door behind her clicked shut. She felt every heartbeat in her throat. She passed a cleaning closet, a wall of framed hotel photographs, and a faded sign pointing toward the old ballroom. This lakeside hotel had once been grand. Now its elegance seemed like a disguise for rot.
At the supply door, Leah waited with a key. Her face was pale.
“There's a gate,” she whispered. “It opens onto the beach road. I left my bike outside.”
“Come with me.”
“I have a younger brother. They know where he lives.”
Claire squeezed her hand. “Give me his first name. I'll tell the police to protect him.”
“Daniel.”
A man's voice echoed from the reception corridor. Leah pushed the door open and hurried away. Claire stepped through, crossed a narrow kitchen, and found the service gate standing beneath a burnt-out security light. Beyond it, the lake wind cut through her borrowed jacket.
She was thirty yards down the beach road when she heard tires on gravel. Headlights spread across the trees. She ducked behind a low stone wall and waited. The vehicle stopped near the gate. Two men got out. She heard one ask whether the woman had gone to the shore.
Claire crawled through wet leaves until she reached the bike. Its chain was rusted, its tires soft. It was still a miracle.
She rode into the dark, following the sound of traffic. Twice she nearly fell. At the junction with the county highway, she abandoned the bike and stumbled toward the bright windows of an all-night gas station. The cashier stared at her soaked shoes, the maintenance jacket, and the scratches across her hands.
“Can I use your phone?” she asked.
He reached for the counter phone without a word.
Claire dialed the emergency number. She gave her name, the hotel's location, and the fact that people were following her. Then she asked the operator to connect her with Detective Park.
“Do not call my husband first,” she said. “I need the police to reach me before the people who work for him.”
She had just finished describing Leah when the cashier looked toward the road. A dark sedan had pulled into the lot. Two men stepped out, their coats gleaming in the rain.
The cashier quietly pressed the lock button beneath his counter.
Claire backed away from the window.
May you like
And for the second time in three days, she watched a door become the difference between a life she could choose and one someone else intended for her.
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