Chapter 21 - THE ARCHITECT'S SISTER
Madeline Rowan did not knock on the front door. She walked straight to the side veranda, took a key from her pocket, and unlocked the heavy service door as if she had used it a thousand times before.
Evan and Grace met her in the stone corridor of the pantry.
Madeline stopped dead when the flashlight caught her face. She was in her early fifties, elegant, with gray streaks through her dark hair and eyes that carried the same sharp, observant intelligence that Evan recognized in Grace’s expression.
"You look just like your mother, Grace," Madeline said, her voice calm despite the flashlight shining directly into her face. "And you, Evan... you have your grandfather’s height, but your mother’s temper."
"Who are you?" Evan asked, his voice low and dangerous, the crowbar still gripped in his right hand.
"I am Thomas Miller's younger sister," Madeline replied simply. "And I am the woman who helped Margaret Whitaker take Grace out of this house thirty-two years ago."
Grace took half a step forward, her breath catching. "Aunt Madeline?"
"Thomas changed his name to Miller after we fled," Madeline said, pulling a leather wallet from her coat and producing a weathered family registry. "Our family name was Rowan. Margaret entrusted me with the duplicates of the house blueprints. She knew that if Charles ever tried to replace her or eliminate her children, the only way to stop him would be to use the house against him."
"Where is Vanessa?" Evan demanded. "How does Vanessa fit into this?"
Madeline’s eyes hardened. "Vanessa is Gregory Shaw’s daughter."
Evan felt as though the floor had vanished entirely beneath him. "What?"
"Gregory Shaw didn't just cover up Caroline’s death," Madeline explained rapidly, stepping further into the hallway and closing the heavy door behind her. "Shaw was Charles’s fixer for forty years. When Shaw died six months ago, he left Vanessa nothing except a safe deposit box containing audio tapes of every crime Charles Whitaker ever commissioned. Vanessa didn't come here to marry you, Evan. She came here to blackmail Charles using the evidence her father left behind."
"Then who is in the walls?" Grace asked, her voice trembling. "We heard a voice on the vent. Vanessa was talking to someone inside the chase."
Madeline looked at Grace, then at Evan. A look of deep, ancient horror settled across her features.
"You don't know?" Madeline whispered.
"Know what?" Evan shouted.
"Charles didn't act alone thirty years ago," Madeline said. "There wasn't just one doctor present when you and Grace were born. There was a caretaker. A woman who lived on this property before Margaret ever arrived."
May you like
"Who?"
"Charles’s older sister," Madeline said. "Agnes Whitaker. The woman the county declared dead in the psychiatric ward in 1982. She never left Blackwood Manor. She has lived in Room C for forty years."
