Chapter 93 - The Footprints on the Parquet
The beam of Vance’s tactical light carved a narrow tunnel through the immense gloom of the grand parlor. The air inside smelled of disuse and damp rot, mingling with the bitter trace of unburned kerosene. Furniture draped in yellowed cotton drop-cloths stood like mute ghosts along the oak-paneled walls. Everything was preserved in an eerie, suspended animation, just as it had been left before the troopers dragged Evelyn and Melissa out into the freezing mud.
In the center of the room, resting atop the black marble hearth, sat the music box.
Its lid was propped wide open, the tiny porcelain ballerina spinning in slow, dying rotations as the internal spring unwound its final notes. The delicate mechanism let out one last, metallic ping, and then fell silent. Beneath the velvet-lined base of the box lay a square of yellowed photographic paper.
Vance swept the corners of the room with his sidearm, the tactical light darting across the high cornices, the heavy damask drapes, and the yawning archway leading toward the back library. "Clear," he muttered under his breath, though his shoulders remained coiled like iron springs. "Don't touch anything on that mantel until I check for tripwires."
"Look at the floor, Vance," Clara whispered, pointing toward the polished parquet.
Leading from the shattered French doors directly across the floor were fresh, muddy boot prints. They were wide, heavy-soled impressions caked with the dark red silt that only existed along the old weir at the lower edge of the timber tract. But what chilled the marrow in my bones was where the prints led next. They didn’t retreat back out into the night; they trailed toward the portrait of Arthur Van Der Bilt above the hearth, then vanished toward the recessed paneling behind the grandfather clock.
I stepped closer, keeping behind Vance's broad frame, my eyes drawn inexorably to the photograph beneath the music box. Vance leaned down, using the tip of a pocketknife to lift the edge without contaminating the prints.
It was an old black-and-white print from the summer of 1971. Four children sat upon the stone steps of Oak Ridge: Evelyn as an adolescent, Melissa as a petulant toddler, Clara sitting quiet and composed in the corner—and a fourth child, a boy with Arthur’s sharp jaw and fierce, rebellious eyes. But unlike the copies that had been framed in the gallery hall, this boy's face had not been scratched away with a razor blade. Across his chest, written in faded fountain-pen ink that had dried decades ago, was a single line:
May you like
*The dead do not stay buried when the debt is called.*
"Julian," Clara whispered, her breath hitching in her throat as though the name itself carried a curse. "He didn't drown at Lock 11. God help us, Arthur lied about the river."
