Chapter 6 - THE GHOST OF BLACKWOOD MANORThe hospital room suddenly felt entirely too small. The steady beep of the heart monitor seemed to slow down, echoing like a metronome counting off the seconds of a newly uncovered nightmare.
“Are you sure?” I asked, staring at the Zurich routing codes printed on the paper. “Evelyn told me—she swore on her dying husband’s grave—that Anna’s mother died of smoke inhalation in a private sanatorium fire when Anna was just three years old.”
“Lying to you was practically a hobby for that family, Daniel,” Detective Collins said, pulling a second document from her folio. It was an old, yellowed birth certificate accompanied by a sealed medical intake form from a private psychiatric facility in upstate Vermont, dated twenty-five years ago.
“We ran the biometric hash on the offshore account tied to the Zurich trust,” Collins continued. “The primary beneficiary authorized a massive withdrawal just forty-eight hours before Lily was poisoned at the luncheon. And the signature on the release form wasn't Evelyn Hart. It was Eleanor Blackwood.”
Lily looked up from her tablet, sensing the sudden tension in the room. “Dad? Is everything okay?”
“Everything is fine, sweetheart,” I forced a reassuring smile, though my hands were trembling as I folded the paper. “Just some boring adult paperwork. Why don't you finish your game while I talk to the detective outside?”
Lily nodded, blissfully unaware of the new abyss opening beneath our feet.
I stepped out into the quiet hospital corridor, pulling the door half-closed behind me. The harsh fluorescent lights hummed overhead as I turned to Collins.
“If Eleanor Blackwood is alive, where has she been for the last twenty-five years? And why did Evelyn lie about her death?”
“Because,” Collins said grimly, “Eleanor wasn't just a wealthy heiress. She was the sole legal owner of the original Blackwood steel empire—a fortune worth over fifty million dollars before Evelyn systematically dismantled it after putting her sister into a medically induced lockdown in Vermont.”
My jaw dropped. “Evelyn institutionalized her own sister?”
“Worse,” Collins whispered, glancing down both ends of the hallway to ensure no nurses were within earshot. “According to the facility records we just subpoenaed, Eleanor didn't die in a fire. Evelyn staged the fire to fake her death, forged a power of attorney, and redirected every penny of the Blackwood estate into a shell company controlled by her and Michael.”
“And Anna?” I asked, a cold dread pooling in my stomach. “Did Anna know?”
“That’s the most disturbing part of all,” Collins said, tapping the paper. “Two weeks before Anna died in that car crash, our digital forensics team found an encrypted email draft saved in Anna’s personal archives. She had hired a private investigator to look into her mother’s medical file in Vermont. She was hours away from discovering that her aunt Evelyn had stolen her grandmother’s entire estate.”
The pieces of the puzzle slammed together with terrifying clarity.
Anna didn't die in a random car accident because of a loose hydraulic line. She died because she was getting too close to uncovering the original sin upon which Evelyn’s entire empire of lies was built. And when Lily inherited what was left of the family trust, Evelyn and Michael realized history was repeating itself—that I, too, would eventually look too closely at the numbers.
“We need to go to Vermont,” I said, my voice dropping into a cold, hard resolution. “If Eleanor is still in that facility, we need to get her out before Evelyn’s lawyers try to scrub the remaining servers.”
“We’re already heading there,” Collins said, pulling out her car keys. “I have a federal warrant signed by a judge who doesn't play games with corporate kidnapping. But Daniel… there’s something you need to know about the facility itself. It’s not a normal hospital. It’s a private estate owned entirely by a shell corporation registered under Michael’s name.”
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“A private prison,” I muttered.
“Exactly,” Collins nodded. “And based on the encrypted ping we just intercepted from their mainframe ten minutes ago, someone at the estate just realized Evelyn’s been arrested. They’re preparing to move the primary witness before we can reach the gates.”
