PART 14 – Room Fourteen

They returned to the courthouse shortly before closing time. Thomas insisted that they use the public entrance, even though the brass key suggested a room somewhere beyond the archives. Clara was tired of being told what she could and couldn't see, but she followed him through the corridor anyway.

The archives clerk had gone home. A security guard sat at a desk near the elevators, watching a small television with the sound turned low. Thomas approached him and asked whether the records department had an old correspondence room.

“Not on this floor,” the guard replied. “Try the basement.”

Clara noticed that he had stopped watching the television.

“Is there a Room Fourteen down there?” she asked.

The guard looked at her. “Why would you need that?”

Thomas stepped forward before she could answer. “We're following a reference in an old property register.”

The guard's expression changed. He reached for the telephone, then stopped himself.

“Basement access closes in ten minutes,” he said. “If you need records, come back tomorrow.”

He returned to his television, but his hand remained beside the phone.

Clara and Thomas went downstairs.

The basement corridor was lit by fluorescent tubes that flickered whenever the ventilation system started. Metal doors lined one side, each marked with a number. The first dozen were storage rooms containing broken furniture, obsolete equipment, and boxes of tax documents.

At the end of the corridor stood a door with no number.

Clara tried the brass key. It turned halfway before catching.

“Don't force it,” Thomas whispered.

She eased the key backward, then pushed the door gently. The lock released with a click.

Inside, a single desk stood beneath a narrow window. Filing cabinets covered the walls. A thick layer of dust lay across the desk, except for a rectangular patch where something had recently been removed.

Someone had been here.

Clara opened the first cabinet. Its drawers contained correspondence from decades earlier, organized by surname rather than date. She found Whitmore after several minutes and pulled out a folder tied with string.

The first document was a letter from her grandfather to a woman named Lydia Shaw.

You were promised that the property would be transferred once the arrangements were complete. I have fulfilled my part. The remaining difficulty concerns Evelyn.

Clara read the sentence twice.

“Who was Lydia Shaw?” she asked.

Thomas shook his head. “The name doesn't mean anything to me.”

The folder contained several more letters. Some concerned payments to an account Clara didn't recognize. Others discussed a family meeting that had apparently taken place shortly before Evelyn vanished.

One letter, written in her grandfather's sharp handwriting, contained a sentence that made Clara's stomach tighten.

If Evelyn tells the girl what happened, everything we have protected will be destroyed.

“The girl,” Clara said. “Who was the girl?”

Thomas was studying another document. He didn't respond.

She snatched it from his hand.

It was a birth registration, partially obscured by a faded carbon copy. The child's name had been crossed out, but the mother's name was still visible.

Evelyn Whitmore.

The father was listed as unknown.

Clara sat down.

Her family had always claimed Evelyn had no children. Her aunt had supposedly left town after a disagreement with Nathaniel and never returned. The birth registration suggested she had given birth before disappearing.

But the child's name had been deliberately erased.

Clara continued searching. Beneath the birth registration lay a photograph of a young woman standing beside a stone wall. The woman was holding a little girl by the hand. On the reverse, someone had written a date and a location: October 12, 1989 — Bellweather Station.

Clara recognized the woman immediately from the photographs her mother had kept in a locked drawer.

Evelyn.

The little girl beside her wore a red coat and had a small crescent-shaped mark near her left eyebrow.

Clara touched her own eyebrow.

She had the same mark.

“No,” she whispered.

Thomas sat across from her. “Clara, listen to me.”

“Is this me?”

“I don't know.”

“You knew about this room. You knew my mother had a key. How much did you know?”

“Only that she believed somebody had changed the family records. She never showed me the photograph.”

Clara looked again at the little girl. The date placed the photograph several years before Clara's birth certificate said she had been born.

If the child was her, then either the date was wrong or the family had lied about her age.

A sound came from the corridor.

Thomas immediately closed the folder.

Footsteps approached the door, paused, then moved away.

Clara slipped the photograph into her coat pocket. She gathered the remaining documents and tied the folder shut.

“We need copies of everything,” she said.

“We don't have time.”

“Then we come back.”

Thomas shook his head. “If someone has been here recently, we can't assume this room will still exist tomorrow.”

He pulled a small notebook from his jacket and began writing down the document numbers. Clara photographed the letters with her phone, capturing every page before the basement lights went dark for a moment.

When they returned to the corridor, the security guard was gone.

On the desk where he had been sitting lay a folded piece of paper.

Clara opened it.

Stop looking for Evelyn. The person you're trying to find has been standing beside you for years.

Beneath the message was a name.

Lydia Shaw.

Clara stared at Thomas.

“You said you didn't know her.”

“I told you I didn't recognize the name.”

“That isn't what I asked.”

He looked away.

Clara understood then that the secrets surrounding her family were not confined to the dead. Some of them were still alive, and some had been helping her search while carefully deciding which truths she was allowed to discover.

She placed the note inside the folder.

“Tomorrow,” she said, “we find Lydia Shaw.”

Thomas nodded, but his expression told her he already knew where Lydia lived.

Click here to continue reading: PART 15: The Woman Who Kept the Letters