I want the truth that Tobias Hawthorne hid from me all these years. I want to know what happened to my son.
Hawthorne House was full of dark places: hidden compartments, secret passages, buried tunnels. Maybe all Toby had ever found was the seal. Or maybe he found human remains. That thought was insidious because some part of me had suspected, deep down, that that was what we were looking for, before Vincent Blake had ever told me as much.
His son had come here. He’d targeted a child under Tobias Hawthorne’s protection. In his home.
Where would a man like Tobias Hawthorne hide a body?
Oren had disposed of Sheffield Grayson’s body—how, I wasn’t sure. But Vincent Blake’s son had disappeared long before Oren had come to work for the old man. Back then, the Hawthorne fortune was new and considerably smaller. Tobias Hawthorne probably hadn’t even had security.
Back then, Hawthorne House was just another mansion.
Tobias Hawthorne added onto it every year. That thought wound its way through my mind; my heart pumped it through my veins.
And suddenly, I knew where to start.
I pulled out the blueprints that Mr. Laughlin had given me. Each one detailed an addition that Tobias Hawthorne had made to Hawthorne House over the decades since it was built. The garage. The spa. The movie theater. The bowling alley. I unrolled sheet after sheet, plan after plan. The rock-climbing wall. The tennis court. I found plans for a gazebo, an outdoor kitchen, a greenhouse, and so much more.
Think, I told myself. There were layers of purpose in everything Tobias Hawthorne had ever done—everything he’d built. I thought about the compartment at the bottom of the swimming pool, about the secret passages in the House, the tunnels beneath the estate, all of it.
There were a thousand places that Tobias Hawthorne could have hidden his darkest secret. If I came at this randomly, I’d get nowhere. I had to be logical. Systematic.
Lay the plans out in chronological order, I thought.
Only a handful of blueprints were marked with years, but each set showed how the proposed addition would be integrated with the House or surrounding property. I needed to find the earliest plan—the one in which the House was the smallest, the simplest—and work forward from there.
I went through page after page until I found it: the original Hawthorne House. Slowly, painstakingly, I put the rest of the blueprints in order. By dawn, I’d made it halfway through, but that was enough. Based on the few sets that had dates on them, I could calculate years for the rest.
I’d been focused on the wrong question in Toby’s wing. Not where Tobias Hawthorne would have hidden a body—but when? I knew the year that Toby had been born, but not the month. That let me narrow it down to two sets of plans.
The year before Toby’s birth, Tobias Hawthorne had erected the greenhouse.
The year of Toby’s birth had been the chapel.
I thought about Jameson saying that his grandfather had built the chapel for Nan to yell at God—and then I thought about Nan’s response. The old coot threatened to build me a mausoleum instead.
What if that hadn’t been a threat? What if Tobias Hawthorne had just decided it was too obvious?
Where would a man like Tobias Hawthorne hide a body?
CHAPTER 66
Stepping through the stone arches of the chapel, I scanned the room: the delicately carved pews, the elaborate stained-glass windows, an altar made of pure white marble. This early in the day, light streamed in from the east, bathing the room in color from the stained glass. I studied each panel, looking for something.
A clue.
Nothing. I went through the pews. There were only six of them. The woodwork was captivating, but if it held any secrets—hidden compartments, a button, instructions—I couldn’t find them.
That left me with the altar. It came up to my chest and was a little over six feet long and maybe three feet deep. On the top of the altar, there was a candelabra; a gleaming, golden Bible; and a silver cross. I carefully examined each one, and then I knelt to look at the script carved into the front of the altar.
A quote. I ran my fingers over the inscription and read it out loud. “So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen, since what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal.”
That sounded biblical. It was too early to call Max, so I typed the quote into the phone and it gave me a Bible verse: 2 Corinthians 4:18.
I thought about Blake using a different Bible verse as a combination on a lock. How many of his games had a young Tobias Hawthorne played?
“Fix our eyes not on what is seen,” I said out loud, “but on what is unseen.” I stared at the altar. What is unseen?
Kneeling in front of the altar, I ran my fingers along it: up and down, left and right, top to bottom. I made my way around to the back, where I found a slight gap between the marble and the floor. I bent to look, but I couldn’t see anything, so I slid my fingers into the gap.
Almost immediately, I felt a series of raised circles. My first instinct was to push one, but I didn’t want to be rash, so I kept exploring until I had a full count. There were three rows of raised circles, with six in each row.
Eighteen, total. 2 Corinthians 4:18, I thought. Did that mean that I needed to press four of the eighteen raised circles? And if so, which four?
Frustrated, I stood. With Tobias Hawthorne, nothing was ever easy. I walked around the altar again, taking in its size. The billionaire had wanted to build a mausoleum, but he hadn’t. He’d built this chapel, and I couldn’t help but notice that if this giant slab of marble was hollow, there would be room for a body inside.
I can do this. I stared at the verse inscribed on what I suspected was Will Blake’s tomb. “So we fix our eyes not on what is seen,” I read out loud again, “but on what is unseen, since what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal.”
Unseen.
What did it mean to fix your eyes on something that was unseen? I had no way of looking at the raised circles. I couldn’t see them. I’d had to feel them. With my fingers, I thought, and suddenly, just like that, I knew what this inscription meant—not in a biblical sense, but to Tobias Hawthorne.
I knew exactly how I was supposed to see what was unseen.
I took out my phone, and I looked up how numbers were written in Braille. Four. One. Eight.
Crouching back down behind the altar, I slid my fingers under the marble and pressed only the raised circles indicated. Four. One. Eight.
I heard a creak, and my eyes darted to the top of the altar. A slab of marble had separated from the rest. Unlocked.
I moved the candelabra, the Bible, and the cross to the floor. The slab that had released was maybe two inches thick and too heavy for me to move myself.
I looked to Oren, who was standing guard as always. “I need your help,” I told him.
He stared at me, long and hard, then cursed under his breath and came to help me. We slid the marble slab, and it didn’t take much movement to realize that my instincts had been right. The inside of the altar had been hollowed out. There was a space big enough for a body.
But there were no remains. Instead, I found a shroud, the kind that might have once draped a skeleton or a corpse. By the time the chapel and this altar were finished, would there have been anything left but bones? I didn’t smell death. Stretching to reach in and move the shroud, I saw that the marble inside this makeshift crypt had been defaced with familiar handwriting.