Chapter 7 - The Stranger at the Pier
The stranger stepped out of the gloomy warehouse interior, his breath pluming white in the damp air. He looked down at Julian groaning in the gravel, then raised his eyes to meet Mark’s stunned, frantic gaze. The gold ring dangling from the silver chain around his neck caught the amber flash of the van's hazard lights.
"You're wasting your energy on him, Hayes," the stranger said, his voice deep, raspy, and unnervingly calm. "She's not here. She was never in that ambulance."
Mark took a step back, his fists still raised defensively. "Who the hell are you? Where is my wife?"
The man let out a dry, humorless chuckle. "Wife? That’s what she’s calling herself now? Ten years ago, she went by Sarah Vance, and she left my brother bleeding out on a kitchen floor in Ohio with three million dollars in bearer bonds stuffed inside a baby stroller."
Mark froze, the words hitting him like physical blows. "That's... that's insane. Clara doesn't have a brother. She told me her family died in a fire."
"Of course she told you that," Julian rasped, struggling to his feet while wiping a smear of blood from his lip. He picked up his briefcase, his composure miraculously restored. "It’s the same story she told me before she stole my firm's pension fund and left me to take the fall with the federal prosecutors."
Mark looked back and forth between them, his heart hammering against his ribs. "You're lying. Both of you. Elena said... Elena helped her—"
"Elena is my wife," Julian interrupted, stepping closer with a cold, piercing stare. "And she’s the only reason we finally tracked Sarah down to your little suburban paradise. We didn't assault her today, Mark. We staged that fall because it was the only way to get her out of the house long enough for us to search the attic."
Mark’s breath caught in his throat. The attic. Clara’s fierce warnings. The locked hatch he had never opened.
"What's in the attic?" Mark whispered, the horror dawning on him with suffocating weight.
The stranger stepped forward, pulling a heavy manila folder from inside his jacket and tossing it onto the hood of Mark’s sedan.
"Open it," the stranger said quietly. "It’s got every alias she’s used for the last fifteen years. And the birth certificate of the real Clara Hayes—the girl your 'wife' buried in the woods behind her childhood home back in Illinois."
May you like
Mark's hands shook violently as he reached out and flicked open the clasp of the manila folder on the hood of the car. Inside, resting on top of a stack of old police reports and bank transcripts, was a photograph of a woman who looked exactly like Clara—staring up at him with cold, dead eyes.
---
