Chapter 2 - THE GIRL IN THE DOCKSIDE PHOTOGRAPH
By morning, Leo had placed guards at every entrance.
Not to keep Norah inside.
To keep Arthur and Declan out.
Elena brought breakfast, but Norah barely touched it. The name Lena had opened something terrible in Leo’s expression, something more painful than anger.
Leo placed the old photograph on the table between them.
The blonde woman was young. Maybe nineteen. She stood near a shipping container with her arms folded tightly across herself.
“That’s her,” Leo said. “My sister disappeared eighteen years ago.”
Norah looked at the picture again.
“She was in my father’s garage.”
“She was in a ledger your father kept,” Leo said. “That means Arthur knew more than he admitted.”
Norah remembered the night she had seen the red book. Declan had come home drunk and furious. Arthur had screamed at him for losing money to a man named Matteo Varga.
Then Declan had said, “She saw the box.”
Arthur had slapped him.
“She doesn’t know what she saw,” he had replied.
But Norah had seen enough.
Names.
Port schedules.
Photographs.
Payments marked with initials.
And a page torn from the ledger, hidden by Arthur inside the wall behind the kitchen stove.
“I know where it is,” Norah said.
Leo looked at her sharply.
“Where?”
“My old house.”
A silence followed.
Leo did not say no.
He did not say it was too dangerous.
Instead, he asked, “Do you want to go?”
Norah hated the question because it made her feel like a person again.
“Yes,” she said.
That evening, they returned to Arthur’s house with Leo’s security team and a court-authorized investigator. Arthur and Declan had already fled, but the house remained exactly as Norah remembered it.
The broken kitchen chair.
The stained linoleum.
The narrow hallway where she had learned to walk without making sound.
Behind the stove, Norah found the loose panel.
Inside was the torn ledger page.
It contained a date, a dock number, and a list of names.
Arthur Vale.
Declan Vale.
Matteo Varga.
And one final name that made Leo step back.
Leo Russo.
Below it was a note.
RUSSO’S SISTER DID NOT DIE. SHE WAS MOVED.
Leo’s face drained of color.
Then Norah heard a sound from upstairs.
A floorboard creaking.
May you like
Declan had come back.
And he was holding a gun.
