Chapter 4 - The Replica
The air inside the maintenance crawlway smelled of decades-old mortar, coal dust, and oxidized iron. Grace held her breath, listening through the thin lath and plaster to the heavy footsteps in the kitchen below.
""She’s in the service conduits,"" Donald's muffled voice barked into his tactical radio. ""Cut the power to the north wing. Bring the thermal scanner from the SUV.""
Grace jammed Arthur's phone into her apron pocket and began climbing the vertical iron rungs set into the chimney-like shaft. Her hands slipped on grime, but adrenaline gave her artificial strength. Her mind was reeling from the voice note. The real Victoria died in Zurich three years ago.
It sounded impossible. The woman downstairs possessed Victoria Whitfield's aristocratic jawline, her distinctive raspy laugh, her signature scent of bergamot and white amber. Yet, looking back over the last two years, small anomalies flared in Grace’s memory like flares in the night. The way the mistress of the house had suddenly stopped playing the grand Steinway piano, claiming a wrist injury from tennis. The sudden, obsessive insistence on redacting all household medical records. The replacement of the entire long-term staff, except for Grace, whose quiet nature and lack of family connections made her uniquely unobtrusive.
Grace reached the second-floor landing and pushed through a dusty linen closet hatchway. She tumbled out into the dark hallway of the private residential wing. Downstairs, the panic alarm had finally begun to pulse—not calling the local police, but emitting a dull, low-frequency hum designed to alert the private perimeter security.
She slipped down the hallway toward Arthur’s primary study. If the woman downstairs was an imposter, the evidence had to exist somewhere within Arthur’s secure safe. He had clearly known the walls were closing in on him; that was why he had drafted the unsent recording.
The study door was locked with a biometric scanner, but Arthur’s keycard, normally kept in his breast pocket, wasn't with him when he fell. Grace paused, staring at the keypad. She remembered the morning routines: Arthur always typed a manual override code whenever his hands were damp from morning rowing. She had caught the sequence reflected in the foyer mirror dozens of times: 1-0-2-4-9-9. The date of his late daughter’s birth.
She punched the keys. The electronic lock chirped, and the heavy mahogany door swung inward on silent hinges.
The room smelled of old leather and tobacco. Grace stepped inside, locking the door behind her with the physical brass deadbolt. She rushed to the massive mahogany desk, tapping Arthur's phone to illuminate the space. But as the beam of light swept across the leather executive chair behind the desk, it caught the hem of a blush-champagne gown.
The chair slowly swiveled around.
May you like
The woman who called herself Victoria was sitting there, a delicate crystal glass of bourbon in one hand, Arthur’s antique pearl-handled revolver resting quietly on the desk in front of her.
""You really should have taken the kitchen exit, Grace,"" she whispered softly.
