Chapter 3 - The Ghost of Maine-3
Two weeks later, I was living in Thomas’s suburban home in Evanston.
To the outside world, I was a docile, fading retiree adjusting to the twilight of my life. I sat on the back porch wrapped in a plaid blanket, drank chamomile tea, and nodded politely when Thomas’s wife, Karen, asked if I needed anything. They treated me like fragile glass, worried that any sudden movement might trigger the heart attack the doctors kept warning me about.
They had no idea that beneath my quiet exterior, a furnace was burning.
While Thomas and Karen were at work and the kids were at school, I spent my days in the small guest bedroom with the door locked, conducting an investigation that should have happened forty years ago.
I didn't have the internet savvy of the younger generation, but I had a landline, a stack of phone books, and a lifetime of professional contacts from my days as a senior structural engineer. More importantly, I had the metal box.
Inside, alongside Clara’s letter, I had found a few other items: a small leather notebook filled with cryptic names and dates, a faded photograph of a coastal town in Maine called Osprey’s Cove, and a receipt from a private postal box in Portland dated three days before my family vanished.
I started by calling directory assistance for Maine, searching for any listing under Gwen Sterling or Sterling Property Management.
The first three numbers I tried were disconnected or led to automated recording loops. But on the fourth attempt, an elderly, raspy voice answered on the third ring.
“Hello?”
My heart hammered against my ribs. I recognized that voice instantly, even across four decades and thousands of miles of distance. It was Gwen. Her voice had lost some of its youthful musicality, replaced by a dry, papery cadence, but the underlying cold authority was unmistakably hers.
“Gwen,” I whispered into the receiver.
Silence stretched across the line. It wasn't the silence of confusion; it was the heavy, suspended silence of a predator hearing a twig snap in the dark.
“Who is this?” she asked, her voice dropping an octave, losing all warmth.
“It’s Andrew, Gwen,” I said, my voice steady, stripped of all the polite warmth I had forced myself to project for forty years. “I found the box.”
A sharp intake of breath hissed through the earpiece. For a long, agonizing moment, neither of us spoke. The transatlantic cable hummed with the weight of four decades of lies, grief, and stolen lives.
“You should have stayed in your grave, Andrew,” Gwen whispered, a venomous hiss that chilled me to the bone. “You’re an old man with a broken heart. Leave well enough alone. You won't like what you find at the bottom of the ocean.”
“My children aren't at the bottom of the ocean, Gwen,” I replied, gripping the plastic receiver so hard my knuckles turned white. “And neither is Clara. Where are they?”
“Come to Osprey’s Cove and find out,” she murmured softly. “If your heart can handle the trip. But let me warn you, Andrew—some doors are locked for a reason. Once you open them, the monsters inside come out to play.”
Click.
The line went dead, a flat, dial-tone hum filling my ear.
I lowered the phone slowly onto its cradle. My hands were trembling, not from fear, but from a cold, blinding fury. She didn't deny it. She didn't feign ignorance. She knew exactly who I was, and she knew I had discovered the truth.
I looked down at the wall calendar hanging beside the desk. Today was Tuesday. Thomas and Karen were away until six.
I opened my wallet. Inside was my pension check stub, my driver's license, and a stack of cash I had quietly accumulated by selling my old watch and a few pieces of jewelry at a local pawnshop under the pretext of buying medical supplies. It was enough for a one-way ticket to Portland, Maine.
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My cardiologist had warned me that traveling alone, especially with my arrhythmia, was a lethal gamble. He had told me to avoid stress, to stay close to hospitals, to live a quiet, sheltered life.
Let the doctors talk. My family had spent forty years in the dark. I could afford a little risk to drag them back into the light.
