Chapter 9 - Saint Anne’s
Saint Anne’s Chapel had been roofless longer than Emily had been alive.
The old stone shell sat a mile west of the estate past the creek road, swallowed half by trees and half by neglect, the sort of ruin people passed in daylight without thinking and avoided after dusk for reasons they never articulated. Helena used to take Emily there when she was little and tell stories about saints who weren’t holy enough for their paintings.
Emily had loved the place because it felt as if the world had forgotten it, and forgotten places were quiet.
At eight-forty the next morning, it was not quiet.
Gabriel insisted on handling the meeting his own way. Emily rode with him. Two guards stayed hidden in the tree line far enough back to satisfy the letter of the note if not the spirit. Elise remained at the estate overseeing the staff lockdown. Maren stayed too—under watch, against her protests—because if Oscar truly meant to appear, Gabriel refused to let her walk into something that might be another trap.
The chapel smelled of wet stone and old leaves.
No one waited inside.
Only a wooden crate near the broken altar and, on top of it, a tape recorder.
Emily stopped short.
Gabriel moved forward with the gun concealed beneath his coat and checked the space first—behind the altar wall, inside the side transept, around the broken baptistry. No one.
Then he pressed play.
The tape hissed.
A man’s voice came through, worn, low, and unmistakably alive.
“Maren, if he brought you, then I’m sorry. If he didn’t, then I’m sorry for that too.”
Emily felt Gabriel go still beside her.
Oscar.
“You were never meant to hear from me this way,” the voice continued. “But by the time Damon became desperate enough to pull that girl into it, I knew the old promises were failing.”
Gabriel’s jaw hardened at “that girl,” not out of disrespect, but out of the instant recognition that Oscar had been recording for Maren long before realizing Emily might be listening.
“I didn’t die in the ravine,” Oscar said. “I was run off the road, but I crawled out. Silas Reed’s men found me before the police did. They gave me a choice: disappear and let Damon grow up believing I was dead, or stay alive long enough to watch every person I love get buried under the same story.”
Emily closed her eyes briefly.
Not because she doubted it.
Because she could picture exactly the type of choice that was: no choice at all.
Oscar continued, “I agreed to vanish because I thought I could circle back with proof. The proof was the ledger. Helena knew where part of it was. I knew where the rest had been moved. But before we could put it together, she died.”
Gabriel’s head snapped slightly.
“Helena was helping him,” Emily whispered.
Oscar’s voice roughened with age and regret. “If you’re hearing this after Helena, then things have gone worse than I feared. Silas was never the top of it. He carried papers. He fixed dates. He threatened the poor and flattered the rich. But he answered to the one person Helena never wanted named until she had evidence strong enough to survive the name.”
The tape clicked.
Paused.
Then resumed.
“Gabriel, if you’re listening—yes, I know it’s you—she didn’t keep everything from you because she thought you’d betray her. She kept some of it because she thought you’d go after the wrong monster first and get yourself killed before you could protect Emily.”
Gabriel did not move.
Emily looked at him and, even now, understood Helena perfectly in that.
“She wanted to tell you about Daniel too,” Oscar continued. “Daniel wasn’t just a weak man who disappeared into debt. He got pulled into title laundering because he was good with maps and desperate for cash. When he realized the land swaps involved widows and forged arrears, he tried to walk. That’s when he vanished for real.”
Emily’s throat constricted.
“He was killed?” she whispered.
Gabriel didn’t answer, because the tape did.
“I never found Daniel’s body,” Oscar said. “And Helena never believed he was dead.”
A tremor seemed to pass through the chapel walls themselves.
Oscar’s voice lowered.
“That’s why the west tract matters. There’s a false boundary buried in those deeds. If corrected, it shifts ownership of the creek strip, the chapel road, and the old cellars beneath them. But more importantly, it reopens the chain of transfers Daniel tried to expose. If Emily signs it away now, the last clean path back to those original records dies with her signature.”
Emily gripped the back of a pew until her knuckles whitened.
Then came the line that changed everything again.
“The person orchestrating this isn’t after the land’s value. They’re after erasing the route Helena left to Daniel.”
The tape stopped.
No footsteps followed. No dramatic entrance.
Only chapel silence.
Gabriel crossed to the crate at once. Inside lay a map tube and an old leather notebook.
The map tube held survey overlays, one of which marked a location in the woods north of the chapel ruins.
The notebook was Oscar’s.
Inside were dates, parcel numbers, and a page torn from a hospital visitor log from twelve years ago—the week Helena died.
One name had been circled.
Visitor to Helena Ashford, 7:14 p.m.:
Maren Cole.
Another circled below it:
Silas Reed, 8:03 p.m.
And below both, written in Oscar’s hand:
Only one of them came out crying.
Emily looked up sharply.
“Maren visited Mom the night she died?”
Gabriel took the log.
His face had gone unreadable again, which in him often meant there was too much feeling underneath for expression to hold.
“Yes,” he said.
“She never told us that,” Emily whispered.
No one had.
Then something fell from the back cover of Oscar’s notebook.
A small torn receipt.
Gas, motel coffee, cigarettes.
Dated nine years ago.
Signed by a card imprint bearing the name:
D. Rowe.
Gabriel stared.
Emily read it again.
Her mother had believed Daniel might be alive.
Oscar had not found a body.
And now there was recent legal action filed in Daniel’s name.
Gabriel folded the receipt carefully into his pocket.
“We’re going to the north woods location,” he said.
“Now?” Emily asked.
“Yes.”
“What if this is another trap?”
“Then whoever set it has made a mistake. They’ve started giving us too much truth.”
As they turned to leave, Emily glanced back once at the ruined altar.
There, in the dust where nothing had been when they arrived, now lay a single object.
A woman’s hair ribbon.
Blue.
The same faded shade Helena used to tie around letters she wanted Emily to keep.
And pinned beneath it was a note in a careful feminine hand:
You’re finally following the right ghost.
No signature.
But Emily recognized the hand immediately.
Not Helena.
Not Maren.
May you like
Not Silas.
Elise Wren.
