Chapter 22
Sylvie Deering
Sylvie’s room had a charm to it that the rest of the mansion had lost to neglect.
A four-poster bed with a carved headboard sat against the far wall, dressed in clean white linens that were whiter than the lace curtains.
There was a faded floral rug beneath the bed, large enough to prevent her feet from touching the hardwood floor first thing in the morning.
The wallpaper was a soft blue with delicate silver vines, slightly worn at the seams and curling near the ceiling, but it gave the room a warmth the house’s darker corridors didn’t share.
A window faced the front of the property, and the morning light came through it in a clean, even wash that made the room feel like it belonged to a different house entirely.
Derek’s handsome face filled the screen of her phone as she sat on the edge of the bed, one leg tucked beneath her.
He, in turn, was sitting on the floor of her living room with Coco sprawled across his thighs with the boneless contentment of a cat who had decided that the temporary human was an acceptable substitute.
The white fluffball had her eyes half-closed, and one paw dangled off his knee as though she’d melted there and couldn’t be bothered to relocate.
Derek had attentively come home for lunch specifically to feed her before a business dinner later that evening, despite the fact that his office was a forty-minute drive in the opposite direction.
It was the kind of thoughtfulness that Sylvie was still getting used to, and it was also the kind of thing he did without mentioning it, as though driving eighty minutes round trip to feed her cat was simply what a person did when they cared about someone.
“She barely looked at me when I walked in,” Derek said, scratching Coco behind her ears. “I had to open the can first just to get her to acknowledge my existence.”
“That’s because she has standards.”
Derek laughed and angled the phone toward Coco so that Sylvie could see her face.
The cat blinked slowly at the screen, which Sylvie chose to interpret as affection rather than indifference.
The team had gotten Coco for her after her father had passed away, and in that time, the cat had trained her to recognize the subtlest of gestures as declarations of love.
A slow blink.
A single headbutt against an ankle.
The rare occasion when Coco chose to sleep on the bed rather than her favorite chair. These were the milestones of their relationship, and Sylvie cherished every one of them.
“Hi, baby girl.” Sylvie softened her voice in the way she reserved exclusively for Coco and occasionally for Bit when he was having a particularly rough day. “I’ll be home next week. I love you, and I miss you so much.”
Coco yawned.
Derek turned the phone back to himself, grinning.
“I think you miss Coco more than you miss me. Which is saying something, because I’m the one holding down the fort over here.”
“You’re not wrong.”
“That’s cold, Sylvie.”
“You knew what you were getting into.”
His grin slowly widened into something warmer, and he lowered his voice. The shift was subtle but unmistakable, as it always was when he moved from humor to honesty.
“In all seriousness, Coco is doing better than I am without you. I miss you.”
Derek had come into her life at an unexpected time.
He was patient in a way that didn’t come across as performative, and he’d never once made her feel like her work was an inconvenience, even when it pulled her out of the city for days at a time.
Given that his net worth was something she would never earn in her lifetime, she loved that he didn’t act that way.
“I miss you, too.” She meant it more than her tone conveyed, but he knew her well enough by now to read between the lines.
“We’ll spend the next few days wrapping up interviews, and we’ll probably head back when the forensics team is finished with the greenhouse.
With cold cases like this one, we’ll take periodic trips back to speak to those who are still alive, along with the families of the victims.”
“Will the press release change your plans?”
“Probably not. We’ll work the case with the same method regardless of what the media does with it.
” Sylvie glanced at the time on the corner of her phone screen.
“Which means I’d better get going. I need to reach out to the second victim’s family today.
Dr. Kessler notified the next of kin, and she explained to them that someone from our firm would be in touch. ”
“Go save the world.” Derek flashed the camera toward Coco, who was now sauntering toward the bay window in the living room, her tail held high, signaling she was finished with the conversation, even if the humans weren’t. “We’ll be here.”
Sylvie blew a kiss to Coco, told Derek she’d call him later that evening, and ended the video call. She slipped on her blazer, gathered her notebook and phone, and opened the bedroom door.
She stopped short.
Gwenyth was standing in the hallway right outside her door.
She wasn’t paying attention to Sylvie at all.
Instead, her gaze was directed downward, fixed on the threshold as though it held something only she could see.
The gray cardigan hung from her thin shoulders, and her bare feet were pale against the dark hardwood.
The corridor behind her stretched toward the staircase in a dim line of faded rose wallpaper and dusty photograph frames, and the sconce lighting was off, leaving her illuminated only by the light spilling from Sylvie’s room.
How long she’d been standing there was impossible to say.
The walls in this house were thick, so it wasn’t as if she’d been listening in on Sylvie’s conversation with Derek. What was more unsettling was the stillness of Gwenyth’s posture, the way she stood in the hallway as though she’d been rooted there for some time.
“Gwenyth?” Sylvie kept her voice gentle as she stepped into the hallway. “Are you okay?”
Gwenyth raised her head slowly. Her eyes were red-rimmed, though no tears had fallen. She was holding herself together with the kind of rigid control that Sylvie recognized from years of interviewing people on the edge of breaking but who refused to do so in front of a stranger.
“Yes.” The word was thin. “Has there been any progress?”
“We’re still interviewing everyone connected to the estate and to your father.”
“Not Porter.”
The correction was quiet and immediate. The absence of a man who had been part of Gwenyth’s daily life for as long as she could remember was at the forefront.
“No,” Sylvie agreed softly. “Not Porter. I’m very sorry for your loss, Gwenyth.”
She nodded, and the effort it took to keep her composure was visible in the tightening of her jaw and the way her fingers gripped the fabric of her cardigan. She was trying not to cry, and the restraint made her appear both older and younger than her forty-eight years.
“Porter was special,” Gwenyth said. Her voice steadied as she spoke about him, as though the act of honoring his memory gave her something solid to hold onto.
“He took care of me when my father couldn’t.
He never asked for anything in return, and he never made me feel like I was a burden.
I’ll always be grateful to him for that. ”
Sylvie didn’t fill the silence that followed. She let Gwenyth hold the space for as long as she needed it. The corridor was quiet around them, the only sound the faint creak of the house settling somewhere below their feet.
“Will there be a funeral?”
“I’m not sure,” Sylvie replied truthfully. “Porter has a sister in Arizona. I’d guess the arrangements would be up to her.”
Gwenyth’s brow creased slightly, as though the idea of someone else deciding what happened to Porter didn’t sit well with her.
“I’ll speak with Uncle Cal. Maybe he can reach out to Porter’s sister.” Gwenyth paused, and when she spoke again, her voice carried something closer to a wish than a statement. “It would be nice if Porter were buried somewhere close by. I could visit him.”
Before Sylvie could respond, Gwenyth stepped back into her room. She moved with the slow, deliberate gait that Sylvie had come to associate with her retreats, not confusion but conservation, as though she rationed her energy the way some people rationed their words.
The door closed with a soft click, and the hallway was quiet again.
Sylvie stood there a while longer, her leather-bound notebook pressed against her chest, processing the encounter. Gwenyth’s grief for Porter was the most coherent and sustained emotion she’d displayed in Sylvie’s presence.
No confusion, no drifting, no retreat into blankness.
Just a woman mourning someone she loved, articulating that emotion with a lucidity that contradicted the picture Dale had painted of her in every conversation.
Sylvie had interviewed hundreds of people over the course of her career, and she’d developed an instinct for the difference between performed emotion and the real thing.
Gwenyth’s grief was real.
Whatever else was going on with her condition, her love for Porter Voss was not part of the confusion.
Sylvie made her way downstairs, the old floorboards announcing each step with their familiar protests.
She found Bit in the dining room. He was hunched over his laptop with a half-empty bag of pretzels beside his keyboard, and his knitted cap was pulled low enough that it nearly touched his eyebrows.
The portable monitor at the end of the table was active, the grid of burial sites glowing in the dim room.
The curtains had been drawn against the midday sun, and the light of the screens gave the space the same cave-like quality it had taken on every day since they’d arrived.
Bit had been running searches for the better part of the morning, cross-referencing missing persons records against cancer diagnoses, hospital admissions, and hospice facility reports from the mid-nineties.
The work was painstaking and repetitive, the kind of digital excavation that most people would have abandoned after the first hour, but Bit had a patience for data that bordered on obsessive.
“Where are Brook and Theo?”
“They went to search Porter’s cottage for the hidden lab,” Bit said without looking up. His fingers continued to move across the keyboard. “No word yet on whether they found anything.”
“I need to reach out to Ruth Okafor’s family today.” Sylvie set her notebook on the table and pulled out the chair in front of her workstation. “Dr. Kessler has already notified the next of kin. They’re expecting a call from us.”
“You’ll want to add another call to your list.”
Bit reached for the remote and pointed it at the portable monitor.
The grid shifted, and a new section appeared alongside the existing profiles.
A photograph, pulled from a missing persons database, showed a woman with kind eyes and close-cropped, graying hair.
The image was decades old, the colors slightly washed, but the woman’s expression carried a warmth that had survived the degradation of the file.
“Dr. Kessler just sent a notification that a fourth victim has been identified.”
Sylvie turned to the monitor and studied the new entry.
The woman’s name, her age at the time of disappearance, and the circumstances of her case were laid out in a clean, clinical format that Kessler’s team had been using throughout the excavation.
Sylvie lowered her gaze to the details beneath the photograph, and the information confirmed what they’d all already begun to suspect before she’d finished reading the first line.
The woman had gone missing thirty-one years ago…from hospice.