CHAPTER 15 — THE TAPES
George waited until the basement was completely silent before placing the first cassette into the old recorder.
The machine resisted at first, its plastic casing stiff from years of disuse, but after he pressed the buttons several times, the mechanism finally engaged with a faint mechanical click.
Mara stood beside him, holding a flashlight toward the recorder while the tape began to turn.
For several seconds there was only static, followed by the distant hum of what sounded like an old ventilation system.
Then a man's voice emerged from the speaker.
The recording was damaged, but the words were clear enough to understand.
“You can't keep doing this.” Another voice answered, calmer and older.
“We're not doing anything.” The first voice returned.
“Then where are they going?” The recording abruptly became distorted.
George looked at Mara. “Who are they talking about?”
The tape continued for several seconds before stopping completely.
George rewound it and listened again. The conversation contained no names, no explanation, and no conclusion.
It was only a fragment. But it was enough to prove that the hidden room had been used to record private conversations.
The second tape was dated several years earlier.
This time, the voices were clearer. A woman was speaking to someone who appeared to be standing inside the house.
She mentioned a man who had become “difficult” and said that someone needed to convince him to leave.
The other person asked what would happen if he refused.
The woman answered quietly, “Then we'll make sure he doesn't stay.”
Mara looked at George. The phrase sounded disturbingly deliberate.
They listened further. The conversation eventually shifted to property documents, money, and a missing vehicle.
There was no direct mention of murder or violence, but the implication was unmistakable: someone was manipulating circumstances around a particular person.
When the tape ended, George looked at the label again.
It contained only a date and a number. No name.
“They recorded people for years,” Mara said.
George nodded. “And whoever did it was keeping track of something.”
They moved through the tapes one at a time.
Some contained ordinary conversations that seemed unrelated to the disappearances.
Others were filled with fragments of arguments, meetings, and discussions about people George had never heard of.
A man spoke about someone who had become suspicious.
A woman discussed a family that needed to be “moved.”
Another recording mentioned a person who had been told to leave the area and never return.
The conversations were never complete. Several tapes had been recorded over.
Others contained long stretches of static.
Some ended abruptly in the middle of sentences.
Yet a pattern slowly emerged. The people being discussed were not chosen randomly.
Someone knew who they were, knew where they lived, and appeared to have information about their families, finances, and routines.
George began writing names and dates in his notebook, connecting each conversation to the disappearance records they had already found.
Then they found a tape labeled D. KANT — 1998.
George stopped before putting it into the recorder.
“This is it,” Mara whispered. He inserted the cassette and pressed play.
At first, there was only silence. Then came the sound of footsteps, followed by Daniel Kant's voice.
George recognized it from a recording included in an old television interview they had found online.
Daniel sounded exhausted. “You said this would end.”
A second voice replied, but the recording was too distorted to identify the speaker.
Daniel continued, “You promised my family would be left alone.”
The other person said something that the tape failed to capture.
Then Daniel spoke again. “Rebecca has nothing to do with this.”
Mara's expression changed immediately. She leaned closer to the recorder.
Daniel's voice became quieter. “If you want me, take me. But leave my wife and daughter alone.” Then the tape stopped.
Mara stared at the recorder. “That's all?”
George checked the cassette. It had not reached the end.
He pressed play again. Nothing happened for several seconds.
Then another voice appeared, this time much clearer.
“Daniel was given a choice.” A second person asked, “And?”
The answer came after a long pause. “He made the wrong one.”
The tape ended. George rewound it, but the same recording played again.
No explanation. No indication of who the voices belonged to.
Only the suggestion that Daniel Kant had been given some kind of choice shortly before his disappearance.
Mara looked toward the diary they had brought down from Rebecca's room.
“He told Rebecca they were leaving,” she said.
“Maybe they weren't leaving at all.” George nodded. “Maybe someone was forcing them to.”
The next tapes revealed that Daniel's case had not been unique.
Conversations from earlier decades described other people who had become suspicious, asked questions, or refused to cooperate.
In several recordings, the speakers discussed disappearances as though they were problems that needed to be managed.
No one ever openly described how a person would be made to disappear.
Instead, they used vague phrases: “handle it,” “move them,” “close the matter,” “make it voluntary.”
George recognized the language immediately from the police reports.
Families had repeatedly claimed that missing relatives had left voluntarily.
The tapes suggested that the idea of a voluntary disappearance might not always have originated with the families themselves.
Someone could have created the circumstances that made the explanation believable.
But who? And why were certain people being targeted?
One recording mentioned Arthur Bell. George immediately stopped the tape and looked at Mara.
The conversation appeared to take place sometime in the early 1990s.
A man asked whether Arthur could be trusted.
Another voice answered that Arthur “knew enough to be dangerous.”
The first man asked whether they should remove him from the area.
The second voice refused. “Not yet.” George's face tightened.
Arthur had not merely witnessed something at Blackwood House.
He had apparently been considered a potential problem by the people behind the disappearances.
Mara remembered the photograph hidden behind the wall—the six people who had agreed never to speak about what happened.
Arthur's signature was one of them. Perhaps that agreement had not been voluntary. Perhaps it had been a warning.
Near midnight, they reached the final tape in the box. It had no date. No name. Only a single word written across the label.
REBECCA.
Mara immediately reached for it, but George stopped her.
“Wait.” He stared at the cassette. “If this was recorded in 1998, it could be the most important one here.”
He inserted it carefully and pressed play.
For several seconds, there was only static.
Then came the faint sound of a child breathing.
Mara's face went pale. A girl's voice whispered something too softly to understand.
George increased the volume. The voice became clearer.
Rebecca was speaking to someone. “Are they downstairs?”
she asked. A man's voice answered, but the words were almost completely lost beneath static.
Rebecca spoke again. “Daddy said we're leaving.”
Then there was a pause. “But he didn't tell me where Mommy is.”
The recording suddenly changed. There was a loud sound, as though something had fallen against the recorder.
Rebecca gasped. Someone entered the room.
A man's voice said something indistinct.
Then Rebecca whispered, “Three knocks.” George looked at Mara.
The tape continued for another few seconds before the recording became nothing but static.
Then, just before it ended, a final voice spoke clearly enough to understand.
“She knows too much.”
The recorder clicked off. Neither George nor Mara moved.
The tapes had answered one question. The disappearances were not random.
Someone had been watching people, choosing them, manipulating their circumstances, and deciding what happened when they became inconvenient.
But the recordings had created a far more dangerous question.
If someone had been controlling the disappearances for decades, who had been giving the orders?