CHAPTER 20 — 217
The discovery began with something so ordinary that George almost ignored it.
He was sitting in the study late at night, surrounded by Detective Thomas Reed's files, David Vale's notes, Rebecca's diary, and the transcripts he had made from the cassette recordings.
He had been trying to establish a timeline of the Kant family's final night when he noticed the same time appearing again and again.
2:17 AM. It was written in Rebecca's diary.
It appeared in one of the police reports.
A timestamp on one of the cassette recordings placed a conversation within minutes of it.
Even the notes found inside the hidden room contained a reference to 2:17.
George initially wondered whether someone had deliberately chosen the number because of its connection to the three knocks.
But when he compared the documents chronologically, he noticed something that made him stop.
The time had appeared in records created by different people, at different times, for different purposes.
It wasn't a supernatural signal. It was a timestamp.
Something had happened at exactly 2:17 AM, and the people who knew about it had preserved that moment for decades.
George spent the next several hours reconstructing the events of October 17, 1998.
Rebecca's diary suggested that something had already gone wrong before midnight.
Daniel had been arguing with someone. Helen had been frightened.
People had entered the house through the hidden passage.
The cassette recordings placed several voices inside the basement during the same period.
Then George found a police document he had previously overlooked.
It was an old incident report created shortly after the Kant family's disappearance.
Most of the page contained routine information, but near the bottom was a handwritten note from an investigator who had apparently arrived at Blackwood House during the early hours of October 18.
The note contained a single time: 2:17 AM.
Beside it was a description of a disturbance reported by a nearby resident.
George read the sentence twice. The resident had heard what sounded like an argument followed by a loud impact.
The investigator had recorded the time but apparently never followed up on it.
George immediately searched the original case file for any mention of the disturbance. There was none.
Mara joined him and began reading through the documents.
Together they compared the police report with the cassette timestamps and Rebecca's diary.
The pieces slowly began to align. At approximately 2:00 AM, several people were inside or near Blackwood House.
At 2:17, something happened. Shortly afterward, the recordings became incomplete.
Rebecca's diary ended. Daniel and Helen disappeared.
And the official story began to take shape.
George looked at the timeline. “Someone died at 2:17,” he said.
Mara stared at him. “How do you know?” George pointed toward a forensic note buried inside Reed's files.
It referred to a bloodstain discovered in the basement during an early search.
The original investigators had concluded that the stain was too small to establish what had happened.
But Reed had written a question beside it: “Why was this cleaned?”
George looked toward the basement door. “There was a murder.” Mara's face tightened. “Whose?”
They searched for evidence of a death connected to that exact time.
The official records contained no murder investigation on Blackwood Road in October 1998.
There was no body, no confirmed victim, and no homicide case.
That was the problem. If someone had been killed, where was the body?
George returned to the disappearance reports.
Daniel and Helen were both officially missing.
Rebecca was absent from the records entirely.
But there was another name that appeared in a document from the same period—a man who had been associated with the second house and who had supposedly left the area shortly after the Kant disappearance.
His name appeared only once in the surviving files.
Victor Hale. George had never heard of him.
The document stated that Hale had been questioned by police two days after the Kant family disappeared, then released.
After that, there were no records of him.
Mara looked at the page. “Could he be the victim?”
George shook his head. “We don't know.” But beneath Hale's name was a handwritten note from Detective Reed: “Check 2:17.”
The clue sent them back to the cassette tapes.
George found the recording labeled October 17, 1998 — 11:58 PM and listened again.
The voices were difficult to distinguish, but this time he noticed something buried beneath the conversation.
A clock could be heard faintly in the background.
At first there was nothing unusual. Then, after several minutes of argument, the sound changed.
A door slammed. Someone shouted. A second voice said, “No.”
Then came a loud impact. The recording continued for a few seconds before becoming almost completely silent.
George checked the timestamp. The recording had been interrupted at 2:17 AM.
Mara stared at the machine. “That's when it happened.”
George nodded. He played the final seconds again.
Beneath the static, they heard someone breathing heavily.
Then a man's voice whispered something almost impossible to understand.
George increased the volume. One word became audible.
“Please.”
Then the tape ended.
The discovery made the three knocks feel different.
They had spent days assuming that the sound was connected to Rebecca or perhaps to some hidden mechanism inside the house.
Now George considered another possibility.
What if the three knocks had originally been part of the events surrounding the murder?
What if they were not a message from the dead but a signal used by the people who had been inside the house?
He returned to the records and found that the same time—2:17—had been preserved in several unrelated documents because someone had deliberately recorded it immediately after the event.
Detective Reed had marked it. David Vale had copied it.
The cassette recorder had preserved it. Rebecca had written about the events surrounding it without understanding their full meaning.
The time survived because different people had recognized that something important happened at that exact moment.
It wasn't supernatural. It was evidence.
Mara suddenly found another page inside her father's notebook.
It contained a rough timeline of the Kant family's final night.
Most of the entries had been crossed out, but one remained clearly visible: 2:17 — IMPACT / DEATH?
Beneath it David had written: “No body means no conclusion.”
George stared at the words. His father-in-law had reached the same point in his investigation.
He had believed someone had died, but he had never been able to prove who.
Mara looked toward the basement. “What if the person who died wasn't Daniel?”
George considered it. Daniel and Helen had disappeared.
Rebecca had vanished from the official record.
Someone else might have been killed inside the house, and the body could have been moved through the underground passage before the police arrived.
That would explain why no homicide had ever been recorded.
It would also explain why someone had gone to such extraordinary lengths to preserve the exact time.
The question was no longer whether a murder had happened.
It was whose death had occurred at 2:17?
George returned to the hidden room one final time and searched the documents beneath the cassette tapes. At the very bottom of the box, he found a small handwritten card. There was no name on it. Only a date and a time.
OCTOBER 17, 1998 — 2:17 AM.
Below it was a single sentence:
“One died. Three disappeared. One survived.”
George read it aloud. Mara looked at him.
Suddenly, the entire mystery seemed to change shape.
If the note was true, then the night of October 17 had not ended with one disappearance.
It had ended with a murder, three people being taken away, and one person surviving to carry the secret.
And somewhere in the records of Blackwood Road was the identity of the dead.