Chapter 7 – The Hollow Wall

I drove back to my house alone. I had sent Andrew home to be with his wife and daughter. I needed to do this myself.

It was 11:15 AM. Robert wasn’t due for the “settlement meeting” until noon.

I unlocked the front door and walked straight toward the basement stairs.

The basement had always been Robert’s domain. He kept his tools down there, his old college textbooks, boxes of holiday decorations. When we moved in, he had built a false wall near the water heater to create a small storage closet.

I turned on the overhead fluorescent lights. They hummed a low, mechanical tune.

I walked over to the storage closet. I pushed aside boxes of Christmas ornaments and old winter boots. I stared at the drywall Robert had installed thirty years ago.

Something hidden in the walls.

I went to his workbench and picked up a heavy steel crowbar.

I walked back to the drywall. I raised the crowbar and swung it as hard as I could.

The metal punched through the drywall with a sickening crunch. White dust exploded into the air.

I pulled it out and swung again. And again. Thirty-six years of obedience, of silence, of making dinners and ironing shirts and smiling at corporate dinners—every ounce of it poured into my arms.

I ripped a massive chunk of drywall away with my bare hands.

Behind the wall, nestled between two wooden studs, was a black metal lockbox.

It was covered in decades of dust.

I pulled it out. It was heavy. I set it on the floor and brought the crowbar down on the cheap padlock. It shattered on the third strike.

I opened the lid.

Inside was a stack of letters. Hundreds of them. Bound together by decaying rubber bands.

I picked up the top envelope. The return address was a post office box in Chicago.

The handwriting belonged to my sister, Helen.

I opened the letter.

August 14th, 2014. (Two years before she died).

Robert,

You have to tell Margaret. I can’t live like this anymore. The guilt is destroying me. She thinks you’re working late. She thinks you’re a good man. If you don’t tell her about us, I will.

I stopped breathing.

I dropped the letter. I picked up another.

November 2nd, 2015.

Robert,

I don’t care about the money. I don’t care about the house. I just want to stop lying to my sister. Please. Let’s just end this.

I fell to my knees on the cold concrete floor.

It wasn’t an affair with Vanessa.

It had been an affair with my own sister. For years.

And then, I found the final document at the bottom of the box.

It was a life insurance policy. Taken out on Helen Hayes.

The primary beneficiary was not her husband. It was Robert’s LLC. The exact same LLC he had used to buy the commercial property.

The policy was worth two million dollars.

My mind connected the horrifying dots.

Helen wanted to confess. She wanted to tell me the truth. Robert couldn’t allow that. It would ruin his reputation, his marriage, his career.

So he was in the car with her that rainy night ten years ago.

He didn’t just flee the scene of an accident.

He caused it.

He killed my sister to keep her quiet, and he collected two million dollars from her death to fund his embezzlement schemes.

“You shouldn’t have gone down here, Margaret.”

I gasped and spun around.

Robert was standing at the bottom of the basement stairs.

He was wearing his tailored charcoal suit. He looked perfectly composed, but his eyes were entirely black, devoid of any human warmth.

“I asked you to be reasonable,” he said softly, walking toward me. “I tried to give you a clean break. A simple divorce. But you just couldn’t let it go.”

I stood up, clutching the letters against my chest. My heart was pounding so hard I thought my ribs might crack.

“You murdered her,” I whispered.

Robert stopped a few feet away. He looked at the broken wall, the shattered lockbox, the letters in my hands.

“Helen was weak,” he said, his voice terrifyingly calm. “She was going to destroy our family over a guilty conscience. I protected us, Margaret. I protected you from the pain.”

“You protected yourself!” I screamed, stepping back.

He sighed, reaching into his suit jacket. “And now you’re forcing me to protect myself again.”

He pulled out a small, black handgun.