Part 13
The detective arrived early the next morning, examining the envelope and the photograph with a grim, practiced intensity. He dusted the paper for prints, but we all knew what the result would be. Whoever had sent this was careful. They hadn't left a single trace behind. The detective promised to flag our address for increased patrols and contact the prison where Marlene was held to see if she had made any recent phone calls or received any unusual visitors.
But Jack couldn't just sit around and wait for the police to find answers. The phrase on the back of the photo—*“the roots still run beneath the floorboards”*—haunted him. It sounded like a riddle, a direct instruction left behind by a woman who took absolute pleasure in psychological torture.
"She hid things," Jack said quietly after the detective left, his eyes scanning the hardwood floors of our living room. "When the police searched the house during the investigation, they looked for the poison, the documents, and the tapes. But Marlene lived here for nearly a year. She knew every nook and cranny of this old place. What if she left something else behind?"
We began a frantic, systematic search of our own home. We pulled out every drawer, flipped every mattress, and emptied every closet. Eva was at a playdate with a trusted neighbor, giving us a window of time to tear our lives apart without frightening her. We checked behind the drywall, looked under the sinks, and even inspected the crawlspaces, but we found nothing.
It wasn't until late in the afternoon, when Jack was checking the structural beams in the basement, that he noticed something strange. Near the back corner of the foundation, where the old coal chute used to be, a single wooden plank on the storage shelf seemed slightly misaligned. It was a shelf Marlene had used to store her homemade preserves—jars we had thrown away months ago without a second thought.
May you like
Jack reached under the shelf, his fingers searching the dark gap between the wood and the stone wall. With a sharp tug, the entire back panel of the shelf slid forward, revealing a hollow space that had been meticulously carved into the wood.
Inside the hidden compartment sat a small, tarnished silver key and an old, dust-covered cassette tape. There was no label on the tape, just a small piece of red masking tape stuck to the plastic. Jack looked up at me, his eyes filled with a mixture of dread and determination. The ghost of Marlene was still in our house, and she had left us a key to a lock we didn't even know existed.
