The Room Above the Ballroom
Chapter 02 - The Room Above the Ballroom
Three hours earlier, Evelyn had gone upstairs to retrieve the original Haven Trust charter.
The gala was supposed to celebrate the trust’s merger with Crowe Family Services, a national network of foster homes and scholarship schools.
Mason called the merger efficient.
Evelyn called it dangerous.
For six months, she had found payments to children whose schools had no record of them. When she questioned the invoices, Mason said grief had made her suspicious.
Evelyn’s mother, Catherine Bennett, founded Haven after Evelyn’s younger sister disappeared twenty-two years earlier.
Catherine died before solving the case.
The trust passed to Evelyn.
Its controlling vote would become permanent at midnight on the anniversary of Catherine’s death.
Mason needed Evelyn’s biometric approval before then.
In the upstairs archive room, Evelyn found the charter missing.
Mason entered with Victor Shaw and a private physician, Dr. Paul Mercer.
A tablet displayed an emergency incapacity agreement.
Mason said Evelyn had become unstable and that signing would allow him to protect the trust temporarily.
She refused.
Victor blocked the hallway.
Evelyn backed against a glass display case containing old donor records.
Mason took her phone.
“You are exhausted,” he said. “By morning, the board will remember that you became confused.”
Evelyn saw a small red light inside the display case.
The Bellamy’s original camera system was still recording.
She knocked a brass plaque against the glass, triggering the building’s breakage alert.
The panel cracked. A fragment brushed her cheek as she stepped away.
The alarm distracted Victor.
Evelyn recovered her phone, escaped through the service stairs, and called Robert.
The scratches were minor.
The story Mason planned to attach to them was not.
Before leaving the archive room, Evelyn took a silver memory key from the broken display.
Catherine had hidden it behind a photograph of Haven’s first children’s home.
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On the key was one engraved word:
LANTERN.
