Chapter 2 - The Ghost of Blackwood Tavern
The air in the bedroom grew thick with the smell of damp earth and stale tobacco clinging to Meyers’s jacket. He didn’t lunge. He didn’t shout. He moved with the sickening, deliberate calm of a man who had practiced every breath of this encounter against the cold cinder block of a cell. When he stepped toward Natalie, his boots made no sound against the braided rug.
“Sydney, look at me,” I barked, straining against the cuffs. The links bit savagely into the soft flesh of my wrists, grinding against the radial bone. Warm blood trickled down my thumbs. “She had nothing to do with Blackwood. She was off duty on maternity leave. You know that. Check the logs you stole.”
Meyers stopped inches from the mattress. Natalie sat upright, her spine pressed against the headboard, her chin held level despite the tremor vibrating through her lower lip. She was tracking the pistol in his right hand—a weathered, blued steel .38 revolver with a bobbed hammer. A pocket gun. Untraceable, easy to ditch, perfectly lethal at five paces.
“Maternity leave,” Meyers whispered, his voice like dry leaves scraping pavement. He reached out with his left hand, the thumb calloused and missing its nail. He hovered it half an inch from Natalie’s cheek, never quite touching her skin, merely letting her feel the cold aura of his presence. “Fourteen years ago, Clara was pregnant too. Three months. Nobody wrote that in the papers, Detective. You didn’t write that in the incident report.”
The blood drained from my face. “What did you say?”
“You didn’t know, did you?” Meyers turned his head slowly, his hollowed, shadowed eyes fixing on mine. “You just saw an immigrant drywall contractor with sheetrock dust in his lungs and grease under his nails. You saw a husband shouting at the construction site, so you put him in the back of a cruiser while the real work was being done.”
“Clara vanished from the cellar during the night shift,” I said, every detail rushing back across the chasm of time. The rainstorm. The floodlights cutting through the skeletal timbers of the half-renovated Blackwood Tavern. The scent of raw pine and wet concrete. “We searched every square yard of the foundation, Sydney. We dredged the creek. We pulled apart the crawlspaces. If someone took her—”
“Someone didn’t take her from the street,” Meyers rasped. He drew back his hand from Natalie and reached inside his heavy canvas coat. For a fraction of a second, I braced for the sound of a hammer cocking, but instead, he pulled out a thick, water-stained manila folder bound by cracked rubber bands. He dropped it onto the foot of our comforter. It landed with a dull, heavy slap. “You stopped digging after thirty-six hours because the building owner handed your chief a campaign envelope. You wrote it down as a domestic flight. Abandonment.”
“That wasn't my call,” I choked out. “The county took jurisdiction—”
“You signed the closing synopsis, John!” Meyers roared, the calm shattering for a terrifying second, revealing the rabid dog pacing behind his ribs. Natalie flinched, her breath hitching, but her eyes snapped instantly to mine, sending an unspoken message: *The nightstand drawer. The bottom false panel.*
She knew the service weapon wasn't there—Meyers had cleared the room—but the old folding knife from my patrol days was taped behind the headboard baseboard. If she could reach down, if she could distract him for three seconds.
“I signed what the DA verified,” I said, pitching my voice lower, trying to anchor him back into the room. “Sydney, listen to me. If there was a cover-up, I was a twenty-six-year-old patrolman walking perimeter. I didn't have the rank to bury anything.”
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“No,” Meyers said, regaining his chill. He leaned over Natalie, his knuckles resting against the sheets, his face barely inches from hers. “You had something worse. You had eyes, John. And you chose to look away.”
***
