The Dead Won't Let Me Rest

Chapter 7: The Murderer's Ring

He stepped back from the wall.

Not running. Just back. Two deliberate steps until his shoulders found the shelving unit behind him and he had the whole corner in view.

Nothing moved. The seam in the wall was still and dark. Whatever had pressed back had either stopped or was waiting, and neither option made him feel better. He stood there for thirty seconds, torch aimed at the frame, and then he made himself breathe properly and think.

He was not opening that door today. Not without knowing more about what his father had known, what the blood on the floor meant, and why someone had felt the need to build a hidden entrance in the basement of a funeral home. Those were questions that required research and daylight and probably several cups of actual coffee rather than the stale instant variety.

He went back upstairs, bolted the basement door behind him, and made a list.

The list had four items. Find the journalist Vail had been going to meet. Trace the ring. Get into Blackthorn General's transfer records. Figure out whose handwriting was in the ledger.

He started with the ring because it was the most concrete thing he had. He had a clear image of it from the memory, sharp enough to draw accurately: heavy silver band, flat rectangular stone, a closed eye carved in relief with individual lashes. Not mass produced. The level of detail in the carving meant custom work, which meant a maker, which meant a record somewhere.

He photographed his own sketch with his phone and sent it to the only jeweler he knew personally, a woman named Dara who had a workshop on Settle Street and had once spent two hours explaining hallmarking to him at a party when he'd made the mistake of asking a polite question. He sent it with a message: Trying to identify a piece. Custom silver ring, closed eye motif. Seen it before? No urgency.

The last part was a lie, but people responded faster when they didn't feel pressured.

Then he spent an hour on his phone searching Harwick Logistics. The company had a clean, minimal website with a photograph of a container port and three paragraphs about reliability and regional expertise. Registered in Blackthorn City, incorporated eleven years ago. The listed director was a man named Colin Farrer. There was a contact form and a phone number and nothing else of interest.

The port expansion coverage from three years back was more useful. Harwick had been named in two council planning documents as a key freight operator with an interest in the proposed deep-water terminal. There was a quote from Farrer about investment and jobs. There was also, in one article, a mention of Harwick's legal representation: a firm called Crowe and Associates.

Kael read that twice.

Crowe. His mother's family name before she married. Elias's family name. He wrote it in the ledger and put a line under it and kept going.

Dara replied at half past eleven. Not a text but a call, which meant she had something to say that didn't fit in a message.

"Where did you see this?" she said, instead of hello.

"In passing. Why?"

"Because I've seen that motif before and not in a good context." A pause, the sound of something being set down on a hard surface. "About two years ago a man came into the workshop wanting a ring repaired. Same design, same stone, same closed eye. He wasn't friendly about it. He didn't want to leave it with me, didn't want to give a name, just wanted to know if I could do the repair on the spot while he waited."

"Could you?"

"I could have. I didn't. Something about him made me say the part needed ordering." Another pause. "He left and I looked up the eye symbol afterward. There's not much, but what there is points to a group that's been operating in this city since at least the eighteen hundreds. They're listed in one academic paper on Blackthorn's occult history as the Closed Eye Assembly. The paper describes them as a fraternal society with connections to the city's mortuary trade." She stopped. "Kael. Why are you asking about this?"

"Research," he said. "Old family papers. You know how it is."

She didn't believe him. He could tell by the silence. But Dara had the useful quality of not pushing past the point where pushing became an imposition.

"Be careful," she said, and ended the call.

The Closed Eye Assembly.

He wrote it in the ledger and sat with it for a while. A fraternal society with connections to the mortuary trade, operating in Blackthorn since the eighteen hundreds. Old enough to have roots under the city. Old enough, possibly, to have known about whatever was beneath this building long before Harwick Logistics existed.

Vail had said the ring was a mark. That the people running Harwick's back channels used it. Which meant the Assembly, or whatever it had become, was currently using a freight company as cover for something. And that they had killed at least one man to keep that something quiet.

And their legal firm shared a name with his cousin.

He looked at the time. Just past noon. He needed to eat something real and think through the Blackthorn General angle. The transfer record for Vail would have a signature. A name. If he could get into the hospital's administrative system, or find someone inside who owed him a favor, he could put a face to the handwriting in the ledger.

He was pulling his jacket on when he heard the front door.

Not a knock. A key. Someone with a key to Arden Funeral Home was opening the front door from the outside, and the only keys he knew of were the two on the ring in his pocket.

He went to the top of the basement stairs and picked up the torch, gripping it at the heavy end.

The door opened. Footsteps in the reception area, unhurried and familiar with the space. Then a voice, dry and faintly amused, coming from directly below him.

"You can put the torch down, boy. If I wanted you dead, you'd have woken up that way."