Chapter 4 - The Man in the Stone
I stood there in my tailored suit, smelling of rain and Julian Croft’s tobacco, staring at a door that had existed five feet from my desk for the entirety of my adult life. Every brief I had drafted, every multi-million-dollar merger I had structured, every solitary glass of Scotch I had drunk in the dead of night—I had done it all while a man was breathing on the other side of that iron.
I stepped closer, my knees sinking into the soft pile of the rug, and crouched before the feeder hatch.
"Who are you?" I demanded.
The voice ceased instantly. On the other side of the door, I heard the rapid, panicked shuffle of fabric against stone—someone scuttling backward into a corner, breathing in high, terrified wheezes.
"Grace?" the voice whispered again, trembling. "Who... who is that? That’s not Grace."
"My name is Gabriel Duca," I said, keeping my voice as hard and steady as an anvil. "This is my house. Who are you, and why are you in my wall?"
A long, suffocating silence filled the room. The only sound was the wind rattling the heavy sash windows overlooking Mount Vernon Street.
Then, a sound emerged from the darkness that turned my blood to slush.
It was laughter.
A high, cracked, hysterical cackle that dissolved into a violent fit of coughing, wet and productive, echoing within a stone chamber that sounded far larger than a simple utility closet.
"Gabriel," the man wheezed, his voice bubbling with phlegm. "The boy. The little prince of the Commonwealth. He doesn't know. Julian... Julian really took the secret to the cemetery with him. The magnificent, arrogant bastard."
My father's name spoken in that tone—familiar, mocking, intimate—ignited an instinctive fury in my chest.
"Open the lock," I said. "Tell me the combination."
"I don't have the combination, you idiot!" the voice hissed, dragging itself closer to the iron hatch once more. I could smell him now—the foul, unwashed stench of confinement, mold, old urine, and cheap tallow. "I'm on the inside! Have you ever seen a cell where the prisoner holds the key?"
"How long have you been in there?"
"What year is it?" the voice shot back immediately. The question was frantic, ravenous. "Tell me the year, Gabriel! Tell me!"
"It's 2024," I said.
A low moan escaped the hatch, a sound of absolute, bottomless despair that made me instinctively pull back. "Twelve years... twelve years since the trial. Or was it fourteen? God... oh God, Mary, forgive me..."
"Who are you?" I repeated, louder this time.
"Samuel," the man whispered. "Samuel Vance. Look at your files, Gabriel. Look at the Duca & Associates ledger from 2010. Look for the man your father paid to die."
Samuel Vance.
The name hit me like a physical blow.
In 2010, Samuel Vance was the Chief Financial Officer of the Vance-Duca Maritime Trust. He was also the man accused of embezzling forty-two million dollars of union pension funds from the Boston Longshoremen's Association. Two weeks before the federal indictment came down, his sailboat was found adrift three miles off the coast of Marblehead, the deck smeared with his blood, a suicide note weighed down by a brass compass on the navigation table.
His body was never recovered. The court declared him dead in absentia eighteen months later. My father had delivered the eulogy at Trinity Church, weeping openly as he praised his "flawed, tragic brother in commerce."
"You're dead," I whispered.
"Your father was an artist with paper and blood," Vance wheezed from behind the door. "He didn't want me dead. If I died, the feds would have dug until they found the offshore accounts in the Caymans. If I lived, I could testify. So he gave me a third option. He told me I would stay down here for six months until the heat died down, until he could arrange a transport to Argentina under a Panamanian passport."
"And he left you here."
"He came every Sunday," Vance rasped, his voice dropping into a venomous hiss. "He brought me canned beef, dry bread, five-gallon jugs of water, and the Sunday *Globe*. He sat right where you are sitting, Gabriel. He would read the real estate section aloud to me through the hatch. He told me the world outside was looking for me with shotguns. He told me the Longshoremen had put a two-hundred-thousand-dollar bounty on my head. He said if I took one step onto Mount Vernon Street, they would skin my daughters alive."
My mind spun. "Grace. What does Grace have to do with this?"
"Grace is my niece," Vance coughed, the sound rattling like dry bones. "My sister’s girl. When Julian died... when your father’s heart finally burst in that whorehouse in Providence... Grace came to clean the house. Julian had left her an envelope. A stipend. Five thousand dollars a month in cash, hidden in the carriage house floorboards, on one condition: she kept the water running through the feed line, and she kept the food coming through the slot. If she stopped, the money stopped. If she told you... Julian told her you would put her in prison as an accessory."
I closed my eyes. The cold, mechanical cruelty of my father was a known quantity to me, but this—this was an architecture of torment so precise, so completely sociopathic, it defied belief.
"Where is the key, Vance?" I asked, looking at the bronze dials of the combination lock.
May you like
"There is no key," Vance whispered. "Julian told me the combination once. He said he would only tell Grace if I became uncooperative. But she never knew it. She only had the key to the dumbwaiter shaft from the cellar that feeds the supply pipe. Gabriel... Gabriel, please. The pipe froze three days ago. I haven't had water since Tuesday. I am licking the condensation off the granite. Open the door."
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