The line went dead silent.
Not the silence of a bad connection, but the heavy, suffocating silence of someone whose breath had just been stolen.
“Where did you hear that name?” Miriam’s voice had lost all its professional composure. It was barely a breath.
“Answer me, Miriam. Did my father know Caroline Harper? Did he know Lucas?”
A long, trembling sigh escaped her lips. “Anne… your father didn’t just know about Laurel House. He was the lead investigator on Caroline’s disappearance before he retired from the force.”
My knees nearly gave out. My father had been a police detective for twenty years before transitioning into private security, but he had rarely spoken about his old cases.
“He never closed it,” Miriam continued quietly. “It was the one case that haunted him. A woman vanishes from her home, leaving a six-year-old daughter and a teenage nephew behind. The nephew—Lucas—was the last person to see her alive.”
