Chapter 23
By late afternoon, Sterling had arranged for us to stay at a secluded private residence owned by his firm in the coastal town of Rockport, two hours north of Boston. The house sat on a high granite cliff overlooking the gray, churning waters of the Atlantic, surrounded by tall pine trees and a heavy iron fence.
Inside, the house was warm and silent. Eleanor sat near the wide glass windows of the sunroom, watching the white foam break against the black rocks below. Her appearance had changed subtly over the past twenty-four hours; the stooped, terrified posture she had maintained at the estate was slowly loosening, though her hand still twitched every time a door clicked open in the hallway.
I walked into the sunroom carrying two mugs of hot tea, setting one down on the small table beside her.
"Maya is sleeping upstairs," I said, sitting down in the armchair across from her. "The nurse Sterling hired says her fever from yesterday is completely gone."
Eleanor looked down at her tea, her reflection floating in the dark liquid. "I remember him now, Clara," she said quietly.
I paused, holding my mug halfway to my lips. "Who?"
"Our father," Eleanor whispered. "When I was six years old, a man used to visit my mother's small house in Cambridge every third Tuesday. He wore heavy wool coats that smelled of cedar wood and expensive cigars. He never let me call him dad. He told me to call him Uncle Arthur."
She looked up at me, a single tear spilling over her lower eyelid and running down her pale cheek. "He gave me a small silver music box for my seventh birthday. It played a German lullaby. After my mother died in the fire, that music box was the only thing I had left. But when Julian moved me into the Blackwood estate four years ago, he took it away. He said little girls who don't follow rules don't deserve music."
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"Julian took everything from you," I said, my teeth grinding together in quiet rage. "He tried to erase every trace of who you were."
"No," Eleanor said, setting her tea down and looking straight into my eyes with a firmness I had never seen in her before. "He took my freedom, Clara. But he didn't erase my memory. The silver music box wasn't just a toy. My mother hid the master encryption key to her original lab research inside the brass mechanism. Julian has been trying to crack that box for four years."
