He never ate a single bite of the midnight meals you delivered for two years, the estate attorney told sixty-eight-year-old Arthur Pendelton inside the empty probate office.
The next morning, I found myself locked out of the diner entirely. Greg had changed the locks, leaving a terse note taped to the door: “Due to emergency health and safety concerns, premises are closed. Contact legal counsel for access.”
The rain started then, a cold, relentless downpour that mirrored the chill in my own heart. I didn’t know where to go. My own home felt miles away, and my daughter, Clara, was at work.
I saw the bus shelter at the edge of town, its corrugated metal roof offering scant protection from the deluge. I huddled inside, the cold seeping through my worn jacket.
My head pounded. The weight of Jasper’s secret, Greg’s relentless campaign, and the growing supernatural presence beneath the diner was crushing me.
A figure rushed in, shaking out a dripping umbrella, and settled onto the bench beside me. The scent of damp wool and jasmine filled the small space.
It was Brenda Higgins. Greg’s ex-wife.
She looked tired, her eyes red-rimmed, but there was a flicker of something else in them—a cautious determination.
We sat in silence for a moment, the drumming of rain on the roof the only sound.
“Arthur,” she finally said, her voice soft, “I heard what Greg is doing. The flyers. The talk around town.”
I just nodded, unable to meet her gaze. The shame was a bitter taste.
She leaned closer. “I need to tell you something. Something I should have said a long time ago.”
Brenda worked as a bookkeeper for several small businesses in Hollow Creek, including, until recently, the diner. She saw everything, the quiet numbers, the hidden ledgers.
“Greg… he was looking for something in the diner’s lower storage rooms months ago,” she confessed, her voice barely a whisper. “He knew about the strange phenomena.”
My head snapped up. “He knew?”
“Yes,” she insisted. “He always called them ‘drafts’ or ‘settling.’ But I saw him down there, poking around. Not for inventory. He was looking for hidden ledgers, he said, for secret funds Jasper might have had.”
Her gaze met mine, unwavering. “He found… something else. He came back agitated, but also excited. He started looking into insurance policies.”
She paused, taking a shaky breath. “He had a grand plan. To destroy the building, collect a fat insurance payout, and then sell the empty lot for commercial development. He’d been talking to developers for months.”
“He was provoking it,” I realized, the pieces clicking into place with a sickening thud. “He was deliberately disturbing whatever was down there.”
“He didn’t care what it was,” Brenda confirmed, her voice laced with self-loathing. “He just saw dollar signs. And an easy way to cover up some of his own… past dealings.”
A new kind of cold enveloped me, colder than the rain, colder than the cellar. Greg wasn’t just greedy. He was utterly ruthless, willing to unleash an unknown horror for a fortune.
“I have proof, Arthur,” Brenda said, reaching into her bag and pulling out a small, worn leather journal. “His private notes. His financial schemes. Everything.”
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