A Lawyer Stopped My Wedding With My Dead Mother’s Deed—Then My Mother-in-Law Turned White

Chapter 05 - The Basement Office

We found Thomas’s abandoned car in the employee parking garage.

The driver’s door was unlocked. His phone lay on the front seat, crushed beneath the heel of a shoe.

Daniel immediately called the police.

Margaret insisted Thomas had probably left because he was overwhelmed.

“My husband has a heart condition,” she said. “This spectacle has placed him under unbearable stress.”

Henry studied her carefully. “Then why did he leave his medication in his jacket?”

Margaret did not answer.

Rosa approached me while officers searched the garage.

“Your mother kept an office in the basement,” she said. “Margaret closed it after Nora died.”

“I thought Mom worked upstairs.”

“She did. But after the fire, she refused to use the executive wing.”

Rosa led Sarah and me down a service corridor behind the hotel kitchen. The polished marble gave way to concrete floors and exposed pipes.

At the end of the hall was a blue door secured with a new padlock.

“That lock wasn’t here last month,” Rosa said.

Henry obtained permission from the police to cut it.

Inside, dust covered an old desk, filing cabinets and shelves filled with banquet records. My mother’s faded cardigan still hung from the back of a chair.

Seeing it nearly brought me to my knees.

I touched the sleeve.

It smelled faintly of cedar and the lavender hand cream she always carried.

On the wall was a photograph of my mother standing beside Franklin Whitmore, Daniel’s grandfather. Between them was a younger Thomas.

They were covered in soot.

Behind them, smoke poured from the upper floors of the Bellmore Grand.

“The fire,” I whispered.

Rosa nodded. “Twenty-six years ago.”

I would have been seven.

Daniel would have been ten.

“Your mother went back inside three times,” Rosa said. “She carried guests out through the service stairs.”

“Why didn’t she ever tell me?”

“Because one of the people she saved spent years making her feel ashamed of it.”

Margaret.

We searched the desk.

Most drawers were empty, but I found scratch marks beneath the bottom one. Henry removed the drawer completely and revealed a narrow metal compartment.

Inside was a hotel guestbook, its leather cover blackened by fire.

Several pages had been torn out.

One remained folded near the center.

The handwriting belonged to my mother.

If anything happens to me, ask Thomas what Margaret locked in Room 614.

Daniel stared at the note.

“Room 614 was sealed after the fire,” he said.

“Why?”

He looked at the charred guestbook.

“Because that was the room where my grandfather died.”

A police officer appeared in the doorway.

“We found Mr. Whitmore.”