Page 85 of The Final Gambit

About Will Blake and the decision to hide a dangerous man’s only grandchild in plain sight. I thought about Toby’s poem, the one we’d decoded months ago.

Secrets, lies,

All I despise.

The tree is poison,

Don’t you see?

It poisoned S and Z and me.

The evidence I stole

Is in the darkest hole.

Light shall reveal all

I writ upon the…

“Wall,” I finished now, the way I had then. But this time my brain was seeing all of it through a new lens. If Toby had known what the seal was when he stole it, that meant he knew who Will Blake was, who Vincent Blake was. And if Toby knew that…

What else had he known?

The evidence I stole

Is in the darkest hole.

When I’d recited this poem for Eve, she’d asked me,Evidence of what?She’d been looking for answers, for proof.For a body, I thought.Or more realistically at this point, for bones.But Eve hadn’t found any of it yet. If she had, Blake wouldn’t have laid this task before me.

I want the truth that Tobias Hawthorne hid from me all these years. I want to know what happened to my son.

Hawthorne House was full of dark places: hidden compartments, secret passages, buried tunnels. Maybe all Toby had ever found was the seal.Or maybe he found human remains.That thought was insidious because some part of me had suspected, deep down, that that was what we were looking for, before Vincent Blake had ever told me as much.

His son had come here. He’d targeted a child under Tobias Hawthorne’s protection. In hishome.

Where would a man like Tobias Hawthorne hide a body?

Oren had disposed of Sheffield Grayson’s body—how, I wasn’t sure. But Vincent Blake’s son had disappeared long before Oren had come to work for the old man. Back then, the Hawthorne fortune was new and considerably smaller. Tobias Hawthorne probably hadn’t even had security.

Back then, Hawthorne House was just another mansion.

Tobias Hawthorne added onto it every year.That thought wound its way through my mind; my heart pumped it through my veins.

And suddenly, I knew where to start.

I pulled out the blueprints that Mr. Laughlin had given me. Each one detailed an addition that Tobias Hawthorne had made to Hawthorne House over the decades since it was built.The garage. The spa. The movie theater. The bowling alley.I unrolled sheet after sheet, plan after plan.The rock-climbing wall. The tennis court.I found plans for a gazebo, an outdoor kitchen, a greenhouse, and so much more.

Think, I told myself. There were layers of purpose in everything Tobias Hawthorne had ever done—everything he’dbuilt. I thought about the compartment at the bottom of the swimming pool, about the secret passages in the House, the tunnels beneath the estate, all of it.

There were a thousand places that Tobias Hawthorne could have hidden his darkest secret. If I came at this randomly, I’d get nowhere. I had to be logical. Systematic.

Lay the plans out in chronological order, I thought.

Only a handful of blueprints were marked with years, but each set showed how the proposed addition would be integrated with the House or surrounding property. I needed to find the earliest plan—the one in which the House was the smallest, the simplest—and work forward from there.

I went through page after page until I found it: the original Hawthorne House. Slowly, painstakingly, I put the rest of the blueprints in order. By dawn, I’d made it halfway through, but that was enough. Based on the few sets that had dates on them, I could calculate years for the rest.

I’d been focused on the wrong question in Toby’s wing.Not where Tobias Hawthorne would have hidden a body—but when?I knew the year that Toby had been born, but not the month. That let me narrow it down to two sets of plans.