The Blue Ridge Project: A Dark Suspense Novel (The Project Book 1) (4 page)

—Next Day—

A blue van with spots of blood-colored rust on the roof pulled into an unmarked parking space about fifty meters from a squa
t,
brick warehouse. Blue smoke belched from the van’s exhaust as the engine coughed and went quiet. The van had arrived by a lane, dusty with loose earth, that curved and disappeared into a dense forest. Tall, sickly grass surrounded the building, and trees stood in a perimeter that blocked the view of the highway between the outer edges of Beacon City and the towns that lay to the north.

The building was proof that aesthetics in construction were left to rich architects and banks. The original gray was smeared with soot and grime from years as a storag
e-
warehouse. The scene looked even more forlorn in the light of a setting sun.

Frank Mortimer put in his earplugs and stepped out of the van and onto the tarmac. He looked around and grimaced at the view. Frank hated the look of the place almost as much as he hated driving the beat-up old van.

This place could do with some military grooming,
Frank thought, and spat on the grass as he started to walk toward the building.

A formerly obsessive groomer himself, Frank now paid little attention to his appearance. At six-foot-three, he still made an impressive figure, but his physique had begun to deteriorate. Jet-black hair, slicked back and combed daily, had been replaced with a stubbly dome. Having sailed through puberty with little to no outbreaks, now pimples had started to appear on the back of his neck. He ignored them the same way he ignored people on the street, forgetting about them unless they irritated him.

As he neared the only entrance to the building, he saw a pair of boots on the end of a pair of crossed legs, jutting out from underneath a table. Rounding the corner, he saw their owner. The man wore blue overalls and a navy cap with the word '
Security'
stitched across the front in faded yellow. The man unfolded his arms and sat forward as Frank appeared in front of him.

Frank stood there, wordless for a second as they stared at each other, and for the briefest of moments considered running.

“From one, from many,” he said, instead.

The man in the cap nodded. “From all, from none,” he replied. His shoulders relaxed, the tension almost visibly oozing out of him. His gaze never left Frank’s cold blue eyes until Frank walked past him and into the warehouse proper.

Frank reached the door at the far end of the lon
g,
empty room and his eyes passed unseeing over the sign on the door:

'You May Remove Your Earplugs Now'

The next room was small and appeared to be just as empty, except for the square trapdoor in the center of the floor. Frank squatted and hooked his fingers into the small handle and pulled up, revealing a ladder into darkness. He climbed down and flipped a switch on the wall to his left, lighting up the eight-foo
t-
high tunnel that stretched out in front of him.

He reached the end and pushed through another door into another room. It was occupied by an open elevator shaft with a car waiting, and a woman with her back turned to Frank and the door. Her head was bent slightly, writing onto a clipboard. She seemed not to notice Frank’s entrance.

He took a few seconds to admire her form. She had deep red hair that hung in a straight ponytail to the middle of her back. She wore a long, white lab coat, and Frank could see the bottoms of camouflage pants tucked into black combat boots under the hems.

“Subject number three,” she said without turning around.

“Excuse me?” Frank asked, surprised into speaking in a higher voice than usual.

The woman gave a little sigh. “Mortimer, am I right?”

“That’s right, Miss...?”

“Doctor. Ryan. Shall we get to it?” she said as she turned around.

Frank’s jaw dropped slightly as she did. She was quite striking, with strong features that aligned perfectly under her glasses. Green eyes shone out at him from under the lenses. Frank admired the swell of her breasts even under the bulky clothes, and he noted the Project pin with its signature cross and circle, pinned over a name badge: “
Dr. Sylvia Rya
n
.
”

Frank stepped into the elevator after her, catching the scent of shampoo and clean skin. She used something with peaches on the label, he was sure. He closed his eyes and inhaled the smell, and when he opened them Ryan was standing against the back wall of the car with a bored look on her face.

Frank grinned and leaned toward her, one hand covering the button to descend. “Going down, Sylvia?”

She looked him in the eye, showing no sign of discomfort or fear. “Cut the shit, Mortimer. We’re already off schedule. If you’re done reading my tits, let’s get down to the staging area.”

Frank’s face reddened, the grin twisting into a petulant snarl. “How dare yo
u.
Do you know who I—?”

“Who you are? Yes, indee
d,
I do. Francis Randall Mortimer, a pissant child of an uppity family with more money and twisted genes than brains.” Frank looked like he’d been slapped. “Your name might have influence as far as the limits of that excuse for a city you call home,” she continued, “but down here, the Project is in charge. Which means I could boil your brain in piss if I felt like it, and your inbred little
famiglia
would have to smile and ask for seconds. Now push the fucking button.”

Frank’s jaw dropped and hung uselessly. Even as the shock wore off and he dutifully pushed the button to go down, he filed away her name and face for possible retribution one day. The petty boy in him was incredulous that a woman—other than his mother—could speak to him in such a way without fear of reprisal. He ignored her for the rest of the journey down, which took some time. He instead concentrated on what was to come, and a calmness started to creep back over him. A snippet of an old dinner table prayer swam up to the surface of his mind from the murky depths of his memory:
Bless me, Father, for these gifts I am about to receive.

*****

The car that had followed Frank’s van out of the city rolled down the same route Frank had taken, belching exhaust occasionally. It was a gray sedan, with a bumper sticker that said
If You’re Reading This, You’re Too Close!
As with Frank’s van, the driver had chosen a car that wouldn’t draw attention or stick in a memory.

Said owner was Graham Turner, a self-made journalist according to him, a bottom-feeding
paparazzo
according to almost everybody else. His purview was the lifestyles of the rich, the famou
s,
and the mentionables, especially their bad habits and indiscretions. The most money was to be made in the latter and Turner had made his meager living through catching people of note with their pants down, figuratively or otherwise.

His mission today was to catch a Mortimer doing something he wasn’t supposed to be doing. A picture of the son, Frank, doing something untoward could pay out massively. Turner didn’t care if it was through sale of the picture or blackmail, just as long as he got his payday.

He was sure the squeaky-clean bachelor was up to no good, driving out here in the middle of nowhere in a buste
d-
up van when his family was rich enough to have a foundation in their name. Turner parked a good distance from the van, reached around to the back seat to grab his camera with the long-distance lens, and stepped out onto the tarmac.

He began to feel ill immediately. He broke out in a sweat and his stomach churned like a washing machine at the start of a spin cycle. He stood leaning against the front of the car for a second, a headache thumping behind his eyeball
s,
and a loud ringing in his ears. He wiped his soaked forehead with the sleeve of his shirt and started to make his way through the grass, searching for a decent vantage point.

Around forty paces in, close to the warehouse, his headache intensified massively. The pain shot up and down his body, and he felt a pop inside his skull. His left leg went dead and useless beneath him, and he groaned as he fell to his knees. The camera fell and smashed apart on the ground. He heard another pop, like a tiny balloon being pricked with a needle inside his ears, then he fell forward onto the remains of his equipment.

The man with '
Security'
written across his cap came sauntering over the grass toward Turner’s body. He rolled it over with one boo
t-
clad foot and saw the burst capillaries in Turner’s eyes: They were as red as the eyes of a B-movie vampire, and just as dead.

Hell of a tune they play
, the man thought as he went through Turner’s pockets for the keys to the gray sedan. As he stood u
p,
he doubl
e-
checked his earplugs, as he often did after finding someone who had come too close, and strolled over to the car to put it out of sight. The body could wait. He couldn’t even see it from the car, the grass deep enough to hide it. He saw a small flock of birds flying overhead, wheeling to make a wide detour around the building nearby.

Birds are smarter than people
. He chuckled, proud of his philosophical revelation, and got into the driver’s seat of the almost unnoticeable car.

Leanne Duncan’s funeral was held in the Olman Road Cemetery, on the outskirts of Beacon. It had been her wish to be buried in the shadow of the old oak that grew at the top end of the graveyard. However, the tree was no longer standing at the time of her death. It had been chopped down and uprooted, for fear of damage to the graves. Nobody wanted their relatives disturbed by wandering roots underground, or even worse, having the expensive headstones smashed by a falling tree. The caretakers and patron families had been unanimous, and the tree had been removed the year before.

Robert, the priest, and the caretakers — who doubled as gravediggers and pallbearers — were the main attendees that day. The only other people were a couple of older women, who Robert guessed were from his mother’s reading group. They had met every Tuesday and Thursday before she had gone to hospital. As far as Robert remembered, they were the only people in Beacon she had associated with in her older years. He wasn’t sure if the old bats were here to mourn a friend or to gloat in the way old women who survive their peers sometimes do, and he didn’t care either way. He had never spoken to them before and wasn’t about to start now.

Robert checked his watch a few times, and kept looking around. He chided himself every time, as he knew he was expecting his father to appear at the last minute. After years of silence, he still thought that maybe today his father would show up to say goodbye to bury the woman he had loved. He never did.

The ceremony was solemn, but brief, the beatitudes and prayers droning through the still damp air and over the heads of the people gathered at the graveside. When it was finished, the priest and the caretakers shook Robert’s hand and offered their condolences. The old ladies nodded to him and shuffled out of the cemetery without speaking.

Robert went back to his car and sat in the driver’s seat for a minute, staring through the windshield at the molten silver sky. He cried when he saw his mother's body, when the nurse had taken him up to the room to see her before she was wrapped up and sent to the funeral home to be prepared. He had cried again that night when he went back to his hotel room, but this time out of pity. Pity and shame at how she had died alone at the end of her life apart from a son who visited her when it was convenient for him. His eyes had welled up on the morning of the funeral as he had gotten ready, but no tears had fallen. Now he was dry-eyed and empty, and he wondered if that was all the grief he had for her, just a few tears and fewer days.

He started the car and pulled out of the cemetery without looking back. He had a meeting with the executor of the will, arranged for just after the funeral. He started to wonder what might be waiting for him there, if anything, that could keep him in the city past the weekend.

*****

The lawyer’s office was almost exactly as Robert had imagined it would be. Warm, dark wood furniture everywhere with shelves of leather-bound books on the walls. It smelled of cheap polish and expensive furnishings. Pictures of the lawyer decorated the walls, posing with who Robert assumed were well known names and faces that he didn’t recognize.
Before my time
, Robert thought, looking at some of the black and whites.

The lawyer himself, Fred Minnow, was in his sixties at least by Robert’s estimation. He looked to Robert like a man who would die in his office rather than retire. He welcomed Robert in with a firm handshake and indicated the seat opposite as he sat in his own large chair behind his mammoth mahogany desk.

“Mr. Duncan,” he said, after the necessary greetings and condolences were offered, “I’m sure you’re a busy man and you’re eager to be off, so we’ll get straight to it. Your mother has left you the house and a fair sum in her will, which will become available to you within a few days. There are also some items that have been bequeathed to you. Some of which, like these files”—Minnow waved toward a stack of folders in a cardboard box with '
Duncan'
written in black marker on the side—“are here and you can take them away today. Others are in storage, and will require you to present yourself to the storage facility in order to collect them. I tried to arrange to have it all brought here, but the will was very clear that you, and only you, were to collect these items.”

Robert frowned and sat back into the chair with his hand to his chin. “What kind of items?”

Minnow shrugged. “I can’t say. The will refers to the contents of a security box, but doesn’t specify what those contents are. You’ll have to find out for yourself. I have the address and key here. Would you like me to read you the will?”

Robert thought for a second, then shook his head. “That won’t be necessary. I’ll take it to the family home; I have to stop off there anyway. I’ll take the files, too.”

“Quite understandable, I imagine you’re exhausted after the past few days. Awful circumstances, but at least you were there for her at the end, yes?”

Robert nodded, and tried to convince himself that he had indeed been there for her, and not just for his own conscience.

“Okay, then,” Minnow continued, “if you’ll just sign here I can hand all of this over.”

Robert took the gold pen Minnow offered, signed, stood up and offered his hand. “Thank you, Mr. Minnow. I appreciate all you’ve done.”

Minnow took his hand and shook it firmly. “That’s perfectly fine, Mr. Duncan. And once again, my deepest condolences. Will you be staying in town long?” Minnow’s eyebrow was raised, genuine interest on his face.

“No, I don’t believe I will, Mr. Minnow. Have a nice day.”

“You, too, Mr. Duncan, take care.” He leaned over in his seat. “Sally?” Minnow called out the door of his office. “Sally? Can you show Mr. Duncan out, please? And give him a hand with the files, there’s a good girl.”

“That’s okay, Sally,” Robert said as she appeared at the door, “I can deal with it.”

The receptionist smiled as he passed her with the box in his hands, the envelope with the will and key to the storage locker in his back pocket. He got to his car and laid the box on the back seat, got in front, and pulled out onto the street.

On the drive out to his old house, what he had thought of as his mother’s house for most of his life, his mind began to wander. He started to think about his father again, after not thinking of him for a long time before the funeral. His father, who had left in the middle of the night when he was eleven years old and never come back. His father, who had never contacted them since. Robert had asked his mother many times when he was younger if she had known where he was, but she always deflected the question, or teared up and pleaded ignorance. Soon enough, he had stopped asking. Not long after, he had stopped caring as much.

He wondered what was so secret that he had to go out to a storage locker to look at. Maybe it was something to do with his father’s disappearance. Perhaps the will would shed some more light on things. Robert put his foot down on the gas pedal, and the car leaped forward into the approaching night. The rain that had been threatening all day started to fall, the clouds black against the darkening sky.