Page 16 of Scarred By Sin

“Nestor Ellingham was a good man. I know what people in town say about him. That he was strange, that he lost his mind after Claudine died, that he cared more about his plants and research than his own daughter.” Porter shook his head as they reached the landing where the staircase split. “None of that is true. He was grieving. He was trying to find a cure for the disease that killed his wife so that it wouldn’t kill anyone else. That’s not madness. That’s love.”

“It sounds as if the two of you were close.”

“He was my employer.” Porter came to a complete stop on the higher landing. “But he always treated me with respect. He was quiet, yes. Kept to himself more than most. But he was gentle. Patient. The kind of man who’d spend an hour helping me repair a leaky pipe and never once mention that he had three degrees hanging on his wall.”

This wasn’t a man defending an employer. This was a man defending someone he’d admired. Bit wasn’t sure how to respond, but he was saved from speaking when Porter continued down the stairs.

The tour had circled back to the ground floor.

As they descended into the foyer, Bit studied the dining room to the right once more. A long wooden table that could easily seat twelve occupied the center of the room. Two slender candles in brass candelabras sat atop a faded runner, their wax long since dripped and hardened. The curtains were drawn, but that didn’t stop a thin blade of light from slipping between the panels.

“Would it be alright if I set up my equipment in there?” Bit asked before he glanced in Porter’s direction. “The room is large enough for what I need, and the table would save me from having to bring in folding ones.”

“I don’t see why not. No one’s used it in years.”

Bit was already mentally mapping the power outlet locations and the proximity to the nearest window for his router placement when he caught movement at the top of the staircase. He turned with the intention of introducing himself, but the words got stuck in the back of his throat.

A woman stood on the upper landing, just to the left of where the banister curved. She was thin, almost gaunt, and she wore a long gray cardigan that hung past her knees. Her hair was dark, falling straight and uncombed past her shoulders. She was motionless, both hands gripping the banister rail.

She slowly tilted her head, as if studying him.

Bit took an involuntary step backward, and his elbow connected with a vase on the small table behind him. He spun and caught it with both hands before it hit the floor, his fingers closing around the porcelain with the kind of reflexive desperation usually reserved for catching a phone over a toilet. He set the vase back on the table with exaggerated care, steadied it until he was confident it wasn’t going to topple, and then turned back toward the staircase.

The landing was empty.

She was gone. No footsteps. No creak of a floorboard. No sound of a door closing. She had simply been there and then not been there, as though the house had absorbed her back into itself.

Bit couldn’t tear his gaze from the empty landing.

This was it. This was how he died. Not at the hands of Jacob Walsh, not in some catastrophic drone malfunction during a surveillance op, not even from the amount of sugar he consumed on an hourly basis. He was going to be murdered in a crumbling Indiana mansion by some woman in a long cardigan that matched the color of his knitted beanie.

Porter cleared his throat. Bit reluctantly switched his focus, finding that the man was now standing beside the front door with his hands in his pockets, entirely untroubled.

“That was Miss Ellingham?”

“That was her.”

Bit nodded slowly. He sure hoped that Theo and the others would join him soon. One thing was for sure…he wasn’t leaving the lower level until everyone else decided to retire for the night.

“I’m going to go get those cases now.”

Bit walked toward the front door, paused, and turned back to glance at the top of the staircase one more time.

Still empty.

He was definitely going to need a bigger monitoring station.

7

Brooklyn Sloane

July 2026

Wednesday — 4:21 pm

Brook carried a small bowl of grapes into the dining room and paused in the doorway to appreciate what Bit had accomplished in the span of two hours. The long wooden table that had likely hosted formal dinners decades ago was now divided into four distinct workstations, each marked by a laptop, a charging dock, and a small stack of file folders that Arden had prepared before their departure.

Cables ran in organized bundles along the table’s edge and down to several power strips on the floor. At the far end of the table, Bit had positioned the firm’s large portable monitor on a low stand, its screen currently active and casting a blue-white glow across the faded runner and the brass candelabras that no one had bothered to move.