Chapter 5 — Chapter 05

Mrs. Ashworth returned on Sunday evening. I met her in the parlor with the watch in my pocket and the journal on the table between us.

"Your husband found something beneath this house," I said.

Her face went pale. "He told me never to go down there."

"He was trying to protect you." I slid the journal across to her. "And I think he was murdered for what he knew."

She opened the journal with trembling hands. I watched her read — watched her expression shift from confusion to recognition to something that looked almost like relief.

"He wasn't mad," she whispered. "He wasn't losing his mind."

"No. But the man who killed him wants you to believe he was." I leaned forward. "Reginald Voight. How long has he been after your husband's share of the business?"

Her eyes widened. "How did you—"

"Because he visited my office to tell me your husband was unwell. To plant the idea that you were too. To make sure any suspicions about Arthur's death would be dismissed as grief and madness." I took out my notebook. "The question is: what did Arthur know that was worth killing for? And what does Voight think is down in that cellar?"

She was quiet for a long moment. Then she said, "Arthur inherited something from his father. A ledger, he called it. Documents from before the quake — land deeds, construction contracts, payoffs to city officials. The kind of thing powerful men would kill to keep buried."

"Where is it now?"

"I don't know. He hid it. Said if anything happened to him, the truth would find a way out." She looked at me with those burning eyes. "He said the city remembers. The dead remember. And someday, someone would make them answer for what they did."

I thought of the watch in my pocket, ticking in a heartbeat that shouldn't have existed.

"I think," I said slowly, "that your husband is still trying to tell you something."

---

The breakthrough came from an unexpected source.

I'd been digging into Voight's business dealings for two days when a Chinatown contact of mine — a man who dealt in information the way other men dealt in produce — asked to meet.

"Elias Coe," he said, pouring tea I didn't drink. "You ask questions about Pacific Heights. About houses built after the great fire."

"I ask questions about a lot of things."

"This is different." He leaned closer. "The men who rebuilt that district — they were not careful men. They cut corners. They buried things. And when the Chinese laborers found what was beneath the foundations..." He spread his hands. "Some of them are still missing."

"What did they find?"

"Bodies. Not from the fire. From before. Many, many bodies." He met my eyes. "The kind of deaths that make ghosts angry, Mr. Coe. The kind that never stop burning."

I thought of Arthur Ashworth's journal. *They're the fire that didn't stop burning.*

"And Voight? The man I'm asking about?"

My contact smiled without warmth. "His father was one of the developers. The one who signed the payoffs. If the dead beneath Pacific Heights want justice, Mr. Voight has much to answer for."