Chapter Thirteen: The Parking Lot
Nolan crossed the lot carrying a cardboard tube and wearing a clean gray suit.
He smiled at Priya, ignored Evan, and stopped when he saw Claire.
“You should have called me before bringing strangers into this,” he told her.
Claire did not move.
“You were selling spaces that don’t exist.”
Nolan turned to Priya.
“The east wing is a backup arrangement, and my daughter has a history of misinterpreting stressful situations.”
Evan recognized the sentence from Claire’s account of the first festival.
Priya asked Nolan to show her the signed authorization for using the east wing.
He opened the cardboard tube and produced a rolled plan.
The plan contained sixty-four booths, with no mention of the locked room.
Priya held it beside the version on her tablet.
The drawings carried the same revision date.
One showed eighty spaces, and the other showed sixty-four.
Nolan looked at the documents and said nothing.
A security guard stepped closer when Nolan reached for Priya’s tablet.
“Don’t touch that,” the guard said.
Nolan lowered his hand.
For the first time, his confidence seemed less like authority and more like a habit that had finally stopped working.
Chapter Fourteen: What Iris Recorded
Back at the house, Iris watched the market confrontation on a video call with Claire.
She had wanted to travel to the hall, but Evan insisted she stay away from Nolan.
Iris accepted the decision and returned to editing the mailbox footage.
She noticed that Marla’s first swing had struck the box from the front, but the last swing had landed against the side facing the road.
The shift mattered because Nolan had instructed Marla to stand where she would block Evan’s view of the basement steps.
Iris built a simple diagram showing the sight lines from the kitchen, the porch, and the upstairs window.
Her school project had suddenly become a lesson in how a distraction could be staged.
She sent the diagram to Evan and asked whether the basement door had been visible from the street.
He checked the photographs and confirmed that the door was hidden behind a tall hedge.
Whoever entered the basement had known exactly where it was.
Evan remembered Nolan attending a neighborhood barbecue two years earlier and asking for a tour of the renovated house.
Nolan had seen the basement then.
He had also admired Iris’s miniature neighborhood model, which now lay crushed on the closet floor.
Chapter Fifteen: The Person in the Blue Jacket
Marla called Evan on Friday morning and said someone had left a note beneath her door.
The note contained only an address and the words, “Ask about the blue jacket.”
Evan took the note to Claire, who recognized the address as an equipment rental yard outside town.
They arrived to find a woman loading folding tables onto a truck.
Her name was Becca Rowan, and she had worked for Nolan during both festivals.
She listened to their questions without stopping her work.
“I wore the jacket,” she said at last.
“Did you enter my basement?” Evan asked.
Becca nodded.
“Nolan told me the banner belonged to him and that your wife had agreed to return it.”
“Why didn’t you knock?”
“He said you would be outside dealing with a repair.”
Becca looked ashamed.
“I thought he meant a broken mailbox hinge.”
She admitted taking the banner and handing it to Nolan behind a grocery store.
When he unrolled it and found only painted canvas, he became furious.
“He thought something was sewn into the edge,” she said.
“Then he made me search it with a pocketknife.”
Claire closed her eyes.
“That’s what he used to tell me,” she whispered.
“He always thought someone had hidden proof because he couldn’t imagine anyone simply remembering what he did.”
