They tore it up.”

“Why did you send my daughter to me?” Elijah asked.

Esther glanced toward the water.

“Because Lydia Vale asked me to find the man who repaired the west wing.” Elijah felt his mouth go dry.

“Where is she?” “I don’t know where they’ve taken her now.” Esther produced a second scrap of paper.

“She told me that if the name in the cellar appeared again, the records would be moved.” Elijah took the note but did not unfold it.

“What records?” Esther met his eyes.

“The list of the people who were stolen, and the names of the men who sold them.”

Chapter 6: The List of the Living

Esther’s second note contained five names, each separated by a short horizontal line.

There was no heading and no explanation, but Elijah recognized the last name.

Isaac Fenwick had served as a cook at a river hotel until two winters earlier, when his mother said he had vanished while traveling to find work in Baltimore.

His family had been free for generations.

Elijah knew this because Isaac’s uncle had once brought documents to Riverbend while helping repair a ferry landing.

The colonel had called the uncle insolent for carrying papers that proved his freedom.

Now Isaac’s name appeared on a list associated with the colonel’s cellar.

Esther told Elijah that the five names were only a beginning.

Lydia had memorized dozens more before the brokers discovered she was copying their books.

Esther had met her inside the holding house, where Lydia claimed to be a seamstress from the mountains.

She spoke little in front of guards and moved carefully around the rooms, measuring doors with her eyes.

When the men slept, she wrote names on scraps of fabric that could be hidden in seams.

“She wasn’t free to leave,” Esther said.

“They kept her because she could read accounts, but they didn’t trust her.” Elijah asked why Richard would hold his wife’s sister for so many years.

Esther looked bewildered.

“He hasn’t kept her in one place all that time.

She’s escaped him more than once.”

The statement challenged everything Elijah believed about the household.

He had imagined a single long captivity, a hidden room beneath a polished staircase.

Instead Lydia had traveled, gathered witnesses, worked under false names, and been captured again while trying to expose a conspiracy.

Esther said Lydia had sent warnings to judges and ministers, but letters disappeared, witnesses recanted under threats, and the brokers changed routes whenever suspicion grew.