The Lighthouse Necklace
Chapter 03 - The Lighthouse Necklace
Isabella met Ethan at a public café the next morning with her aunt Ruth. She wore jeans and a green coat that had been carefully repaired at one cuff. Ethan arrived with his attorney, Naomi Brooks, and introduced her before asking permission to discuss the pendant.
“My sister Mara was twenty-nine,” Isabella said. “She volunteered with a roadside emergency-response program while studying to become a paramedic. Six months ago, she called me from the interstate. She said there'd been a bad crash and she was helping a man who couldn't move his legs.”
Ethan's throat tightened.
“She left me a voicemail. I still have it.” Isabella turned her phone across the table.
Mara's voice was breathless and close to tears: “Izzy, I'm with someone. The car was hit. I've called an ambulance. I'll be late. Tell Ben I love him.”
Then, farther from the microphone: “Stay with me. Look at this lighthouse. Follow the light.”
Ethan closed his eyes. He remembered wet asphalt, the taste of blood, and a silver pendant swinging above him. “She put pressure on a wound near my shoulder,” he whispered. “She talked to me until I heard sirens.”
Isabella nodded. “Then Mara disappeared. Her car was found burned beside an access road two days later. There was no body. Police said they couldn't confirm what happened. People started calling her dead anyway.”
Their father had passed away years earlier, leaving Isabella responsible for Ben, now seventeen. Mara had helped pay his medical bills before she vanished. The hospital social worker was helping the family apply for assistance, but they were running out of savings.
“Why did Chad look at your necklace?” Ethan asked.
“Because Mara worked at his company's charity fundraiser the day before she disappeared. She said she saw something on a laptop she wasn't supposed to see.”
Naomi wrote down the details. Ethan asked if Isabella had shared them with detectives.
May you like
“Everything. They said they'd follow up.”
Ethan looked at the pendant one final time. His memory couldn't prove what had happened to Mara. But the woman who'd reached through the wreckage and kept him conscious had a name. And for the first time, he had someone to thank.
