Chapter 16 - The Blackwell Fixer
Otis Frame had worked for Warren for twenty-three years.
He was never listed as an executive.
Never appeared in company photographs.
Never attended public events.
But his name surfaced whenever Blackwell business faced trouble.
A contractor threatened to expose unsafe construction materials.
He withdrew the complaint.
A councilman resisted one of Warren’s developments.
Private photographs appeared online.
A union organizer disappeared from Millstone.
Police classified it as voluntary flight.
Otis solved problems.
Meredith had known him since childhood.
He waited in the car outside family dinners.
Carried sealed envelopes.
Entered Warren’s office through the side door.
When Meredith was sixteen, she saw Otis washing blood from his shirt in the mansion laundry room.
Warren told her a deer had been struck on the road.
She believed him because believing anything else meant accepting who her father was.
Years later, Otis vanished.
Warren said he died overseas.
But bank records showed monthly payments to a shell company long after his supposed death.
Detectives traced the latest transfer.
It was made three days before the foundry fire.
The recipient used an ATM outside Altoona.
Security footage captured a thin older man with white hair and a scar beneath one eye.
Meredith identified him immediately.
Otis Frame was alive.
A state-wide alert was issued.
Caleb sat beside Lily’s hospital bed while police searched.
She had not spoken since saying “furnace.”
He placed his military watch on the tray.
The steady ticking used to help her sleep during thunderstorms.
Her eyes moved toward it.
“Daddy stayed,” Caleb whispered.
Her fingers shifted.
He did not ask what happened.
He did not say Warren’s name.
He simply remained there.
Several minutes later, Lily whispered, “The man was crying.”
Caleb leaned closer.
“What man?”
Her eyes moved toward the curtain.
“The one under the floor.”
“Otis?”
Lily closed her eyes.
“He said Grandpa would burn us both.”
Caleb’s breath stopped.
Us.
Not only Lily.
Someone else had been held in the foundry.
Someone Warren believed could expose him.
👉 Lily revealed that Otis had been trapped beneath the furnace too—and Warren threatened to burn both the child and the man alive.
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