The Dust Collector (eBook)

A Locked Room. A Hidden Manuscript. A Killer Story.

Bilal Salman (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2025 | 1. Auflage
230 Seiten
Publishdrive (Verlag)
978-0-00-112340-3 (ISBN)

Infos

A famous author is found dead in her locked study. Her final manuscript? Missing.

Nora Hemsley was hired to clean the house-not uncover its secrets. But when bestselling novelist Miranda Vale is murdered under impossible circumstances, Nora is drawn into a maze of erased stories, coded drafts, and one question no one dares ask:

What if your life could be rewritten against your will?

As Nora uncovers the truth behind Miranda's final work, she realizes it isn't just fiction being edited-it's reality itself. And the next draft... might not include her.

If you love psychological thrillers with haunting secrets, literary twists, and unforgettable female leads, this is the book that will keep you turning pages deep into the night.

Perfect for fans of Alex Michaelides, Simone St. James, and The Thirteenth Tale.

Textauszug

Chapter 1

 

 

The room still carried her perfume, though she had been gone for hours. It was a peculiar scent, one I had grown accustomed to over the years: cedarwood sharpened with ink, a fragrance expensive yet strange, edged with something faintly metallic, as though ambition itself had been distilled into a bottle. It clung stubbornly to everything—velvet curtains heavy with dust, the leather of her chair, the typewriter ribbon that stained her fingers black. Even the unfinished coffee on her desk, cooling into bitterness, seemed saturated with it. When I lifted the cup, the porcelain trembled against my hand as though it shared my unease.

I stood at the threshold, unable to cross. The rug beneath my feet met the hardwood in a neat line, and it felt like a border I had no right to step over, a boundary between the ordinary duties of my life and the nightmare that had begun within. My heart beat unevenly, shallow breaths fogging in my chest. I told myself to move, but my body lingered, tethered by dread.

The door, they said, had been locked from the inside. There was only one other key. Mine.

When I first saw her slumped in the writing chair, I thought she was asleep, her hair veiling her face like a curtain. I whispered her name, the way I always did when she wrote too long and forgot to eat. She didn’t stir. I whispered again, louder. Nothing. It was only when I saw the blood—dark, steady, trailing a thin line down her blouse—that I understood. The tray slid from my hands before I could stop it. China shattered across the rug. The sound should have woken something in me, some primal scream, but it didn’t. Nothing stirred, not even in me. The silence swallowed everything.

Now the house wasn’t mine anymore. It belonged to the police.

Two detectives prowled through Miranda Vale’s sanctuary. One in uniform remained stationed at the front door like a sentinel, while the others picked through the air she had once filled with words. The younger detective looked at me like I was a fingerprint on glass—unwanted, smudged, a blemish he meant to wipe away. His hair was clipped sharp, his notepad already filled with neat, efficient accusations. The older one said little, only observed, his eyes roaming her shelves as if Miranda herself might be tucked between the spines, waiting to be found.

I stood in the hallway, fingers curled into the hem of my cardigan to stop the trembling. I wasn’t crying. The tears would come later, perhaps when the house was empty again, when silence became unbearable. For now, I felt only the cold.

“She didn’t open the door?” the younger detective asked. His voice carried the polished indifference of someone who had already decided my role in this story.

“No,” I said softly.

“And you knocked?”

“Three times. She always answered.”

“And when she didn’t?”

“I used my key.”

He tilted his head, writing as though each word carried its own weight. “And you found her… like that?”

I nodded, my throat dry.

“Why did you have a key to her private office?”

“She gave it to me.”

“Did she trust you?”

The question caught me off guard. Miranda never trusted anyone fully—not her editors, not her readers, certainly not her publishers. Did she trust me? I thought of the mornings she let me carry in her coffee, the evenings when she asked me to close the curtains so she could work in darkness, the way she sometimes muttered secrets to her typewriter that I was never meant to hear.

“Yes,” I answered. “But not with everything.”

“What do you mean?”

“She trusted me with her tea, her mail, the order of her house. She trusted me to make it look unlived in when she was gone. But Miranda Vale never trusted anyone with her words. Not until they were finished. She believed in stories, not people.”

The detective wrote this down too, his pen scratching like a blade across the page.

They didn’t let me into the room again, claiming they had to preserve the scene, but they hadn’t seen what I had when I first entered. They didn’t notice the blood, small but deliberate, spreading toward the rug’s edge. They didn’t see that her coffee cup had been moved from its usual coaster. They didn’t realize her perfume was weaker than it should have been, diluted almost to nothing, as though someone had tried to wipe her away.

And they didn’t ask the only question that mattered.

Where was the manuscript?

Two years of work. Two years of locked doors, unanswered calls, late-night typewriter keys clattering like teeth in the dark. She called it the book that would bury everything. She said it was dangerous, that it had teeth, that if it escaped it would finish what her enemies had started. She never named those enemies, but Miranda didn’t need to. Her words had always been sharp enough to wound without permission.

That night, they released me. Not arrested, not yet, but their glances as I walked past them told me all I needed to know. In their story, I had already been cast: the housekeeper, the invisible servant, the shadow who moved through locked doors and polished away sins.

The one with the key.

When they were gone, I moved through the house like I always did after the world intruded. I straightened pillows she never used, rinsed the coffee cup she never finished, folded the blanket at the end of her bed as if she might return to it. It was ritual as much as duty, the kind of pattern that gave me purpose when everything else was breaking.

At last, I found myself before her writing room once more. The door was sealed now with their tape, bright and foreign against the wood. I stood there, breathing the fading remnants of her perfume, feeling the silence press against me.

That was when I saw it.

A single sheet of paper, curled at the edges, wedged beneath the hallway baseboard as if someone had shoved it there in haste. My heart stuttered as I bent to retrieve it, fingers trembling against the texture of the familiar typewriter paper.

It was her work. Her machine’s imprint. Her rhythm.

And on it, only one sentence:

If anyone reads this, I’m already dead. And it wasn’t who you think.

I stared until the words blurred, my breath thick in my throat. There was no title, no page number. Just that line, and faintly in the bottom corner, a signature.

My name.

Nora.

 

The page stayed in my pocket all night, its folded edges pressing against my palm every time I shifted, a constant reminder that Miranda had spoken from beyond her silence. I did not sleep. I could not. Instead, I sat rigid in the parlor, the wallpaper peeling in thin strips behind the antique clock, listening as the house exhaled around me. The shadows thickened in the corners until they seemed to lean closer, swallowing the space inch by inch.

The silence was not empty. It carried weight, like the hush before a confession. I could hear the faint tick of the clock when the wind paused outside, the rattle of the old pipes, the groan of beams settling. Even those sounds felt different now, less like the house was alive, more like it was remembering things it should have forgotten.

By dawn, a new sound intruded.

The reporters.

It began as a low hum carried on the damp air—tires rolling over gravel, voices muted but growing clearer. Then the clicking of cameras, the metallic burst of shutters firing through the hedges. A woman’s voice pierced the quiet, sharp with curiosity: “Do you believe Miranda Vale was murdered for her book?” She spoke as though murder could be tallied in publishing contracts, as if a life were only worth the story it produced.

I did not answer. I did not even look. I pulled the curtains tight and let their voices fade into fabric, pretending that their presence beyond the hedge was only another ghost haunting the estate. But I knew they would return tomorrow, louder, hungrier. They always did when Miranda released something new. Only this time there was no book, no cover reveal, no carefully staged interview. Only silence. And a headline already spreading like a stain:

Bestselling Author Found Dead in Locked Office. Police Question Live-In Housekeeper.

Not Nora Hemsley. Not confidante or longtime employee. Just a title. A profession. A shadow. Something impersonal and replaceable. The dust collector.

At sunrise, I found myself drawn upstairs again, unable to resist the pull of her writing room. The door was strung with bright yellow tape, an ugly smile that did not reach the eyes. I did not cross it. I didn’t need to. I already knew what I was looking for was no longer inside. Whatever mattered had followed me into the night, folded neatly in my pocket.

I pulled the page free again.

If anyone reads this, I’m already dead. And it wasn’t who you think.

The words trembled in my hand. There was no date, no title, no anchor to tell me whether this was fiction or confession. Yet something about its cadence chilled me. It felt less like a story and more like a warning, as if Miranda had written it for one reader only.

And then there was the signature. Thin, slanted letters at the corner. My name.

Nora.

She had never used it so casually, never written it in ink or type, never in anything meant to outlast the moment. Seeing it there made my throat close. She had known I would find this. She had wanted me to.

And that terrified me more than anything.

The phone rang at ten. Its shrill tone cracked through the silence, startling me so badly I almost dropped...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 15.12.2025
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Literatur ► Krimi / Thriller / Horror
• ISBN-10: 0-00-112340-8 / 0001123408
• ISBN-13: 978-0-00-112340-3 / 9780001123403