The Brass Check

In a sepia-toned America where smokestacks outnumber steeples, inventor Henry Everett—equal parts Nikola Tesla and sacrificial lamb—refuses to sell his vulcanized miracle to the rapacious Rubber Trust, and for this apostasy is clapped into a Gothic asylum whose corridors exhale chloroform and despair. His sister Edith, all porcelain resolve and clandestine grit, hires a detective to spirit the blueprints out of the boardroom and her brother out of the madhouse; a single baggage-claim token, brass and deceptively innocent, becomes the baton in a relay of deception. Enter Richard Trevor, heir to the very fortune grinding Henry underfoot, who by accident pockets that brass check and inherits its perilous itinerary. Through tenements slick with midnight rain, across ballroom floors that glitter like shrapnel, he plays the faux sleuth, unmasking his own father’s cabal while the asylum’s iron gates yawn wider each hour. By the time the final reel crackles, trusts are shattered, shackles literally sawn off, and Edith’s heart—once collateral damage—beats against Richard’s in radical, unspoken covenant.