Chapter 14 - Cracks in the Sanctuary
The revelation hung in the humid kitchen air like smoke from a house fire.
I pulled out a chair opposite Vanessa and sat down. For a moment, the room seemed to tilt. Gerald’s treachery was endless. It wasn't enough that he had spent my childhood making me feel invisible; it wasn't enough that he favored Vanessa with expensive private schools and European vacations while I worked thirty hours a week through college. In the end, he had treated my very name—my legal identity—as an expendable shield to throw between himself and the monsters he had borrowed from.
"Where is Eleanor?" I asked quietly.
"Mom?" Vanessa laughed, a bitter, broken sound. "Mom is staying at her sister’s house in Roanoke, pretending none of this exists. She still thinks Gerald is going to get a pension payout from his old firm. She told me to ‘be sweet’ to Julian Vance and maybe he’d settle for fifty thousand dollars. She’s completely detached from reality."
"And you?" I leaned forward, looking directly into my sister's eyes. "Why did you come here, Vanessa? Three weeks ago, you looked me in the eye and told me to get out of your way because you needed my home more than I did. You brought a locksmith to throw me into the street."
Vanessa flinched as if I had struck her. She stared down at her ruined hands, tears dripping off her chin onto the oak table.
"Because you were always the only one who actually knew how to survive," she whispered. Her voice was stripped of every ounce of the smug, aristocratic varnish Gerald had coated her in. "Dad was a con artist. Mom was an enabler. And I... I was an idiot who thought being pretty and agreeable would protect me forever. But when Dad saw what was in that safe three weeks ago, he didn't just get scared of the law. He looked at you like you were an executioner."
She grabbed my wrist across the table, her skin burning hot. "Help me, Maeve. Vance told his men that if the money isn't recovered from the property sale, I’m going to end up in a federal penitentiary for grand larceny. I have nowhere else to go."
Before I could answer, the sharp, unmistakable sound of snapping wood cracked from the darkness near the barn.
I froze.
Through the kitchen window, across the dark expanse of the pasture, the barn’s external floodlights flickered once and died.
"Tommy?" Vanessa gasped, her voice trembling.
"Tommy went into town two hours ago to pick up parts for the tractor," I said, rising instantly to my feet and extinguishing the overhead kitchen light. The room plunged into shadows.
I moved silently to the gun cabinet beside the pantry—a solid walnut cabinet Grandmother Maeve had kept stocked since the 1970s. I unlocked the lower drawer, pulled out Maeve’s double-barreled twenty-gauge shotgun, and slipped two heavy shells into the chambers. The mechanism closed with an oiled, definitive *snap*.
"Stay down," I told Vanessa. "Keep away from the windows."
May you like
I slipped out through the mudroom door, stepping into the warm, pelting rain. The wind whipped through the tall grass, carrying the sharp, metallic smell of an engine running with no muffler down near the lower orchard.
Someone was on the property. And they weren't waiting for the seventy-two hours Julian Vance had promised.
