Chapter 17 - BENEATH THE ROTTING PINE
The Adams County cabin stood at the end of a forgotten logging trail, swallowed by overgrown weeds and weeping willow branches. It had been abandoned since my father’s funeral three years ago, its wooden facade blackened by mildew and rot. But tonight, a faint yellow glow flickered through the warped glass of the ground-floor window.
"She’s inside," Arthur whispered, turning off the SUV's headlights several hundred yards down the path. "Alex, we cannot go in there alone. She is desperate. A desperate narcissist who has lost her kingdom is capable of anything."
"I spent my entire life cowering before her tantrums," I replied, pulling a heavy steel tire iron from behind my driver’s seat. "I am not running away on the night I finally find out who I am."
We approached the porch on foot, our boots sinking into the wet mud. The only sounds were the howling wind through the bare branches and the steady thud of my own heartbeat. The front door was ajar, the rusted latch splintered open by a crowbar that now lay discarded on the porch steps.
Inside, the cabin smelled of damp earth, stale dust, and the sharp chemical stench of kerosene. The furniture had been overturned. Cushions were ripped open with a knife, stuffing spilling across the floor like guts. Someone had been tearing this house apart room by room.
"Where is it?!"
A raspy, ragged shriek echoed from the back hallway leading to my father's old workshop. It was Eleanor's voice, stripped of all its polished church-matron pretense. It sounded like an animal cornered in a trap.
I stepped quietly over the broken floorboards, Arthur lingering just behind me with his phone recording audio and the emergency dial screen illuminated.
Through the doorway of the workshop, I saw her. Eleanor was on her knees, her manicured hands caked in filth and grime, frantically clawing at the oak planks near the brick fireplace. Her expensive designer sweater was torn at the shoulder, her gray hair wild and tangled around her sunken face. A battery-powered lantern sat beside a small pry bar.
"Looking for this, Eleanor?" I asked coldly.
She gasped, jerking backward so hard she knocked over the lantern, sending long, grotesque shadows dancing across the cedar walls. When her wild eyes locked onto mine, there was no shame, no fear—only a poisonous, venomous venom that made my stomach turn.
"You," she hissed, scrambling to her feet against the mantle. "You miserable, ungrateful bastard. How dare you follow me here? Everything in this house belongs to me! Everything your father touched was bought with my sacrifice!"
"Your sacrifice?" I stepped forward, holding up the faded manila envelope from the bank vault. "Or Sarah Linwood's?"
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The moment the name left my lips, Eleanor’s face went dead white. Her mouth opened slightly, her thin lips trembling not with remorse, but with pure, unadulterated terror.
***
