Chapter 23 - The Poisoned Bloodline
"Is it the police?" Dad asked, scrambling to his feet, his paternal instinct finally cutting through the paralyzing shock of Margaret’s return.
Liam pulled the curtain aside by an inch, peering through the rain-streaked glass. "No police cruisers. Two black SUVs. No license plates. They bypassed the electronic keypad at the lower gate."
"They followed me from Boston," Margaret whispered, terror returning to her eyes. "I tried to switch trains in Portland, but two men were watching the platform. Eleanor knows I made contact with the port authority. She knows the thirty-year statute on murder doesn't apply to arson resulting in death."
"They aren't here for you, Margaret," Liam said softly, his jaw set in a rigid line. "They’re here to clean the entire board."
He turned to me, his gaze fierce and steady. "Maya, take Margaret and your father down to the root cellar behind the wine rack. The foundation is four-foot poured concrete from the nineteen-twenties. The door locks from the inside with a cast-iron bar."
"I'm not leaving you up here alone," I said, my voice shaking but resolute. "Liam, Richard is completely unhinged now. If he’s in those cars—"
"Richard isn't in those cars," a voice called out from the darkness of our wrap-around porch.
The sound of shattering glass exploded from the side sunroom.
Before Liam could raise his weapon, the side French doors gave way under a violent kick. But the person who stumbled through the splintered wood wasn't an armed thug or a hitman.
It was Julianna.
My sister fell onto her hands and knees in the hallway, soaked to the bone, her designer trench coat torn and smeared with mud, her face pale, bruised, and streaked with mascara. Behind her, standing in the rain on the deck, was nobody. She was alone.
"Maya!" she screamed, choking on a sob as she dragged herself across the floor toward us. "Lock the back gates! Please! Richard is hunting me! He took my car keys, he broke into Mother's townhouse—"
She froze mid-sentence.
Her gaze drifted past me, past Liam, and landed directly on the frail, shivering woman standing in the center of the living room wrapped in my wool blanket.
Julianna’s eyes widened until the whites were stark against her rain-mottled skin. She crawled backward, her heels digging frantically into the floorboards until her back slammed against the wall.
"Aunt... Aunt Margaret?" Julianna breathed, her voice reduced to a terrified whimper. "No. No, that's impossible. Mother keeps your urn in the garden columbarium. I’ve brought flowers to your grave every Easter since I was five years old!"
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"Your mother keeps a jar of fireplace ash in that marble niche, Julianna," Margaret said, her voice dripping with thirty years of unvarnished grief. "Just like she keeps thirty years of lies in her heart."
***
