Chapter 28 - The Midnight Summons
The revelation hung in the warm kitchen like poison gas.
Donald Miller had never left the mill. He was encased within the very stone foundation that held up our living room floor. For thirty years, Ellis had slept fifty feet above his grandfather’s unhallowed tomb.
Before either of us could speak, the sudden glare of high-beam headlights swept across the lace curtains of Maeve’s front window.
Tires crunched over the frosted gravel. Two vehicles—heavy, idling V8 engines—pulled into the narrow drive behind Ellis’s truck.
"Down!" Ellis shouted, grabbing me by the waist and pulling me to the pine floorboards just as a heavy, metallic sound echoed from the porch.
"Abigail!"
The voice that cut through the night wasn't Harlan Greer’s trembling whimper, nor was it the hesitant mumble of a hired sawyer. It was Raymond Vance.
My father had come himself.
Through the crack beneath the window casing, I saw his silhouette against the headlights of his black Cadillac Fleetwood. He wore his heavy camel-hair coat, his silver hair neatly combed despite the two o'clock hour, standing with the cold, immovable posture of a man who believed the entire world belonged to him by divine right.
Beside him stood Sheriff Douglas—not in uniform, but wearing a heavy flannel coat, a pump-action shotgun cradled across his belly.
"Abigail, open the door," Raymond shouted, his voice carrying clearly through the frost-rimmed glass. "You've dragged this ridiculous melodrama far enough. Come outside, bring your grandfather's box, and we will settle this like a family. Refuse, and the Sheriff is under orders to execute an emergency felony warrant for grand larceny of private estate records."
"Felony warrant?" Maeve Miller scoffed from the floor beside me. She didn't drop to her knees; she sat deliberately against the base of the grandfather clock, her ten-gauge shotgun resting across her lap. "Douglas doesn't have a warrant signed by a legitimate judge. He has a piece of paper Raymond wrote on a napkin."
"Ellis," I whispered, my heart slamming violently against my ribs. "If they take the satchel, it's over. Douglas will incinerate the journals in the courthouse furnace before dawn."
Ellis looked at the back door of the cottage, then back at me. His face was entirely devoid of fear now. What was left was the cold, focused resolve of a man whose debts were finally coming due.
"They're not taking the satchel, Abby," Ellis said quietly. He reached into his coat and handed me his truck keys. "Maeve has a root cellar under the pantry with an iron bulkhead that leads to the creek drainage. Take Clara. Take Maeve. Take the books."
May you like
"I'm not leaving you, Ellis!"
"You're not leaving me," Ellis said, kissing my forehead with fierce, desperate tenderness. "You're getting the evidence to the Grand Rapids federal courthouse. I’m going to hold Raymond here until daylight."
