Chapter 5 - MIDNIGHT AT BLACKWOOD MANOR
The logging road was barely a road at all. It was an ancient, scarred trench cut through the granite spine of the mountain, overgrown with wild pine and choked with fallen timber.
The storm had peaked. Snow fell in heavy, blinding curtains, illuminated only by the piercing white beams of the Defender’s roof-mounted light bar. The chains on the tires groaned and ground against the bedrock as the vehicle crawled upward at a brutal ten miles per hour, clawing its way through three-foot drifts.
On the passenger seat, the burner phone began to ring.
I hit the speaker button. "Speak."
"Clara? It’s Celeste." Her voice was high, breathy, and trembling with panic. Behind her, I could hear the background noise of an airport terminal.
"Where are you, Celeste?"
"JFK. I’m trying to board a flight to Miami, but my cards aren't working. Julian’s corporate cards have been cancelled, and my personal account is frozen. Did you do that?"
"Arthur Cross did," I said, keeping my eyes fixed on the winding, treacherous track ahead. A massive pine branch cracked under the weight of the snow to my left, crashing down into the ravine. "You’re an unindicted co-conspirator in an eighty-million-dollar fraud scheme, Celeste. The District Attorney has flagged your passport. You aren't going to Miami. The only place you’re going is a federal detention facility in Brooklyn unless you give me something useful right now."
"I didn't know about the drugs!" Celeste sobbed into the phone. "I swear to God, Clara! Julian told me you were suicidal. He told me you agreed to go to the clinic to recover! He said the trust transfers were pre-approved by your grandmother’s lawyers!"
"Stop lying, Celeste. You were wearing my anniversary earrings at dinner."
A beat of suffocating silence hung on the line.
"Brett has Lily," Celeste blurted out, her self-preservation completely overriding whatever loyalty she had to Julian. "Julian told him to take her phone away and keep her in the basement recreation room until morning. Julian said if the police showed up, Brett was supposed to say it was a pre-arranged ski holiday and that Clara had authorized it."
"Is Brett armed?"
"Yes," Celeste whispered. "He has a Glock seventeen in his glove box. But he’s terrified, Clara. He’s an idiot who thought this was just an easy fifty grand. He doesn't want to go to prison."
"Give me his direct number."
She read off the digits without hesitation. "Clara... if I help you, will you tell the prosecutor I cooperated? Julian is ruined. His own board members are leaking everything to the Wall Street Journal. Please, I don't have anywhere else to go."
"Send me every text message Julian ever sent you about my confinement," I said. "Every screenshot. Every bank routing number. Do it in the next ten minutes, and Arthur will recommend leniency. Fail, and you can share a cell with Victoria."
I hung up without waiting for an answer.
Twenty minutes later, the timberline broke. The headlights cut through the swirling snow to reveal the silhouette of the hunting lodge. It was a sprawling, pretentious structure of river rock and dark timber, perched precariously on a cliff overlooking the frozen expanse of the valley.
A single pickup truck was parked in the driveway, covered in six inches of fresh powder. No lights showed through the heavy front windows, but a thin ribbon of gray smoke drifted from the massive stone chimney.
I killed the Defender’s headlights, shifting into neutral and coasting the last fifty yards down the gravel path, coming to a halt behind a dense thicket of spruce trees.
I reached beneath the driver’s seat. Arthur had left a heavy-duty tactical flashlight, a crowbar, and a stun baton rated for private security work. I took the flashlight and the baton, sliding them into the deep pockets of my heavy canvas coat.
My heart was hammering against my ribs, but the cold air outside hit my face like an electric shock, clearing every lingering molecule of medication from my brain. Sixty days ago, Julian had taken my daughter from my arms while two orderly guards pinned me to the floor of our townhouse. He had told her that Mommy needed to go away because Mommy was sick.
I walked up the stone steps of the porch. The front door was heavy oak, reinforced with decorative iron straps.
I didn't knock.
I dialed the number Celeste had given me. Inside the cabin, a muffled ringtone began to play—some obnoxious, bass-heavy pop track.
Through the narrow leaded-glass window beside the door, I saw a light switch on in the hallway. A shadow moved toward the foyer.
A man’s voice, raspy and annoyed, answered the phone. "Celeste? Why the hell are you calling from an unknown number? Julian isn't answering his cell, and the news online is saying—"
"Brett," I said softly into the phone, standing three inches from the glass.
The shadow inside the foyer stopped dead.
"Who is this?"
"Look through the window, Brett."
The curtain twitched. Brett Vance’s wide, terrified eyes peered through the leaded glass, meeting mine in the pale winter gloom.
"Clara?" he choked out, his voice cracking.
May you like
"You have ten seconds to open this door and hand me my daughter," I said through the phone, my voice dropping into a deadly, unyielding whisper. "If you don't, the two tactical units waiting down the ridge will breach this house. And you will spend the next twenty-five years in an upstate maximum-security penitentiary for federal kidnapping. Open the door, Brett."
***
