Chapter 26 - Bloodline and Timber
The freight train hammered through the belly of the Cascade Mountains, an iron serpent crawling through snow-dusted granite passes and black timber forests.
We were huddled inside the empty steel brake-cab of an ancient flatbed car, surrounded by sixty-foot trunks of Douglas fir harvested from the high slopes of the Wenatchee ridge. David had managed to start a small, smokeless warmth using a pack of emergency chemical flares he found in the rail-car supply box, their orange glow painting the rough steel walls in flickering shades of ember and shadow.
He had torn his own shirt to bind the wound on his shoulder, and now his fingers were working gently through my wet, tangled hair, checking the bruises along my neck and temples.
"I should have told you about Vivian the moment she reached out to me two months ago," David said quietly, his voice raw with regret. "She called me from a burner phone in Spokane. She told me Marcus Croft had approached her with financial audit records showing that our commercial design firm had laundered syndicate money."
I looked up at him through the orange flare-light. "Did you?"
"No," David said, holding my gaze without blinking. "Croft created twelve fake offshore accounts in my name using corporate documents he stole from Vivian’s law office. He told Vivian that unless she helped him secure the Vance probate files, he would send the fabricated wire-transfer trails to the federal prosecutor in Seattle and ensure I spent the next twenty-five years in a federal penitentiary."
He reached out, his thumb tracing the curve of my cheekbone.
"Vivian came to our house that day to warn me, Claire. She kissed me because she knew Croft’s surveillance team was watching our living room through an infrared directional lens. She whispered in my ear while her arms were around my neck: 'They’re going to kill Claire on the twentieth unless you make her believe you betrayed her. If she thinks you’re having an affair, she’ll run to the lake house to find our mother’s journals. That’s the only place she’ll be safe.'"
Tears stung my eyes. All the humiliation, all the burning rage that had consumed me since that dreadful afternoon in my Mercer Island home, inverted into a terrifying clarity.
"She sacrificed herself," I whispered. "She deliberately made herself look like an adulterous monster so I would flee to the only fortress that could protect me."
"Your sister is an arrogant, sharp-tongued, reckless little idiot," Arthur murmured from the corner of the cab, where he sat cleaning the action of the deer rifle with an oiled rag. "Just like her mother. Eleanor always chose the most dangerous, dramatic route to save the people she loved."
He looked at me, his eyes softening with an ancient, unbearable tenderness.
"You look so much like her, Claire. Not Vivian. Vivian has my father’s cold, stubborn pride. But you... you have Eleanor’s fire. You have the heart that kept this family alive through forty years of silence."
The train whistle shrieked through the morning mountain air, a long, mournful blast echoing off the sheer cliffs of the Snoqualmie corridor.
May you like
The train was descending the western slope. Ahead of us, hidden beneath the gray bank of maritime fog rolling in from Puget Sound, lay the glass-and-steel towers of Seattle, the saltwater lowlands, and the marble dome of the Capitol in Olympia.
The clock was ticking. Seven-fifteen AM. We had less than three hours before the probate gavel fell.
