Chapter 16 - The Intruder in the Dark
I slid out of bed without making a sound, my bare feet touching the cold hardwood floor.
I didn't turn on my phone flashlight. In the dark, a light makes you a target; darkness makes you part of the house. And I knew this house better than anyone alive. I knew which floorboards sighed under pressure, which doors swung without a murmur, and where the shadows pooled thickest.
From beneath the bed, I retrieved the solid hickory walking stick that had belonged to my grandfather—heavy, weighted with a brass cap, three feet of unyielding American timber.
I cracked my bedroom door open an inch.
The air in the hallway was cold. Unnaturally cold. A damp, sulfurous smell drifted up the stairwell—not smoke, but the sharp chemical tang of industrial accelerant.
*He promised he would burn it down.*
The words echoed in my skull with the clarity of a church bell. But Vance was in county lockup without bail. Marcus had confirmed it six hours ago.
Then, from the bottom of the grand staircase, came the sound.
*Scrape. Thud. Scrape. Thud.*
A dragging, uneven step. The sound of someone who was injured, or carrying a tremendous weight.
I moved silently down the hallway, keeping my back pressed against the plaster wall, my breathing shallow, mouth open to silence the intake of air. When I reached the top of the landing, the moonlight cutting through the stained-glass arched window painted the foyer below in fractured patterns of cobalt blue and blood red.
Standing in the center of the foyer, illuminated by the fractured moonlight, was a man.
He was wearing a stained canvas coat. He held a five-gallon plastic jug in his left hand, the amber fluid sloshing heavily against the semi-translucent container. In his right hand, gleamed the long, serrated blade of a brush-clearing machete.
He looked up at the landing.
The moonlight hit his face, and my breath hitched in my chest.
It was not Vance.
It was Bradley.
His face was gaunt, his eyes hollowed out with manic, sleepless terror. His expensive designer clothes had been replaced by ragged workwear, and around his right ankle, the heavy black plastic housing of his court-ordered monitoring bracelet hung loose, sliced through with an angle grinder and wrapped in aluminum foil to scramble the GPS transponder.
"I know you're up there, Julian," Bradley called out, his voice cracked, whistling through dry teeth like wind through a dry reed. "I know you can hear me."
I didn't answer. I tightened my grip on the hickory stick.
"Clara left me," Bradley laughed, a ragged, barking sound devoid of humor. "Packed three suitcases and went to a hotel in Chicago with some trust-fund kid she met on Instagram. Said I was a failure. Said I was a coward who couldn't even forge an old lady’s name right."
He unscrewed the cap of the fuel container. The pungent, suffocating stench of kerosene flooded the stairwell.
"The bank foreclosed on my firm at noon," Bradley continued, splashing the fuel across the Persian rug in the foyer, the liquid hissing as it soaked into the antique wool. "The FBI is coming for my parents' house because I pledged it as indemnity collateral for Vance's bond. Vance sold me out! He signed a plea agreement three hours ago naming me as the mastermind! Me! He threw me to the wolves to save his own skin!"
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Bradley dumped more fuel onto the base of the oak banister.
"If I'm going to federal prison for twenty years," Bradley whispered, pulling a brass Zippo lighter from his coat pocket, "there’s not going to be a kingdom left for anyone to inherit. We're all burning together, brother-in-law."
