Chapter 4 - The Confession in the Dark
The poker came down with a whistling tear through the air.
Reid wasn't an athlete; he was a gym rat who had never been in a bar fight in his life. He telegraphed the swing from his shoulder, his weight entirely on his back foot, swinging the heavy brass rod like a baseball bat aimed directly at my skull.
I didn't try to block it.
I stepped inside the arc of the swing, moving forward as the metal descended. The brass shaft grazed the heavy wool of my left shoulder, doing nothing more than tearing the seam. My right hand, hard and calloused from decades of hand planes and iron adzes, drove straight into the solar plexus beneath Reid's cashmere sweater.
The air left Reid's lungs in an explosive, wet grunt: *"Oof!"*
Before he could recover his balance, I grabbed his right wrist with both hands, twisted his arm outward until the joint screamed, and slammed his forearm down across the edge of the heavy mahogany dining table.
The brass poker clattered onto the china plates, shattering an antique butter dish before rolling into a pool of cranberry sauce.
Reid fell to his knees beside the table, clutching his belly, his face pressed against the floorboards, gagging and weeping in pure shock.
"Sit there," I told him, my breath steady, my pulse thrumming with cold precision. "Move an inch, and I'll put my boot through your collarbone."
I walked over to the sideboard, picked up my phone, and lifted it to my mouth.
"Dispatch, this is Miles Tolland. The situation inside the house is temporarily contained. The primary patient is in respiratory arrest. I am a certified coastal rescue first responder. I am initiating manual airway management and CPR. Send the medics through the carriage house trail—the wind is blocked on the leeward side of the hill. It’s faster than the main drive."
*"Copy that, Miles. Relaying to Medic 3 now. Good luck."*
I set the phone down and looked at Marshall Grady.
The attorney had sunk into one of the velvet armchairs by the dark fireplace, his head buried in his hands, trembling like an aspen leaf in an autumn squall.
"Marshall," I barked.
He looked up, his eyes bloodshot, his face gray.
"Get over here."
"I... I can't look at him, Miles. I can't—"
"Get over here and hold his head in the sniffing position, or I will let him die and tell the State Police you handed him the glass."
The threat was a bluff, but to a terrified lawyer facing twenty-five years to life in Maine State Prison, it sounded like an iron decree. Marshall scrambled out of the chair on hands and knees, crawling across the Persian rug until he was kneeling in the spilled wine beside Conrad’s head.
"Tilt his chin back," I commanded, dropping to my knees on Conrad’s other side. "Keep his airway straight. If he vomits, roll him toward you immediately. Don't let him aspirate."
I tore open Conrad’s custom-tailored dress shirt. The mother-of-pearl buttons scattered across the floor like teeth.
Beneath the linen, my father’s chest was pale, hairless, and motionless. I pressed two fingers into the groove of his carotid artery.
Nothing.
Just a faint, chaotic, thready tremor—like a moth trapped inside an envelope. Ventricular flutter. His heart wasn't pumping; it was shivering itself to death.
I laced my fingers, placed the heel of my hand on the lower half of his sternum, locked my elbows, and began compressions.
*One, two, three, four...*
The sickening crunch of cartilage separating from bone echoed through the dining room. It was the unavoidable reality of effective adult CPR. Conrad’s body jerked under my hands with every downward thrust.
*Ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen...*
"June," I said, not breaking the rhythm of the compressions. "Look at me."
My mother looked up from the floor. The blank, vacant shock on her face was beginning to crack, revealing the deep, festering well of guilt beneath it.
"Tell me what happened three years ago," I demanded, driving down into Conrad’s chest. *Twenty, twenty-one, twenty-two...* "Tell me what happened in that sauna, Mother. Because Reid already said it to the police, and Marshall is going to testify to save his license. If you want any hope of dying in your own bed instead of a women’s correctional facility, you tell me the truth right now."
June’s lower lip quivered. A tear cut a clean channel through the pale powder on her cheek.
"It was Thanksgiving," she whispered, her voice competing with the rhythm of my compressions and the roar of the blizzard outside. "Just like tonight. August had come over for dinner. He... he had the audit papers with him."
*Twenty-eight, twenty-nine, thirty.*
I paused, tilted Conrad’s head, pinched his nose, and delivered two full rescue breaths into his blue lips. The taste of stale wine, gastric acid, and chemical bitterness flooded my mouth. I spat onto the rug and resumed compressions immediately.
*One, two, three, four...*
"Go on," I ordered.
"August threw the files at your father," June sobbed, her fingers clawing at the hem of her ruined dress. "Right here in this room. He called Conrad a thief. He called Reid a degenerate. He said he was going to the U.S. Attorney in Portland on Monday morning. He said he wouldn't let his father's company be used to hide stolen money."
"And Conrad?" I asked, my shoulders burning with the exertion of the chest compressions.
"Conrad didn't yell," June said, her eyes staring into the dark corner of the room as if replaying the ghost of that night. "You know how your father gets when he's truly cornered. He gets quiet. He smiled. He poured August a cup of his favorite herbal tea—the valerian blend August drank every night before bed."
Beside me, Marshall Grady let out a low, pathetic moan and closed his eyes.
"Reid had gone to the greenhouse in Arundel two days before," June continued, the words tumbling out now like water through a broken dam. "We have the foxglove beds along the south wall. Reid studied chemistry for two years at Dartmouth before he failed out. He knew how to extract it. He used a double-boiler in the carriage house kitchen. He made an amber tincture. No smell. No taste in dark tea."
*Eighteen, nineteen, twenty...*
"They waited until August said he was going to take a sauna to clear his head before driving back to his house," June wept. "The tea took twenty minutes. Just like tonight. August went into the carriage house. Conrad locked the cedar door from the outside with the master key. Then Reid... Reid went to the breaker box on the exterior wall and jammed the thermostat override. He turned the infrared coils to maximum."
"Jesus Christ," I breathed, my rhythm faltering for a microsecond before I slammed back down onto Conrad’s sternum.
"August started screaming after ten minutes," June whispered, her voice dropping into a register of sheer horror. "He beat on the door with his fists until the cedar cracked. I stood on the back porch in the snow, Miles. I stood right there in my coat. I could hear him. Conrad stood beside me with his arm around my shoulders. He was holding his scotch. He told me that if I made a sound, if I called an ambulance, he would tell the police I was the one who brewed the tea."
On the floor beside the table, Reid let out a ragged, choking sob, his face still pressed against the white oak.
"He died in there," June whispered. "The heat... the poison... his heart gave out. Then Conrad unlocked the door, turned the thermostat back to normal, placed August on the bench, and waited two hours for the body to cool down before calling the local rescue squad. Dr. Harris signed the death certificate without even taking August's clothes off. Conrad gave Harris a fifty-thousand-dollar 'donation' for the hospital gala the following week."
I stopped compressions.
I leaned over Conrad Tolland’s motionless body.
His skin was clammy, freezing to the touch. The grayish-blue tint had spread down his neck and into his fingernails.
I reached down, pressed my fingers against his throat, and waited.
Five seconds.
Ten seconds.
Then, faint, erratic, but undeniably present, a rhythmic thump hit my fingertips.
*Lub-dub.*
A pause.
*Lub-dub.*
His heart had restarted. The manual compressions had kept just enough oxygenated blood circulating through his coronary arteries to prevent total biological death.
Conrad’s eyelids fluttered.
His jaw worked with a faint, pathetic tremor. He didn't have the strength to turn his head, but his glazed, bloodshot eyes moved slowly toward me.
In the dim amber light of the emergency fixtures, Conrad Tolland looked at the son he had tried to poison—the son who had just broken three of his ribs to keep him from sliding into the abyss.
"You're going to live, Dad," I whispered into his ear.
A single tear leaked from the corner of my father’s eye, cutting through the grime on his cheek.
May you like
"You're going to live," I repeated, my voice as cold as the sea beating against the rocks outside. "Because death is much too easy for what you did to Grandpa. You're going to spend the rest of your life in a concrete cell, listening to the ocean through an iron grate."
***
