Chapter 23 - THE SCENT OF LILAC AND GASOLINE
By midnight, the temperature had dropped to eighteen degrees.
The woodstove Marcus had installed in the center of the great room roared with dry hickory, the iron flanks glowing a dull, comforting cherry red. Waverly was asleep on a cot near the hearth, wrapped in three layers of quilts, her breathing deep and even for the first time in days.
Inspector Vance had departed two hours earlier with the binders and the Nagra tape, leaving behind two armed United States Marshals who sat in an unmarked black Yukon parked backward in the cedar grove, their infrared scopes sweeping the perimeter every three minutes.
I sat at the table with a cup of black coffee—not from a green paper cup, but from an old enameled tin mug that had belonged to Arthur.
Then the landline telephone on the kitchen wall—an old Western Electric rotary Arthur had insisted on keeping—began to ring.
The sound was shockingly violent in the quiet room.
Marcus reached for it, but I caught his forearm. "I'll take it."
I lifted the heavy receiver. "Yes?"
The silence on the other end was thick, wet, and ragged. When the voice finally spoke, the aristocratic sheen had completely cracked, revealing the raw, frantic gravel beneath.
"You think you’ve won something," my mother said.
She was not at the house in town. I could hear the rhythmic clanking of a diesel engine idling in the background, the hiss of air brakes, and the dull roar of highway traffic. She was at a truck stop.
"Where is Claire, Mother?" I asked, my voice flat, cold, and entirely devoid of the deference I had offered her for twenty-six years.
"They took her, June," Eleanor spat, her breath rattling through the receiver like dry leaves. "Federal marshals pulled her off a plane like she was a common thief. In front of the Van Dorens. In front of the bank board. They put steel handcuffs on her wrists. Do you have any idea what that will do to her career? She’s an honors graduate of Duke Law!"
"Claire tried to run me off the bridge on Highway 9, Eleanor."
"It was an accident!" the voice shrieked, so loud that the tin receiver buzzed against my ear. "She was under tremendous stress! You were provoking her with those letters to the timber board! If you had just signed the quitclaim deed, we would have settled the accounts! I came to your bedside! I brought you your coffee! I humiliated myself sitting in that filthy hospital chair for three hours to offer you an olive branch, and you spit in my face!"
"You brought me coffee so you could tell the nurses you were a devoted mother while Claire shredded the corporate ledgers," I said. "And the coffee had a sedative in it, didn't it? You thought if I was groggy enough, I wouldn't notice the signature page your notary was carrying in her purse."
A long, suffocating silence hung on the line. The idling diesel truck shifted gears in the background.
"Arthur always spoiled you," Eleanor whispered, and the hatred in her tone was pure, undiluted, and ancient. "He kept you soft. He kept you thinking the world was an honest place where people get what they earn. He was a coward, June. He built this family on dirt and timber, and when the money became complicated, he curled up in his chair and waited to die."
"He didn't wait to die," I said. "You killed him."
A sharp intake of air.
"You have no proof of that," she hissed. "Dr. Halloway certified—"
"Dr. Halloway is in a federal holding cell in Mecklenburg County," I interrupted. "And the amber vial was in the hearth, Eleanor. Along with the tapes. Vance has everything."
The line went completely dead for five seconds. I thought she had hung up.
Then came a sound that made the hair on the back of my neck stand up—a wet, hysterical chuckle.
"You think that stone house belongs to you because you’ve got Arthur’s ledger?" Eleanor whispered. "Look out your bedroom window, my sweet, obedient girl. Look at the timber line behind the barn."
The call clicked off. A dial tone hummed its mechanical drone.
I dropped the receiver. "Marcus!"
Before Marcus could answer, the Marshals' Yukon in the cedar grove kicked its high beams on. A split second later, a brilliant, terrifying wall of orange light erupted along the southern ridge, three hundred yards behind the barn where sixty acres of dry, beetle-killed loblolly pine met the edge of our clearing.
May you like
The smell arrived on the sudden gust of north wind: not the clean smoke of split hickory, but the suffocating, chemical reek of kerosene and burning rubber.
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