Chapter 35 - The Vault of Evelyn Miller
The floodlights caught Arthur in their center beam, painting him in stark, blinding relief. The wind whipped his grey hair across his furrowed forehead. He held the Remington at his hip, the twin barrels pointing at the mud around Victoria’s boots.
"You're trespassing on consecrated ground, Victoria," Arthur’s voice rang out over the hum of the generator. "Your grandfather bought the judges, but he didn't buy this hill."
Victoria didn't flinch. A thin, cold smile stretched across her porcelain face. "Arthur. I must give your wife credit. She was far more devious than you ever were. My grandfather searched her office for three weeks after she collapsed. We turned her sewing room inside out. We dismantled her sewing machines. We tore the floorboards out of her kitchen."
She gestured toward the grave with the barrel of her carbine.
"She didn't bury the environmental records in a safe. She buried them inside her own bronze casket. She used her own corpse as a vault."
A cold rage, deeper and more terrible than anything I had ever felt, rose from the pit of my stomach. I stepped out from behind the truck, my grandfather's Colt .45 leveled directly at the chest of the nearest contractor.
"Step away from the stone," I said. My voice was completely steady. The trembling that had haunted my father’s hands seemed to have vanished from mine entirely. "Take one more shovel of dirt off that vault and none of you walk out of this graveyard."
The two men with spades froze, glancing back at Victoria. They were hired guns, paid to dig, not to die on a frozen hill for an oil baron’s daughter.
"Shoot them, you cowards," Victoria spat at them, her voice rising in fury. "You’ve already accepted the retainer! Shoot them both!"
"They're not going to shoot," Arthur said, taking a slow step forward. "Because they know that sound."
From the tree line behind the cemetery wall, a low, metallic click sounded. Then another.
Through the falling snow, shadows emerged along the perimeter of the stone wall. Men in heavy hunting coats, orange stocking caps, and grease-stained Carhartt overalls stepped into the light. It was Pete from the feed store, carrying an old 30-30 Winchester. It was Mark’s cousins from the county road department, holding slug guns and tire irons. Behind them stood twelve men from the Blackwood Creek Volunteer Fire Department, their faces grim, their boots crunching in unison on the frozen crust.
Mark had not just radioed the state police before his crash. He had used the emergency volunteer frequency—the old analog frequency that Evelyn Miller had managed from her kitchen desk for thirty-three years.
The two contractors slowly laid their shovels down in the snow and raised their hands above their heads.
May you like
"You're out of your jurisdiction, Miss Vance," Pete called out, his voice thick with the mountain drawl that Julian Vance had spent fifty years trying to eradicate. "And you're standing on the wrong side of the creek."
***
