Chapter 20 - The Midnight Summons
Three weeks later, the first true freeze of November descended upon the Hudson Valley.
The gallery had closed at six, after a bustling Saturday that saw three major restoration contracts signed. I drove the winding country road back to Old Oak Manor, the headlights of my wagon carving tunnels of bright white through the creeping mist.
By nine o'clock, the manor was settled in deep, velvety darkness. Grandma Rose had gone to bed early, exhausted by an afternoon spent cataloging old botanical prints in the conservatory. Michael had driven into the village to attend a town council planning meeting regarding the historical preservation of the old mill.
I sat in the manor's library, the embers of a birch fire glowing cherry-red in the hearth. On the desk lay the silver key Michael had given me weeks ago—the key to his grandmother’s private vault at the Midtown repository. We had never needed to open it; Graves’s surrender had rendered the old merger records unnecessary.
I picked up the key, turning it over in my fingers, admiring the ornate crest of the Vance family stamped into the silver bow.
Then, the landline on the mahogany desk rang.
The sound was shockingly loud in the silence of the great house. It was not the gallery line; it was the private, unlisted landline that only four people in the world possessed: Julian Vance, Michael, the local emergency dispatcher, and Grandma Rose’s cardiologist.
I picked up the receiver on the third ring. "Old Oak Manor, Clara speaking."
Static crackled across the line—sharp, rhythmic, like the interference of an offshore satellite phone.
"Miss Sterling?" A woman’s voice whispered. The voice was tight, breathless, and trembling with an absolute, terrifying urgency.
"Yes. Who is this?"
"My name is Dr. Evelyn Cross," the woman said, her words tumbling over one another against the hiss of static. "I am calling from the Special Care Unit at the Westchester Medical Pavilion."
My heart instantly dropped into my stomach. "Grandma Rose is upstairs in bed. What is this regarding?"
"Not your grandmother, Miss Sterling," Dr. Cross gasped. In the background, the shrill wail of a heart monitor sounded, accompanied by the urgent shouting of nurses calling for a crash cart. "We have an emergency admission transferred twenty minutes ago from the state intake facility in Valhalla. A female patient. Severe blunt-force trauma following a transport vehicle collision on Route 9."
"If this is about my sister Victoria—"
"It isn't Victoria," Dr. Cross interrupted sharply. "The patient was traveling under an alias provided by the United States Marshals Service. But her biometric prints triggered an immediate red flag in the federal surrogate registry. She is in cardiac arrest, Miss Sterling. She has minutes left."
"I don't understand," I said, my knuckles turning bone-white against the receiver. "Who is she?"
"Her legal name is Eleanor Montgomery," Dr. Cross whispered, the monitor in the background flatlining into a single, piercing, continuous tone. "And before she lost consciousness, she swore on the bible that the woman living in that subsidized apartment in Queens is an impostor—and that the real Eleanor Montgomery was never your mother at all."
A loud, thunderous crack echoed outside the library.
Not thunder.
The heavy wrought-iron gates at the end of the long gravel drive—gates that had been locked since dusk—had just been smashed open by a heavy vehicle.
Through the tall library windows, two blinding halogen high-beams swept across the dark lawn, illuminating the bare oak trees like white bones against the night. The sound of tires tearing through gravel roared toward the front steps of Old Oak Manor, accompanied by the low, menacing growl of an armored diesel engine.
May you like
The phone line went dead.
I dropped the receiver, reached into the desk drawer for the brass fire iron, and turned toward the front hall just as the heavy oak double doors of the manor shook under three violent, deafening blows.
