Chapter 42 - The True Heirs of Blackwood Orchard
The radiator in room 412 of the Lackawanna Station Hotel clanked with an arrhythmic, metallic rhythm that matched the pounding in my temples. It was four in the morning. Outside the tall, arched windows, Scranton was buried under a shroud of wet, miserable sleet that turned the streets into dark mirrors reflecting the yellow glow of sodium streetlamps.
Ben sat at the small writing desk, surrounded by the contents of the lockbox we had pulled from the root cellar before the feds sealed the orchard. The copper canister sat between us, open now.
Inside had not been cash or bearer bonds. It was a thick, leather-bound register with hand-stitched binding, its parchment pages yellowed and brittle with age, dated from 1974 to 1978.
"Look at this, Emily," Ben said, his voice husky with exhaustion. He traced his thumb over an entry written in faded black fountain ink.
I leaned over his shoulder, pulling the hotel blanket tighter around my chest.
*October 14, 1978: Received from Julian Sterling — $140,000 in escrow for the purchase of the northern timber tract. Arthur Miller acting as trustee.*
"Julian Sterling," I whispered. "The name Ross mentioned."
"Julian Sterling was thirty-two," Ben said, pulling up an old digital archive on his laptop from the Scranton Public Library's historical newspaper database. "He was a civil engineer from Philadelphia. He inherited the orchard and the surrounding three hundred acres from his grandfather. In November of seventy-eight, Julian, his wife Clara, his mother Evelyn, and his seven-year-old son Leo vanished without a trace."
On the screen was a grainy, black-and-white photograph from the *Scranton Times-Tribune*, dated December 3, 1978. A smiling young man with thick sideburns stood beside an elegant woman holding a boy in a winter coat. Behind them was the familiar stone facade of my father’s house.
Except in 1978, it wasn't my father’s house. It was theirs.
"The newspaper says they were presumed to have fled the country due to debts," Ben continued, his eyes darkening as he read the yellowed clipping. "Arthur Miller, then a junior partner at a local real estate brokerage, testified before a county judge that Julian Sterling had taken cash under the table from private investors and skipped town to Canada. Arthur presented a signed bill of sale conveying the entire property to himself to satisfy the debts."
"The signature," I said, my voice trembling as I opened my father's old ledger and compared the handwriting on the bill of sale shown in the newspaper. "Look at the loops on the 'S'. That isn't Julian Sterling’s hand. It’s my father's. He didn't just forge a deed. He wiped out three generations of a family and lived in their home for forty-five years."
"And your mother knew," Ben murmured gently.
My heart seized. In the bottom of the canister lay four sealed envelopes addressed to me in my mother's delicate, flowing cursive. She had written them in the hospice ward during the final month of her life, three years ago, when the cancer had whittled her down to ninety pounds and my father had refused to let her speak to visitors without him present.
I picked up the first envelope. The wax seal had cracked long ago.
*Emily, my brave girl,* the letter began.
*If you are reading this, Arthur has either lost his mind entirely or you have finally found the courage to look beneath the foundation he forced us to build our lives upon. I pray to God it is the latter.*
*I did not know the truth when I married him in 1982. He told me the house was an inheritance. He told me the locked storm cellar in the north wing was an old dairy cooler that had caved in during the flood of seventy-two. It wasn't until Chloe was born, when I found the Sterling boy’s baptismal certificate stuffed behind the water heater in the basement, that I began to understand.*
*When I confronted Arthur, he didn't deny it. He smiled at me, Emily. He took my hand, held it over our baby’s cradle, and told me that if I ever spoke a single syllable to the state police, Chloe would grow up without a mother, and the orchard would have another layer of concrete poured over it.*
*I was a coward. I stayed. I lived in that house of blood, smiling at his country club galas, watching him rise to the planning commission, watching him buy off the county judges with land parcels he had no right to own. But I kept the records. Every check he wrote to the men who brought the lime. Every receipt from the disposal company that dumped the industrial drums to cover the scent of the grave.*
*Take it all, Emily. Burn his empire to the ground. Give the Sterling child his name back. Do not let your sister become him.*
Tears fell hot and fast against the paper, smudging the ancient ink. All those years I had resented my mother for her silence, for the way she shrank into the background while Arthur ruled the house with an iron fist and Chloe blossomed into his spoiled, sociopathic reflection. My mother hadn't been weak. She had been a hostage.
"Emily," Ben said, resting his hand against my cheek, wiping away the wetness with his thumb. "We take this to the U.S. Attorney directly at eight. Marcus Cole gave Ross enough to hold Arthur on federal environmental racketeering, but this... this is four counts of aggravated first-degree murder. Arthur will never walk out of a prison cell again."
The room phone on the nightstand suddenly shrieked into the silence.
Ben and I both froze. Only one person had this number.
Ben reached across and lifted the receiver, pressing the speaker button. "Walker."
"Mr. Walker, it’s Agent Ross," her voice crackled through the small speaker, breathless and stripped of its previous composure. "We have a critical situation at the county holding facility."
"What happened?" Ben asked, pulling me closer.
"Arthur Miller just invoked his right to speak with family counsel, but he refused his attorney," Ross said, the sound of blaring sirens audible in the background of her call. "He says he will only surrender the bank account numbers for the offshore liquidation fund to one person. Emily."
"I’m not speaking to him," I said immediately, leaning over the phone. "Tell him to rot."
"Emily, listen to me," Ross urged, her voice dead serious. "Chloe walked out of Regional Medical forty minutes ago. She had assistance from the outside. A transport vehicle belonging to Marcus Cole’s private security firm was waiting at the ambulance bay. They’re heading back toward the orchard right now, and Marcus’s brother just cleared out two safe deposit boxes in Clarks Summit."
The air left my lungs. "Why would Chloe go back to the orchard? The place is crawling with your agents!"
May you like
"Not anymore," Ross replied grimly. "Forty-five minutes ago, a natural gas leak was reported along the pipeline bordering the north boundary of the property. The excavation team was evacuated per safety protocols. The house is completely empty, Miss Miller. And according to the dispatch logs... someone just cut the power to the perimeter floodlights."
***
