Chapter 6 - The Shadow on the Ridge
By late afternoon, the autumn sky had turned the color of bruised iron. A cold wind blew down from the Canadian border, stripping the last scarlet leaves from the sugar maples along the lane and sending them skittering across the porch like dry parchment.
The house was quiet, but it was no longer peaceful.
Every creak of the floorboards, every rattle of the windowpanes in the rising gale sounded like an approach. I had locked every ground-floor window, dropped the heavy oak bars across the kitchen and cellar doors, and brought Grandpa’s old hound, Buster—an eighty-pound blue tick coonhound whose hips were stiff with age—inside onto the braided rug by the hearth.
Arthur Vance had offered to send one of the Holloway boys to sit on the porch with a shotgun, but I had refused.
"This is between the people who share my blood and me, Mr. Vance," I had told him before he left for town. "Grandpa didn't raise me to hide behind the neighbors when the wind picks up."
Around seven o'clock, the rain began—a steady, hammering downpour that turned the gravel lane into grey soup. I sat at the kitchen table with an oil lamp burning low between my elbows, a mug of black tea cooling untouched beside me, and the Colt .38 resting on the scrubbed pine surface within reach of my right hand.
On the other side of the table lay the green ledger from the safe.
For three hours, I had read every line of Richard Sterling’s ruin. The copies of the cancelled checks from 2007; the frantic, handwritten letters from Mom promising Grandpa that they would pay him back every cent if he just didn't tell her uncles; the legal surrenders of parental claims they had signed before a crooked notary in a motel room outside Gary, Indiana.
They had sold me for eighty thousand dollars and a five-year timber loan.
Eighty thousand dollars. In Richard’s neat, arrogant script on the back of an envelope: Estimated proceeds from sale of daughter's wardship offset against criminal defense retainer.
They had calculated my worth like an old car traded in to cover the down payment on a new lease.
A sudden, sharp bark from Buster broke the silence.
The old hound rose from the rug, his hackles standing stiff along his spine, his nose pointed toward the darkened hallway that led to the mudroom. A low, wet growl rumbled deep in his chest.
I stood up, sliding the revolver into the pocket of the flannel coat. I blew out the oil lamp, plunging the kitchen into shadows lit only by the orange coals glowing through the glass door of the woodstove.
Outside, above the roar of the wind in the eaves, came the distinct sound of a vehicle engine idling down at the bottom of the orchard. No headlights. No crunch of tires on the main gravel drive. Someone had parked in the old tractor lane behind the hay barn—a path only someone who had lived on this farm as a child would know.
Mom knew that path.
I moved silently down the hallway, keeping my back to the wall, away from the windows. The mudroom door had a small square of reinforced glass at eye level. Through the rain-streaked pane, I saw two dark figures moving along the edge of the stone foundation.
One was tall, wearing a long coat that whipped in the gale. The other was smaller, hunched against the freezing rain, holding a flashlight with a red lens to keep the beam low.
They weren't trying to knock.
They had a crowbar.
The steel tip slid into the seam between the mudroom frame and the heavy fir door with a wet, splintering crunch.
"Hurry up, Richard!" a woman’s voice hissed through the wood—sharp, terrified, and venomous. "The old man had the safe in the floor! Clara doesn't even know the combination! I saw him open it when I was twenty! It’s in the study!"
"Shut up, Evelyn!" Richard’s voice was ragged, panting with exertion as he threw his shoulder against the iron pry bar. "The whole damn valley is watching this place. If that dog starts howling, Holloway will be here in five minutes. Just watch the lane!"
The wood gave way with a sharp crack.
The mudroom door swung inward, letting in a gust of freezing rain and the stench of wet earth. Richard Sterling stumbled across the threshold, his suede jacket soaked black, his face pale and smeared with mud from the orchard track. Behind him came Mom, her designer coat ruined, her expensive shoes caked in grey clay, clutching an empty canvas duffel bag in her trembling hands.
They didn't see me standing in the arched doorway to the kitchen.
May you like
Richard wiped the rain from his eyes, his breathing heavy and rattling. "The study is at the end of the hall. We get the deed box, we get the corporate shares, and we get out. If Clara wakes up, I’ll lock her in the fruit cellar. She won't do a damn thing until morning."
"I wouldn't take another step toward that hallway, Richard," I said.
