Chapter 14 - The Detective with the Closed File
The man who stepped into the library forty minutes later smelled of stale tobacco and wet leather. He wasn't Julianna Vance. He introduced himself as Thomas Vance—Marcus Vance's younger brother and former chief of detectives for the county sheriff's department.
He looked around the room with a weary, knowing smirk, his trench coat dripping onto the parquet.
"Margaret had good taste," Thomas said, running a calloused finger over the empty shelf where the train had rested. "Kept everyone looking at the front door while she moved the bodies out the back."
"You have five seconds to explain why you're in my house," Alexander said, his hand buried in his coat pocket.
Thomas didn't flinch. He tossed a manila folder onto the desk between them.
"Julianna isn't your enemy, Alexander. She’s your half-sister. And she’s running out of time."
Alexander didn't touch the file. "Margaret never had another child."
"Not in a hospital, she didn't," Thomas chuckled grimly. "Summer of '91. Margaret disappeared to Switzerland for eight months under the guise of an art acquisition sabbatical. She came back alone. She gave the baby to my brother Marcus to raise with a half-million-dollar trust and a nondisclosure agreement that would have stripped our family of everything if we spoke a word."
Evelyn stepped forward. "Why did she hide her?"
"Because Julianna wasn't an affair," Thomas said, his face hardening. "Julianna was the daughter of Arthur Davies—the union boss whose strike paralyzed Whitmore Rail back in the nineties. The same Arthur Davies who went missing the night Benjamin’s car went off the bridge at Blackwater."
Thomas leaned across the desk, tapping the cassette tape sitting beside the sapphire rings.
May you like
"Your brother didn't die alone in that car, Alexander. He had Davies' son locked in the trunk. And Margaret spent thirty years buying every badge in the county to make sure the car was pulled out of the river before the state police ever ran the plates."
***
