Chapter 10 - Shadows Across the Lake
I bolted through the front door, slammed it shut, and threw all three heavy deadbolts into place.
“Ava!” I shouted, my voice cracking with panic. “Ava, where are you?”
Ava emerged from the kitchen, clutching a half-eaten slice of toast, her eyes widening at the frantic look on my face. “Daddy? What’s wrong?”
I forced the terror down, swallowing the bile rising in my throat. I couldn’t let her see me unravel. If I broke, her fragile world would shatter all over again. “Nothing, sweetheart. Just… daddy thought he saw a stray dog outside. Where’s Lucas?”
“In his crib. He’s babbling to his mobile.”
“Good. Stay inside the living room, okay? Don't go near the windows until Daddy checks around.”
I grabbed my phone and dialed Eleanor’s direct line. She picked up on the second ring.
“David? How are things out at the lake?”
“She has someone watching us, Eleanor,” I choked out, keeping my voice low as I paced into my home office, staring out through the horizontal slats of the blinds. “Clara. I just found a photograph in my mailbox. It’s Ava, from yesterday afternoon. Clara wrote on it. Her exact handwriting. Eleanor, she’s in a locked psych ward! How is this possible?”
There was a dead silence on the other end of the line, broken only by the sharp rustle of papers. When Eleanor spoke again, the warm, reassuring tone of our family lawyer was gone, replaced by the grim chill of a seasoned legal warrior.
“David, listen to me very carefully. Clara didn’t leave the facility. I checked the status docket this morning; she’s still logged under Category-A surveillance. But Clara had associates. People outside our immediate circle who owed her or who bought into her saintly facade.”
“Who would stalk a child for her?!” I hissed.
“Clara didn’t just volunteer at charities, David. She sat on executive boards. She handled millions in discretionary donations for battered women’s shelters and private adoption foundations. She knew private investigators, crooked fixers, desperate people she bailed out of financial ruin. To the outside world, she’s a martyr unjustly persecuted by an abusive husband. She’s had weeks to manipulate someone on the inside—or someone on the outside.”
“I’m calling the sheriff.”
“Do it right now,” Eleanor ordered. “I’m also dispatching a private security team to your perimeter. Two armed ex-troopers. They’ll be there in forty minutes. Do not leave that house, David.”
I hung up, dialed 911, and gave the dispatcher our coordinates. But as I set the phone down, a faint glint caught my eye from across the lake.
I picked up the hunting binoculars resting on the desk shelf and pressed them to my eyes. Across the sapphire expanse of water, nestled deep in the shadows of the deserted boat launches on the north shore, sat a dark grey sedan. The windshield was tinted dark, reflecting the midday glare.
May you like
As I watched, the car’s brake lights flashed red twice—a deliberate, mocking signal—before the vehicle reversed silently into the tree line and vanished into the mountain roads.
***
