Chapter 105 - The Iron Spire
"April eighteenth," I murmured, the metal growing warm against my palm. "That was the night Evelyn supposedly went into premature labor at the cottage in Lake George. Arthur wasn't even in the state. He was in Boston attending the probate hearing for his own father’s estate."
"He wasn't in Boston," Julian said, his breathing shallow and rattling. "Arthur was seventy miles south, in a private clinic in Bennington. He was paying fifty thousand dollars in unmarked bank notes to a physician named Daniel Vance—no relation to your detective here, but a butcher all the same."
Vance’s flashlight beam flickered over Julian’s face, tight and suspicious. "What did he pay fifty thousand dollars for, Julian? Fast."
"For an infant whose mother had died on the delivery table forty minutes after arrival," Julian rasped. "A young girl from the mills named Sarah Morris. Arthur’s wife, Evelyn, had suffered her third miscarriage two months prior. The Van Der Bilt Trust of 1928 contained a strict male-line survival clause, but the 1974 amendment allowed a daughter to preserve the land trust—provided an heir was presented before the probate court adjourned that spring."
I stared at him, the walls of the tunnel seeming to press inward against my ribs. "Melissa... isn't Evelyn's child? Not even Evelyn's?"
"Evelyn knew," Julian said, closing his eyes in exhaustion. "She took the child to protect her own position in the household. Without an heir, the entire Oak Ridge estate would have reverted to Arthur’s cousins in Philadelphia, leaving Evelyn with a widow's pittance. She raised Melissa as her own, spoiled her rotten out of guilt, and poisoned the girl’s mind every single day until Melissa truly believed she was royalty."
"And what about me?" I asked, my voice barely audible over the dull roar of the intake pipes.
Julian looked at me with an expression that bordered on reverence and sorrow. "You were born eight years later, Katherine. The miracle child Evelyn never thought she could have. Arthur’s true, biological daughter. From the day you took your first breath, Arthur saw Melissa as the living monument to his greatest humiliation, and Evelyn saw you as the living proof of her own fraud."
A sudden, violent explosion shook the iron door at the end of the corridor. The hinges groaned as blue sparks showered from the gap between the frame and the stone.
"They're using a cutting torch on the hinges," Vance snapped, pulling a spare magazine from his belt and slapping it into the grip of his pistol. "The door won't hold five minutes. Which way does this passage lead, Julian?"
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"Down," the old lawyer whispered. "Past the turbine housing. There’s a subterranean drainage vault beneath Lock 11. It empties out into the lower river meadow near the old covered bridge."
"Then we move," Vance said, hauling Julian to his feet. "Before Melissa cuts through that steel and realizes her whole life has been a ghost story."
