Chapter 108 - The Severed Cable
"You don't even know what that key opens, Melissa," I said, holding my ground, though every nerve in my legs screamed to dive into the freezing water.
"It opens what’s mine," she replied, taking one slow step down the stairs. The iron beneath her boots groaned. "Everything in this town belongs to me. The orchard, the trust, the name. Arthur Van Der Bilt was my father!"
"Arthur wasn't your father," I said, my voice echoing off the vaulted stone with absolute, unyielding clarity.
Melissa stopped. The grotesque smile on her face froze, twitching slightly at the corner of her mouth. "What did you say?"
"You aren't a Van Der Bilt," I continued, taking a step toward the foot of the stairs, ignoring Vance’s warning hand on my coat. "You were bought for fifty thousand dollars in Bennington to save Evelyn from being cast out of the will. Your mother was a sixteen-year-old girl named Sarah Morris who died on a clinic table."
"Liar!" she screamed, the shotgun wavering as her arms shook with sudden, violent tremors. "You’re lying! Mother loved me! Mother gave me everything! She hated you! She spent twenty years trying to erase you because you were the mistake!"
"Evelyn didn't love you, Melissa," Julian’s voice rose from the darkness beside the wall, hoarse and uncompromising. "She used you as an insurance policy. And when you grew up to be as vain and cruel as she was, she despised you because every time she looked at your face, she was reminded that she had lived a lie for forty years."
"Shut up!" Melissa roared, raising the shotgun to her shoulder and aiming directly at Julian’s head. "Shut your filthy mouth!"
"Melissa, no!" I lunged forward.
Vance fired.
The sharp report of his sidearm cracked in the confined stone vault like a cannon shot. Melissa stumbled back as the round clipped her shoulder, but her finger reflexively jerked the trigger of the twelve-gauge.
The blast didn't hit Julian. It didn't hit Vance.
The full spread of heavy buckshot struck the high-tension steel cable controlling the counterweights of the Lock 11 overflow sluice.
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The cable snapped with a sound like a freight train derailing.
The massive iron counterweight, weighing over three tons, broke free from its ceiling cradle and crashed down into the intake basin with a deafening roar that shook the very foundations of the dam. Above us, the iron sluice gates buckled, and fifty thousand gallons of winter river water began to pour into the tunnel behind us like an avalanche of liquid ice.
