Chapter 58 - The Trespass at Dawn
The clock on the mantel read 4:18 AM. The fog had rolled up from the valley, thick as curdled milk, muffling the roar of the V8 engine idling at the edge of the lawn.
Miller had his hand on his holster, standing beside the curtain. "Stay back from the glass, Nora. Julian, get the girl into the root cellar."
"I'm not hiding in my own cellar," I said, pulling my heavy shearling coat off the peg. "And Lily stays upstairs with Mrs. Miller behind the reinforced door. This ends on the grass where it started."
I didn't take a weapon. I took the manila envelope Julian had brought from Canada, tucked it under my arm, and stepped out onto the wide stone porch.
The cold air hit me like a bucket of ice water. The Range Rover stood thirty feet away, its high beams bathing the porch in blinding, surgical white light. The engine clicked off, and the silence rushed back in, heavy and menacing.
The driver’s door opened. A tall, broad-shouldered man in a camel-hair overcoat stepped down into the frost. Marcus Vance. He looked older, thicker around the middle, his silver hair slicked back with the same grotesque vanity our father had worn like cheap cologne.
Then the passenger door swung wide.
May you like
Melissa stepped out. She wore an ivory trench coat, black leather gloves, and oversized sunglasses pushed up into her bleached-blonde hair, despite the pitch-black sky. She held a thin cigarette between two fingers, flicking the ash onto the grass she had tried to steal for two decades.
"Good morning, Nora," she called out, her voice dripping with the exact same patronizing saccharine tone she had used on Easter morning. "You really should have left when the moving trucks were cheap. Now it’s going to cost you fifty thousand just to clear the debris."
