Melissa watched her sons ruin my little girl’s Easter dress and called it a joke—so I calmly told everyone to leave, and the look on her face said she had just remembered something important. / Chapter 87 / 117

Chapter 87 - The Stolen Heritage

"Step away from the fuel, Greg!" Vance yelled, his weapon centered directly on the man’s chest. "Put the can down and put your hands behind your head! You’re looking at attempted murder, arson, and kidnapping under federal jurisdiction!"

Greg didn't drop the can. His face was twisted with an ugly, panicked rage, his clothes covered in mud and grease from the old truck he had driven across the border.

"You don't understand, Vance!" Greg screamed, his voice cracking with hysteria. "If she talks, it’s not just Evelyn who goes down! It’s all of us! Melissa, the boys, the entire corporation! Everything Arthur built in forty years is collateral on the trust!"

"Greg... please..." Clara’s voice was barely a whisper, hoarse from years of silence, a sound like dry autumn leaves scraping across flagstones. "Let me go... the child... where is my baby? Melissa took her... she told me the baby died of respiratory distress..."

"Shut up, Clara!" Greg shouted, kicking a wooden crate near her feet. "You were supposed to stay in this hole! Melissa paid the caretakers five thousand dollars a month to keep you drugged and quiet! But you had to smuggle that letter out through the laundry driver, didn't you? You had to bring the police to Montreal!"

"Greg, look at me," I said, stepping past Vance onto the bottom stair, ignoring the detective's urgent command to get back. "Look at me, Greg. It's Nora."

His eyes darted to mine, wild and bloodshot. "Nora... you shouldn't have dug into the Easter dresses. You shouldn't have stood up to Melissa on Sunday. If you had just let her boys have their way, none of the estate records would have been subpoenaed! You brought this on your own family!"

"Melissa let her sons ruin Lily's dress because she hates me," I said, my voice cold, trembling with a fury so ancient and deep it silenced the room. "And she hates Lily. Because every single time she looked at that child’s face, she saw the sister she betrayed, the sister she buried alive in Canada just so she could live in a mansion built on stolen timber money."

Greg’s grip on the gasoline can loosened slightly. "Melissa didn't want to kill her, Nora! It was Evelyn! Evelyn was the one who ordered the hit at the church this morning! She told me if the Montreal registry opened, the Van Der Bilt name would be erased from the state registry of deeds!"

"Evelyn didn't fire that rifle, Greg," Vance said, taking half a step forward. "The ballistic report came back from the state lab twenty minutes ago. The tool marks on the shell casing matched an old Weatherby rifle registered to Arthur. And the only person seen loading an antique gun case into an International Harvester flatbed behind Oak Ridge this morning was you."

Greg froze. The lie died in his throat.

"You weren't trying to protect Evelyn," I said, stepping closer. "You were trying to silence Evelyn so you and Melissa could liquidate the offshore accounts and flee to the Caribbean before the grand jury unsealed the indictments."

Greg stared at the gasoline can in his hand, then down at Clara, who was looking up at him not with fear, but with a terrible, pitying sorrow.

"Drop it, Greg," Caleb said, his voice deadly quiet as he leveled a heavy tire iron he had brought from the truck. "Or you won't live to see an American courtroom."