Chapter 88 - Whispers from the Saint-Laurent
The Canadian emergency response unit arrived within twelve minutes, their blue flashing lights casting sweeping arcs of cerulean against the gray limestone walls of the abandoned convent. Greg was marched out in double iron restraints, his head hung low, muttering incoherently about estate clauses and trust dividends as the provincial police shoved him into the back of a tactical transport.
In the cellar, I fell to my knees in the dirt beside Clara.
My trembling hands worked desperately at the rough hemp ropes that bound her wrists to the support beam. The skin on her wrists was scarred with old calluses, the marks of years of physical confinement and chemical sedation. When the last knot gave way, she didn't collapse; she reached out with trembling, skeletal fingers and touched the side of my face.
"Nora..." she breathed, her voice breaking on the syllable. "You grew up. You have Father’s jawline... but you have your mother's kindness."
"Clara," I sobbed, pulling her fragile, shivering frame into my arms, burying my face in her shoulder. She smelled of damp limestone, cold tea, and old cedar—the exact same scent that had lingered in the high attic of Oak Ridge when we were girls playing among our grandmother's lace trunks. "I thought you were dead. We buried a stone box in the churchyard. We laid white lilies on the grass."
"They told me you all died in the fire," Clara whispered, her gray eyes swimming with tears that had been held back for nearly a decade. "Melissa came here... three years ago. She wore a diamond necklace that Arthur gave our mother on their twentieth anniversary. She sat on that wooden stool and told me that a gas leak had leveled the family homestead. She told me you died in your sleep, Nora. She told me there was no one left to look for me."
"She lied to you, Clara," Caleb said gently, stepping forward and draping his thick woolen jacket around her shivering shoulders. "Nora is here. And there’s someone else waiting outside who belongs to you."
Clara stiffened, her breath hitching in her throat like a dying engine. "The child... the little girl? Melissa told me she was born stillborn... that her heart had stopped before the doctors could cut the cord."
"She is alive, Clara," I said, holding her hands tightly between mine, warming her cold fingers with my breath. "Melissa took her to the States. She tried to hide her, tried to pass her off through an illegal adoption ring, but when that fell apart, she dumped her on the system—and the universe brought her back to me. Her name is Lily."
Clara let out a ragged, wounded cry—the sound of ten years of solitary agony tearing itself free from her chest. She buried her face in my shoulder, her body wracked with sobs so violent they shook the stone floor beneath us.
"We need to get her to a hospital in Montreal," Detective Vance said, standing near the doorway, his eyes unusually bright as he watched the reunion. "The provincial medical officers are waiting at the base of the hill."
"No hospital in Canada," Clara said suddenly, her voice gathering an unexpected, steely resolve that reminded me of our father in his prime. She pushed herself up from the dirt, leaning heavily on Caleb’s arm but refusing to be carried. "Take me back across the border. Take me back to Oak Ridge."
"Clara, the state police have Oak Ridge locked down as a crime scene," Vance said gently.
May you like
"It is not a crime scene," Clara answered, her gray eyes narrowing with a fierce, brilliant clarity that pierced right through the shadows of the cellar. "It is my property. And it’s time my sister Melissa answered to the rightful heir."
***
