Chapter 19 - The Gathering of the Faithful
My hands were shaking violently as I slammed the phone back onto its cradle. Outside, lightning flashed across the sky, casting jagged, violent shadows through the living room windows.
"Mom, what did they say?" Mia wheeled herself into the kitchen doorway, her face pale.
"Stay here, Mia. Lock the deadbolt behind me."
"No! I'm not letting you go out there alone!" she protested, gripping my sleeve. "Whoever is doing this wants you isolated!"
"I have to know what's in that barn," I said, kneeling down to look her in the eye. "If your father left something out there... if there's a reason this is happening, I have to face it. But you stay inside. Call Sheriff Miller if I am not back in ten minutes."
I grabbed a heavy yellow flashlight, pulled on my rain slicker, and pushed through the back door into the raging storm. The wind nearly tore the screen door off its hinges. Mud churned beneath my boots as I crossed the dark yard toward the weathered red barn that had stood on the edge of our property for fifty years.
The barn doors groaned in the wind. I slipped through the narrow gap and switched on the flashlight. The beam cut through swirling dust and cobwebs, illuminating the ancient tractor, rusted farm tools, and towering stacks of weathered timber.
I climbed the wooden ladder to the upper hayloft, the rungs slick with humidity. In the far corner, exactly where the voice had described, a section of pine paneling was held in place by modern, unpainted screws.
Using the flat edge of a pocketknife, I pried the panel loose.
Behind it was a small metal lockbox. Inside lay a leather-bound journal—my late husband David’s handwriting covering every single page. David had passed away six months before the crash on County Road 9, succumbing to an aggressive brain tumor. But as I flipped through the final entries, dated just weeks before his death, the horrific truth began to reveal itself.
David hadn't just been an engineer at the state transport depot. He had uncovered a massive, multi-million dollar kickback scheme involving defective highway safety barriers and falsified road-salt contracts. The company supplying the substandard materials was owned by one of the most powerful families in the state: *The Vance Corporation*—run by David’s own estranged uncle, Raymond Vance.
David had written: *“Raymond knows I have the logs. He told me if I don't surrender the files before the winter freeze, he'll make sure my family never survives the season. If anything happens to me, Victoria and Mia are in grave danger.”*
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My breath hitched. The crash on County Road 9 was never an accident. It was an assassination attempt meant to silence David’s family forever.
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