Chapter 17 - The Dying Warning
Julian caught Evelyn before her knees hit the hardwood floor. Her weight was almost nothing, like a bundle of dry branches wrapped in wet cloth. Snow and freezing rain cascaded from the frayed hem of her trench coat, puddling into dark rings on the braided rug in the entryway.
"Shut the door, Nola! Shut it now!" Julian barked, his face white with shock.
I slammed the heavy timber door, throwing the deadbolt and dropping the iron security bar into place. Outside, the Maine blizzard screamed like a living beast, rattling the glass panes of the transom above our heads. Clara rushed into the kitchen and returned with a stack of clean bath towels and a wool blanket, her hands trembling so hard she could barely unfold them.
"Get her to the hearth," Clara whispered, her voice choked with a mixture of terror and lingering resentment. This was the woman who had helped conceal decades of abduction, but seeing her crumpled, bleeding, and trembling from the bone-deep cold erased everything except the raw instinct to keep her alive.
Julian hauled Evelyn into the living room, laying her gently near the stone fireplace. The heat from the crackling birch logs hit her skin, causing her to shudder violently. I knelt beside her, pulling away the sodden fabric of her coat. Her forearms were shredded with deep gouges, and the purple bruises around her wrists told of heavy steel cuffs that had been torn or pried off with brute force.
"Evelyn, look at me," Julian said, cupping her cold, hollow cheek. "Who broke out? Who bought our sister?"
Evelyn’s teeth chattered so loudly they clicked like dice in a cup. Blood seeped from a cut on her lower lip, staining Clara’s clean yellow towel pink. With agonizing effort, Evelyn raised her right hand and tapped the waterlogged manila folder pinned under her ribs.
"Blackwood..." she wheezed, her lungs rattling with fluid. "Victor Blackwood. He wasn't just a buyer, Julian. He built the network forty years ago. Arthur... Arthur only ran the shipping routes. Blackwood was the architect."
"Victor Blackwood died eight years ago in Marion Federal Penitentiary," Julian said, his eyes narrowing. "It was in all the papers. Heart failure."
"A lie!" Evelyn’s voice rose to a shrill, raspy shriek, her fingers digging through Julian’s woolen sleeve into the flesh beneath. "He owned judges, wardens, senators. He staged his death, took an alias inside the special handling unit, and ran his empires from the dark. Two nights ago... a transport van overturned in the New Hampshire mountains. Three marshals dead. Burned to ash. It wasn't an accident. His private security extracted him."
Clara dropped to her knees, picking up the folder that slipped from Evelyn's fingers. She pulled out several warped, half-burned sheets of carbon paper and a recent black-and-white surveillance still. My heart seized. The photo showed an elderly man with sharp, predatory eyes and a jagged scar splitting his right eyebrow, stepping out of a burning armored vehicle into a black SUV.
"Why Ruth?" Clara asked, her breath catching in her throat. "What does he want with my mother?"
Evelyn let out a wet, bitter laugh that ended in a harsh cough. "Because forty years ago, when Blackwood took the third baby—your baby sister, Maeve—Ruth didn't just take Arthur's payoff. Ruth stole something back. A ledger. A Swiss deposit key. And the real birth certificate that connects Blackwood’s dynasty to five hundred missing children across New England."
Evelyn’s head lolled back against the rug, her eyelids fluttering erratically. "He spent forty years hunting that ledger. He thinks Ruth kept it hidden in her cottage in St. Jude’s Hollow. If he reaches her before you do... he won't just kill her. He’ll tear that valley apart until there’s nothing left."
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Her hand went limp, slipping from Julian's arm to the floor. The silence in the room became absolute, broken only by the roar of the wind against the chimney.
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