Chapter 7 - Caught in the Act
Larry Vance looked like a man who had completely unraveled.
His camel-hair coat was ripped at the seam, caked in salt and road grime. His eyes were wide, bloodshot, and wild, fixed on the open door of the woodshed. The bitter mountain wind whipped his thin hair across his forehead, but he didn't seem to feel the cold.
"I knew it," Larry muttered, his voice ragged, carrying over the wind like torn paper. "I tracked your truck, Thomas. I knew you were coming up here to steal the rest of it."
"Larry," Thomas said, stepping out into the snow, keeping himself between Larry and where Timothy and I stood. "Put the tire iron down. You're drunk, you're violating your bail conditions, and you're trespassing on private land."
"Private land?" Larry let out an unstable, barking laugh that dissolved into a violent coughing fit. "Everything Arthur Vance owned belongs to me! I was the firstborn! I carried his name! I gave twenty years of my life to Vance Construction while Jean did nothing but whine about her deadbeat husband!"
He took two unsteady steps forward, raising the iron tool.
"Give me the box, Jean! I know what's in that woodshed! Margaret told my lawyer about the lake deeds! Those six hundred acres are worth four million dollars! That timber can pay off the Seaport debt and the federal liens! Give me the deeds, or I swear to God none of us are leaving this mountain tonight!"
"Larry, stop!" I stepped out into the open snow, Timothy safe behind me inside the shed. "Look at yourself! You have a family. You have children. Is this what you want them to remember? You standing in the snow trying to rob your own sister with an iron bar?"
"My family is gone!" Larry screamed, his face contorting into an ugly mask of self-pity and fury. "Evelyn’s husband kicked her out this afternoon! Richard filed for emergency divorce! He took Sophie and Lucas to Connecticut and locked her out of their joint accounts! She’s sitting in a motel on Route 9 drinking herself unconscious! And the feds froze my personal bank accounts at four o'clock! I have nothing left, Jean! Nothing!"
"You had two point four million dollars," Thomas said coldly, taking a slow step toward him. "You had a family business with fifty years of goodwill. You had a sister who forgave you every single time you mocked her. You didn't lose your life, Larry. You threw it away."
"Shut up!" Larry lunged forward, swinging the tire iron wildly at Thomas's head.
Thomas didn't flinch. With the practiced agility of a veteran ironworker, he ducked beneath the clumsy swing, stepped inside Larry’s guard, and drove the heel of his palm hard into Larry’s chest.
Larry gasped, losing his footing on the slick ice, and crashed heavily into the snowbank. The tire iron flew from his grip, spinning through the powder and landing near my boots.
Larry lay on his back in the freezing slush, gasping for air, his face pale and wet with snow. He tried to push himself up, but his strength was gone. He looked up at me as I picked up the iron tool and tossed it into the bed of Thomas’s truck.
"Jeanie..." he whimpered, his voice suddenly shifting back into that of the frightened little boy who used to hide behind our mother whenever he broke a neighbor’s window. "Jeanie, please... help me. Call off Margaret. Tell the feds you made a mistake. If I go to prison, I'll die in there. You know I can't survive in a place like that. Please... for Dad’s sake."
I looked down at my brother.
For thirty years, I had believed that if I just loved him enough, if I was just patient enough, he would finally see me as an equal. I had swallowed his cruel jokes, smiled at his insults, and allowed him to treat my son like a second-class citizen, all because I was terrified of being the one who broke the family apart.
Now, looking at him shivering in the snow, I felt no hatred. But I felt no pity either.
"Dad knew who you were, Larry," I said softly, the mountain wind carrying my words away into the dark pines. "He left you a million opportunities to be an honest man. You chose this road. Every single step of it."
From down the valley, the high-pitched wail of state police sirens echoed off the granite cliffs of Mount Chocorua.
Thomas had called the Carroll County Sheriff’s Department the moment Larry’s car had turned onto the mountain road.
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Larry heard the sirens. He closed his eyes, let his head fall back into the freezing slush, and began to weep—not with remorse for the lives he had ruined, but with the bitter, helpless tears of a bully who had finally run out of victims.
***
