Chapter 5 - The Secret in the Silver Vault
A ragged gasp escaped my lips as the contraction squeezed my abdomen like a steel vise, forcing me to curl sideways against the lower oak cabinets while my unborn daughter kicked frantically inside me.
"Oh my God, Maggie, are you having the baby right now?" Jade panicked, dropping to her knees beside me in her ruined emerald dress as Daniel’s fists pounded like thunder against the outside of the heavy oak door.
"It is preterm labor from the adrenaline and the lifting, I just need to breathe through it and get fluids and medication into Rosemary within the next four minutes or her heart is going to stop completely," I panted through clenched teeth, refusing to let pain steal my focus.
Because Harold’s grandfather had built this walk-in butler’s vault in nineteen-twenty-six to protect the family silver and bootleg whiskey from hijackers, the oak door was lined with quarter-inch sheet steel, and the tiny prep sink inside had running water and a locked hospitality medical cabinet that I had stocked myself last spring.
Fighting through the blinding pain in my back, I pulled myself up to the counter, unlocked the red first-aid box, and pulled out a bottle of liquid activated charcoal alongside two auto-injector pens of epinephrine from Rosemary’s severe bee-sting kit.
While a trembling Jade held Rosemary’s shoulders propped up at a forty-five-degree angle, I jammed the epinephrine auto-injector straight into the outside of Rosemary’s thigh to force her crashing heart rate and blood pressure back up, then carefully administered the charcoal slurry as she began to cough and swallow.
Outside in the dining room, the pounding on the door suddenly stopped.
"Maggie, open this door right now or I am going to get your father-in-law’s splitting maul from the woodshed and chop through the frame!" Daniel shouted through the thick oak panels, his voice ragged with panic and rage.
Inside the vault, the epinephrine hit Rosemary’s bloodstream, and her fluttering eyelids finally opened as her pulse climbed back toward sixty beats a minute.
She gripped my wrist with weak, icy fingers, looking down at my swollen belly as a second sharp contraction made me bite my lip until I tasted blood.
"Maggie, sweetheart, listen to me in case I don't make it out of this house tonight," Rosemary whispered hoarsely, her eyes locking onto mine with urgent clarity.
"Daniel didn't poison my tea tonight just because I refused to sign the hotel conversion papers."
"Save your strength, Rosemary, the charcoal and the adrenaline are working," I told her, wiping the cold sweat from her brow with a linen towel while timing the gap between my contractions on my wristwatch—six minutes apart and closing.
"No, you have to understand why you and that baby girl are in ten times more danger than I am!" Rosemary insisted, her fingers digging into my arm as Jade leaned in to listen.
"Two weeks before Harold went into intensive care last November, he discovered that Daniel had been taking kickbacks from unlicensed sub-contractors and using counterfeit steel in a municipal parking garage."
My breath caught in my throat as I remembered how Harold had refused to speak to Daniel during his final week at the house.
"Harold was so disgusted that he secretly called our estate lawyer to the hospital and rewrote his entire will," Rosemary whispered, a tear slipping down her wrinkled cheek.
"Harold left me only a lifetime residency right in this house, Maggie—he left one hundred percent of Hollis Manor and the thirty-million-dollar timberland reserve behind it directly to the first biological child born to you, with you as sole controlling executor the day your daughter takes her first breath!"
Jade gasped aloud beside me, covering her mouth with both hands as the horrifying puzzle finally clicked together.
"Wait—what happens to the thirty million dollars if Rosemary dies tonight and my baby doesn't survive delivery?" I whispered, my blood turning colder than the November wind outside.
"Under the survivorship clause of Harold’s will, if both I and your unborn baby die before birth, the entire thirty-million-dollar fortune automatically reverts to Daniel as the last living blood heir of the Hollis line!" Rosemary rasped out.
At that exact second, the heavy thud of an axe stopped outside the vault door, replaced by the unmistakable splashing sound of liquid being poured across the hardwood threshold and the pungent, choking stench of kerosene seeping beneath the bottom iron gap of the door!
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"Daniel isn't trying to chop his way in anymore," Jade screamed as a bright orange line of fire ignited beneath the door crack and thick black smoke began billowing through the keyhole into our locked room.
"He is burning the pantry down around us so the fire marshal thinks all three of us died in a Thanksgiving kitchen grease fire!"
