Chapter 7 - Footprints in the Frost
"He killed Harold," Rosemary whispered beside me in the dark wine cellar, her voice breaking into a silent, terrible sob as she read the biomedical technician's report over my shoulder.
"My own son murdered his father on Thanksgiving night last year, and for twelve months I let him sit at Harold's table."
Before I could wrap my arm around my mother-in-law’s shaking shoulders, a muffled roar echoed through the limestone ceiling above our heads as the fire in the butler’s pantry blew out the back kitchen windows, sending a shower of burning glass crashing onto the flagstone patio outside.
Wait—if the kitchen windows had just blown out, the outdoor cellar storm doors directly beneath the kitchen patio would be right in Daniel’s line of sight if he walked around the house to check his handiwork!
"We cannot go out the kitchen storm doors," I whispered rapidly, stuffing Harold’s original will and the ventilator memory card deep inside my coat pocket as another sharp contraction squeezed my belly and made my knees buckle for two seconds against the wine rack.
"Maggie, your contractions are less than four minutes apart now, you can't walk through the woods in the dark!" Jade whispered in terror, supporting my left side while Rosemary held onto my right arm.
"We aren't going into the woods—this cellar connects to the underground root tunnel that runs straight out to the carriage house where Harold kept his vintage pickup truck with a snowplow blade and a CB radio!" I told them, pointing my light toward the low brick archway at the west end of the cellar.
Holding my breath through the tearing pain in my lower back, I led the two women through the damp, fifty-yard stone root tunnel until we pushed open the trapdoor inside the tack room of the unheated carriage house two hundred yards from the main mansion.
Through the frosted multipane windows of the carriage house, we could see the orange glow of flames licking out of the mansion’s kitchen wing while thick snow and sleet swirled across the dark west lawn.
Right in the center of the carriage house floor sat Harold’s nineteen-eighty-eight Ford pickup truck, covered in a canvas tarp.
"Jade, help Rosemary into the passenger cab and turn the heater on as soon as I start the engine," I instructed, pulling the canvas tarp off the hood and reaching up behind the sun visor where Harold always kept the spare ignition key clipped in a magnetic holder.
My cold fingers swept across the metal clip behind the visor—and found nothing but empty felt.
At that exact moment, the heavy sliding barn doors at the front of the carriage house rolled open six feet with a loud screech of iron rollers against the overhead track.
Framed against the orange glow of the burning mansion stood Daniel Hollis, wearing his winter hunting parka with a streak of black soot across his cheek and holding Harold’s twelve-gauge double-barreled deer shotgun leveled straight at my chest!
"Looking for this, Maggie?" Daniel asked calmly, holding up the brass truck key between two gloved fingers before tossing it into the snowbank outside.
Jade let out a strangled cry and shrank back against the fender of the truck while I stepped squarely in front of Rosemary, shielding my mother-in-law and my unborn baby behind the heavy steel door of the pickup cab.
"When the pantry door burned through two minutes ago and I didn't see three bodies on the floor, I remembered how much my father loved bragging to you about his secret little tunnels," Daniel sneered, stepping further into the shadowy carriage house and clicking the safety off the shotgun.
"You murdered your own father in his hospital bed last Thanksgiving, Daniel, and we have the ventilator memory card from his lockbox right here," I said, keeping my eyes locked on the twin black barrels pointed at my stomach while my right hand crept backward along the wooden support beam beside the truck.
Daniel’s eyes flicked down to my coat pocket, and a cold, soulless smile twisted his mouth.
"Then it is a good thing the county sheriff is going to find all three of you inside this carriage house after the leaking propane space heater explodes and brings the loft down on your heads," Daniel said softly, raising the shotgun stock to his shoulder.
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"Say goodbye to my thirty-million-dollar inheritance, Maggie."
He never noticed that the wooden support beam my right hand was resting against held the manual iron release lever for the two-ton hydraulic hayloft hoist I had paid the restoration contractors to repair in August.
