Chapter 8 - The Hoist in the Loft
As Daniel’s finger tightened on the forward trigger of the twelve-gauge shotgun, I didn't dive away—because diving away would have left sixty-eight-year-old Rosemary standing directly in the path of the buckshot.
Instead, with every ounce of strength left in my thirty-two-weeks-pregnant body, I yanked the iron release lever downward and shoved myself and Rosemary flat beneath the running board of the pickup truck!
High above Daniel’s head in the dark rafters of the carriage house, the heavy iron ratchet gear disengaged with a gunshot crack of its own.
Daniel jerked his head up toward the ceiling a split second too late as a two-thousand-pound cradle of rough-sawn white oak restoration timbers—the exact beams he had bragged to Jade about at the dinner table—plummeted twelve feet straight down from the loft!
The massive oak beams didn't hit him squarely in the head, because he lunged backward at the last instant, firing both barrels of the shotgun harmlessly through the roof shingles in a deafening flash of orange powder.
Instead, the crashing timber cradle caught him across both thighs and his right hip, pinning him flat onto the plank floor with a sickening crunch of shattering femur bones that echoed through the freezing building.
Daniel let out a high, animal scream of agony, clawing futilely at the thousand-pound oak timbers trapping his legs while the dropped shotgun skittered across the floorboards straight to Jade’s feet.
Jade picked up the smoking shotgun with trembling hands and kicked it into the deep horse trough so he could never reach it again.
"Maggie! Help me, my legs are crushed, I'm bleeding to death under here!" Daniel sobbed hysterically, all his murderous arrogance vanishing in an instant as he stretched a trembling, soot-stained hand toward me under the truck.
I crawled out from beneath the running board, bracing my back against the cold steel wheel of Harold’s truck as another violent contraction seized my body, and looked down at the man who had left me to cry alone in the shower after our miscarriage, brought his mistress to sit in my chair on Thanksgiving, poisoned his own mother, and tried to shoot our unborn daughter.
"Don't worry, Daniel, you aren't going to bleed to death before the state police get here," I said quietly, pulling out my phone as the emergency satellite beacon inside Harold’s truck cab—which I had switched on when I reached for the visor—finally connected to county dispatch and the distant wail of fire engines and police sirens echoed through the snowy pines at the bottom of the ridge.
Twelve minutes later, three volunteer fire trucks and four state police cruisers tore up the icy driveway with their red and blue lights flashing against the snow.
While firefighters contained the blaze to the rear kitchen wing of Hollis Manor before it could touch the historic main house, paramedics rushed into the carriage house with two wheeled stretchers for Rosemary and me.
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As state troopers used hydraulic jacks to lift the oak beams off a screaming, handcuffed Daniel Hollis, I gripped the side rail of my ambulance gurney as the obstetric flight medic checked my vital signs and hooked an intravenous line of magnesium sulfate into my arm.
"Her blood pressure is spiking to one-eighty over one-ten and contractions are two minutes apart—tell Mercy University Hospital labor and delivery to prep Operating Room Two right now!" the medic shouted to the driver as the ambulance doors slammed shut and we raced through the blizzard toward the city.
