Chapter 23 - The Fault Line Shatters
Julian dropped the phone onto the oak table, the speaker still blaring frantic sirens, shouting men, and the deafening screech of tearing rebar from four hundred miles away in Manhattan.
"Someone overrode the valves?" I breathed, terror seizing my chest. "Who had access to the site controls?"
"Richard," Julian snarled, his eyes blazing with murderous fury. "He knew he was going to prison. He’s deliberately destroying the foundation to trigger a catastrophic insurance claim before the federal freeze takes effect!"
"No," Evelyn said suddenly, her voice dropping into an icy, hollow whisper that cut through our panic like a straight razor.
We both turned to look at the ninety-one-year-old woman. She wasn't looking at the phone. She was staring out the cottage window into the swirling Maine fog.
A black luxury SUV with tinted windows had just crawled silently to a stop at the end of her gravel driveway.
"Evelyn?" I whispered, my blood running cold. "Who is that?"
"Richard didn't override those valves, darling," Evelyn murmured, her hand drifting toward the iron tea caddy, pulling out a small, silver-plated snub-nosed revolver. "Richard is a coward who only understands spreadsheets."
The car doors opened.
Two men in dark tactical gear stepped out into the mist, followed by a woman wearing a heavy cashmere coat, oversized dark glasses, and a silk scarf concealing her hair.
As she took off the glasses, my heart violently stopped.
It wasn't a prison escape. It wasn't a legal miracle.
It was Victoria.
Except the woman standing in the Maine driveway was ten years younger, pristine, unblemished by prison walls, and holding a satellite detonator device in her gloved right hand.
Beside me, Evelyn looked at the woman outside, then turned her grief-stricken eyes toward me.
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"That’s not your mother in Danbury, Claire," Evelyn whispered, tears finally breaking down her weathered cheeks. "The woman in prison is Veronica—her twin sister. The daughter Arthur thought he bought. Your real mother never left New York... and she’s come to finish what Arthur started."
The heavy front door of the cottage exploded inward with a deafening splinter of wood.