Chapter 4 Enter the Greedy Heirs #2
"That is a lie!" Gregory shrieked, though the sudden, spastic twitch in his left eyelid suggested it was, in fact, an understatement.
He spun on me, his eyes wild, his chest heaving so violently that a button on his vest popped off and bounced with a tiny *ping* against the hardwood floor.
"The carriage house! Can I go in there? I need to see what he had with him.
He had a leather satchel. Black pebbled calfskin. Did Lawson take it? Did you take it?"
"The carriage house is a yellow-taped crime scene, Mr. Vance," I said firmly, holding his frantic gaze.
"Sheriff Lawson has two deputies stationed at the double doors. Nobody goes in, nobody comes out, and nothing leaves that building until the State Bureau of Investigation crime scene unit finishes processing the floorboards. Including Julian’s satchel. "
Gregory made a low, strangled sound in the back of his throat, pressed both palms against his temples, and stumbled two paces backward until his calves hit an upholstered Victorian bench. He collapsed onto it like a marionette whose strings had been severed with garden shears.
"It's gone," he whispered into his sweating palms. "It's gone. He took it, or Lawson has it, and when they read it..."
"When they read what, Gregory?" I asked, keeping my voice gentle, stepping into his line of sight. "The 1845 ledger?"
Gregory’s head snapped up. For a fraction of a second, the look on his face wasn't panic or anger; it was sheer, unadulterated terror. It was the face of a man who had looked into a deep cellar and seen the ground falling away into nothing.
"What do you know about that?" he rasped.
"Only that it was kept in the hidden compartment of the Moravian cherrywood secretary desk in your aunt's personal sitting room," I said evenly.
"And that when Birdie and I cataloged that desk yesterday morning, the compartment had been freshly forced open.
The wood was splintered. Someone took it, Mr. Vance. Was it Julian?"
Before Gregory could answer, Vanessa let out a loud, mocking bray of laughter that ricocheted off the library doorway.
"The desk?" she crowed, shaking her head until her gold earrings rang like church chimes.
"Grandfather Vance's holy mountain relic? You’re sweating through an eight-hundred-dollar suit over an illiterate backwoods diary, Gregory?
I told you that old lunatic aunt of ours didn't have anything worth hiding.
She lived on saltines and spite! If there was a ledger, it probably contains sixty years of grocery receipts and recipes for dandelion wine. "
"You don't understand," Gregory hissed between clenched teeth, his voice trembling with a rage born of desperation. "You never understood anything about this family, Vanessa. You just took your quarterly allowance and flew back to Florida to get your face stretched."
"At least my face isn't going to be on a county jail intake docket by sunset," Vanessa purred back, her eyes narrowing to two glittering brown slits.
"Unlike yours, dear brother. Where were you yesterday between lunch and tea time, anyway?
You were supposed to pick me up at the Asheville regional airport at two o'clock.
You didn't show up until three-fifteen, smelling of cedar shavings and cheap gas-station coffee, muttering to yourself like a lunatic. "
Gregory surged to his feet, his hands balling into fists at his sides. "I was stuck in road construction on Interstate 40! A gravel truck overturned near Black Mountain!"
"How convenient," Vanessa sneered. "There wasn't a single traffic warning on the highway radio when we drove back up."
"And where were you, Ms. Vance?" Birdie asked, her pencil poised with deadly intent. "Between one and two-thirty yesterday afternoon, while your flight was sitting on the tarmac?"
Vanessa turned on Birdie, her chin lifting with haughty disdain.
"I was in the airport lounge, where any civilized woman trapped in this mountain wilderness would be, drinking double martinis and waiting for my useless brother to remember I exist. You are welcome to check the bar tab, Jenkins.
I believe I tipped the bartender fifty dollars just to keep the glass filled. "
"Oh, I'll have the sheriff check it, darling," Birdie smiled sweetly. "He loves a good itemized receipt. Almost as much as he loves an alibi with an independent witness."
The front door creaked open again, and Luke Sterling stepped into the foyer.
He was carrying a wooden toolbox and a heavy roll of canvas strapping, his broad frame easily blocking the mountain daylight.
Behind him, on the porch, Buster stood at attention, his nose twitching toward Gregory’s trembling trouser legs with deep canine suspicion.
"Everything alright in here, Maggie?" Luke asked, his eyes sweeping from the sweating financial advisor to the neon-clad socialite, his deep voice immediately dropping the room's temperature by ten degrees. "Saw the Raleigh plates on the sedan out front. Figured the cavalry had arrived."
"Not the cavalry, Luke," I said, catching his eye and feeling a steadying wave of mountain sanity wash over the room. "Just the heirs. Mr. and Mrs. Vance were just sharing their fondest family memories with us."
Gregory looked at Luke’s broad shoulders, looked at the heavy steel framing hammer tucked into his tool belt, and seemed to shrink an entire jacket size. He grabbed the handle of his leather briefcase, clutching it against his chest like a bulletproof shield.
"I need to lie down," Gregory stammered, backing toward the main hallway that led to the guest wing.
"I have a migraine. The humidity... the stress. Do not touch anything in the upper sitting room. Do you hear me? If anyone enters Eleanor’s private quarters without my written authorization, I will hold Callahan & Company personally liable for every missing item. "
He turned and fled down the corridor, his expensive leather soles skidding awkwardly on the polished hardwood runners until a bedroom door slammed shut in the distance.
Vanessa watched him go with a thin, cruel curl of her painted lips. She looked at Birdie, then at me, and finally at Luke, running an appreciative eye over Luke's flannel-clad shoulders that made my fingers tighten around my microfiber cloth.
"Well," Vanessa said, picking up her smallest vanity case.
"I suppose you locals have your hands full.
Let me know when the sheriff finishes playing with his yellow tape so we can start putting price tags on the mahogany.
The sooner I turn this mountain mausoleum into liquid cash, the sooner I can return to a state that understands the concept of central air conditioning. "
She swept down the hallway after her brother, leaving a vapor trail of tuberose perfume and tobacco smoke lingering in the cool mountain air.
When the click of her heels had entirely faded, Luke let out a long, low whistle.
"Friendly folks," he said, setting his toolbox down on the bottom step. "Makes you wonder why Eleanor Vance preferred living with forty stray cats and an empty house."
"Eleanor was clearly the only sane branch on that particular family tree," Birdie declared, flipping her clipboard closed with a satisfying snap.
"Did you hear that little ferret Gregory?
He's in hock to his eyebrows in Charlotte, he didn't have an alibi between one and three o'clock, and he looked like he was about to throw up his spleen the second Maggie mentioned that 1845 ledger. "
"And Vanessa was sitting sixty miles away in an airport bar with a bone to pick and an appraiser who tried to shake her down on Monday night," I said, looking down the dark hallway toward Eleanor Vance's private sitting room.
"You think one of them killed him?" Luke asked, stepping closer to me, his hazel eyes serious.
"I think Julian Croft found something in that Moravian desk that terrified both of them," I said quietly, watching Buster trot across the foyer and plant his front paws squarely on the bottom stair, letting out a soft, inquiring whine.
"Eleanor Vance didn't hoard furniture because she liked antiques, Luke.
She was guarding something. And whoever took that ledger didn't just kill Julian to keep it quiet—they killed him because if that paper sees the light of day, the Vance family fortune isn't just divided. It's destroyed."